Spurred by the expiration of my Pandora One subscription, I recently spent a few days putting music into iTunes and organizing playlists. When I finished, I skimmed over my music collection and was surprised at what I found. Lots of disco, heavy metal, and instrumentals. But also much from several different countries as well as [...]

Amit Agarwal has an excellent article on online services that perform OCR. 5 GMail Lab Features that Increase Productivity. Five Thirty Eight has moved to a new home at The New York Times. From Technology Review: Mining Mood Swings on the Real-Time Web. A brief note about Bing crawler improvements. There have been some updates [...]

Template maestro Kevin Savetz has launched a new site, this time for flyer templates. http://www.PrintableFlyerTemplates.net/ has 40 flyer templates in DOC and PDF formats. There are templates for lost cats, garage sales, apartments for rent, door hangers, and parties/events. Templates are divided into categories and searchable by keyword (which isn’t necessary because there aren’t huge [...]

Foursquare. Yelp. Gowalla. There are plenty of services allowing you to let the world know where you go. And now there’s a new one from Facebook: Facebook Places. (Facebook Places is currently for the US only.) Announced by Facebook last week, Facebook Places works with Facebook for iPhone or if your mobile phone can access [...]

Thanks to HeraldScotland.com for the pointer to a new guide on Gaelic place names. The National Gazetteer of Gaelic Place Names is located at http://www.ainmean-aite.org/ and is available in English and Gaelic. Currently it contains information on about 1000 Gaelic place names throughout Scotland. You can do a simple search by keyword, and advanced search [...]

Google Earth for Android now features the ocean. Which will, you know, come in handy when I go visit Spongebob Squarepants. Gov Gab has an overview of legislative changes to your credit card terms. Jason Titus will be leaving Yahoo. Google is testing an instant search feature. I wonder if this will be for the [...]

Here’s the ResearchBuzz part of why I’m doing this writeup: Museum of the Moving Image has a Web site called The Living Room Candidate, available at http://livingroomcandidate.org. This site contains over 500 commercials covering every presidential election from 1952 on up. That’s quite an archive. The site also has free downloadable lesson plans and the [...]

Whee! Someone at Yahoo Answers likes okra as much as I do. Of course my favorite way is fried, but pickled and roast okra are also excellent. Germans don’t want Google Street View. This article explores why. From MIT: “The MIT roots of Google’s new software”. The state of Montana has launched its first mobile [...]

I’ve been hearing rumblings about this from various points on the Internet since last week, but now we have official information from Google. Google announced last week that search results would now show multiple results from the same domain. It used to be that the most results you would get from one domain would be [...]

Do you have a Twitter Tale? Kodak’s OnFilm Campaign is getting a digital archive: “Beginning in 1988, OnFilm ads were conceived as a way for Kodak to highlight the art of filmmaking through philosophical and inspirational remarks from cinematographers…. Today, the archive goes back to 2005 with plans to eventually include everyone featured in the [...]

(Cartoon brought to you by Mimi and Eunice. And that’s only the first panel!) Want to know how transit-friendly your home is? There’s a site for that. Optimizing compressed video signals for sign language by cell phone. So much cool! A nice writeup from Search Engine Land about Swingly. Google employees, a net neutrality petition, [...]

The NEA has given the University of New Mexico a grant to digitize New Mexican newspapers dating between 1860 and 1922. Scientists are going to make a 3-D map of the Titanic site. New archives coming from the Harvard Square Business Association. Korean genealogy gets a boost and some new archives. South Auckland has a [...]

Did you ever fall asleep watching Carson? Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show is now available online in digital format. Unfortunately you won’t get to browse the entire archive of content unless you’re interested in purchasing usage licenses, but there is some content available here. According to Hollywood Reporter, the show’s archives were stored in a salt [...]

I have a terrible time following Twitter. There are lots of people who have interesting Tweets, but I don’t like to hang around and watch the stream all day. I can add list activity to Listimonkey but what seems to me to be the ideal solution is still not available. (The ideal solution is to [...]

In case you were looking for one, here’s a very basic tutorial for making Google Alerts. Lots of screen shots. Om Nom Nom! The National Data Catalog is hungry! From Fortune: Google to open ‘Google Ideas’ global technology think tank. Gee, you’d think “Don’t be evil” would just about cover everything… Facebook has purchased Chai [...]

The National Archives has had Mathew Brady photos on Flickr for quite some time, though only about half the photos have been uploaded. But I was thrilled to read yesterday that NARA has a) organized the photos into over 40 topical sets and b) geotagged most of the images. Yow! I don’t know the count [...]

Speaking of Twitter. It announced something this past Tuesday that think is pretty cool, though I can see it’ll be useful for other people besides me. Now you can follow Twitter accounts without being signed up for Twitter. All you do is text Follow accountname to 40404, where accountname is the name of the Twitter [...]

(This is Calvin & Hobbes. See the last item for why. I do not own them. But I love them.) Fans of Domino magazine are using Flickr to create their own online archives. The Google Buzz API has some new features, including a “Garden Hose”. (As opposed to a fire hose.) Some enterprising soul made [...]

More Blogger news: it has a new comments system. Press release: DIRECTV and Google Enter into Ad Sales Partnership. Boggle. Boggle. Boggle. Boggle…. “National libraries of South Korea, China and Japan have signed an agreement to make their resources accessible to people in the other countries and in their local languages, Yonhap News Agency reported.” [...]

Blogger’s having an 11th birthday party… and you’re invited… Meanwhile, South Korean police raided Google’s office in Seoul. “The Canadian government announced Monday 900,000 U.S. dollars for the creation of a new website documenting the experiences of Chinese settlers, past and present.”. The MSU Quilt Index has gotten a grant to expand. A comparison of [...]

I read an entry on the New York Times Public Library Blog last week that covered one resource but actually took me to another one. The blog post was about a collection of 1,358 images of Napoleon (or images closely related to Napoleon.) Which was all very interesting but not as interesting as Historical and [...]

Boing Boing has a new Submitterator, or as I call it, “Boing Boing Firehose.” Timesink! John Levine has a good writeup on the Google/Verizon net neutrality proposal: “Google and Verizon offer a gift to spammers”. For more reaction in the community, see the ResourceShelf Roundup. The state of Virginia has made some updates to its [...]

The University of Minnesota Libraries has a Fair Use Analysis Tool. MathOverflow sounds way interesting and way over my head. From the Idaho State Journal: “Idaho State University Lands Grant to Build Virtual Museum Exhibits For Idaho’s Students, Researchers and Public” Quora has opened up to Google. Yahoo has a roundup of new search features [...]

Sunlight Labs launched a new Web site last week. Poligraft is designed to provide context into political stories you read and Web sites you visit. It’s available at http://poligraft.com/. So what exactly does it do? Poligraft comes as a standalone Web site or as a bookmarklet. I’m going to do this writeup using the standalone [...]

(Picture from Mrs. Gemstone.) eHow is launching a new video series on organic gardening. The state of Washington has a new database that lets users track medical mistakes by hospital. Aw, now they’re just showing off. Google counts all the books in the world. Speaking of counting, Pi calculated to five trillion places. From its [...]

Still catching up — the David Rumsey Map Collection announced last month that it has added over 550 new maps to its online collection. You can get a list of all the new maps here. A nav on the right shows you the kinds of maps available, including national maps, physical maps, and atlases. As [...]

Google is halting development on Wave. Perhaps now I can let go of my guilt for never really “getting” Wave. The postmortem emotion for Wave’s demise seems to be disdain. Facebook is tweaking its mobile privacy settings. Recently on the Universal Record Database: most medical symptoms Googled in 30 seconds. Heh. That’s interesting: how to [...]

I got a question from @doctorwallin on Twitter. She asks: “Thx for all your info. Do you know if there’s a way to get keyword news alerts via twitter, similar to google alerts by email?” Yes! There’s TweetAlarm, which asks for a name, password, e-mail, and then the keywords you want to monitor. This one [...]

Been sitting in my queue for a while. GazoPa, which I have written about before, is now offering a new feature, GazoPa Answers, in beta. GazoPa Answers is at http://answers.gazopa.com/. As you might imagine it’s yet another answers site, but it’s based on answering questions about photos/images or which have to do with photos/images. I [...]

Thanks to Huntington News Network for the heads up on the new digital archive of Wonderful West Virginia. The West Virginia Division of Natural Resources has assembled an online archive of issues going back to the publication’s inception in 1936 (when it had a different title.) The archives are available at http://www.wvdnr.gov/wwvmagazine/Archive/Archive.html. Pick a year, [...]

Matt Cutts is climbing Kilimanjaro! Best of luck to him. Google is taking your search history mobile. This sounds useful.. “A team of 12 digital humanists came together at George Mason University last week. In seven days, they built a new Web tool that lets users turn blog entries into an electronic book.” Search Engine [...]

It’s kind of funny that I actually found out about Facebook’s new Q&A service via bemused comments on Twitter. Those actually popped up on my radar a bit before Facebook’s actual announcement — Facebook Questions (in beta) is a new part of Facebook that allows you to ask questions of everyone on Facebook. Yup. Everyone. [...]

Wolfram|Alpha now has state-level economic data. More Wolfram|Alpha goodness: 10 useful ways to search. If you follow Guy Kawasaki on Twitter, you can Get a free copy of The Macintosh Way. I follow him via RSS, so I guess I don’t qualify. Luckily I have an ancient hardback copy. YouTube’s upload limit is now officially [...]

Search engine Wolfram|Alpha has announced Wolfram|Alpha widgets. Oh boy! I love widgets. What are they? Widgets are little bits of code that you can usually embed somewhere — like on your Web site or Facebook page. Widgets perform calculations, provide information, or other small feats of data crunching. W|A has tons of widgets available at [...]

Oh Fed nerds! Check out http://www.federalregister.gov/. In the last Morning Buzz I mentioned that Google was experiencing some delays getting the e-mail system for the city of Los Angeles in place. Later in the day Google announced Google Apps for Government. Twitter is going to start showing videos and photos in the stream? I can [...]

Ask.com formerly Ask Jeeves, formerly all kinds of different things, announced yesterday the new Ask.com, which is currently available in “public beta.” I put that in quotes because the mention of public beta in the announcement is followed by “Now available on an invite-only basis (you can request your invite here), the capability to pose [...]

I don’t do a lot of image searching nowadays unless I’m looking for a logo or I’m trying to win a bet about sloth toes. (Really, really long story.) But I was intrigued when I read that Google had updated its image search and found the results pretty interesting. (I was also interested to note [...]

This is great. Footnote.com and Lowcountry Africana announced on Monday that they had teamed up to launch a new free collection of historical records from the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. This new collection contains estate inventories and bills of sale for Colonial and Charleston, South Carolina, 1732-1862. You can browse the new [...]

Thanks very much to DK of the Newberry Library, who was kind enough to drop me a note about the recently-completed Digital Atlas of Historical County Boundaries from the Newberry Library. This atlas is organized by state and documents every change in US counties from 1634 to 2000. This makes my little genealogist heart go [...]

Google has missed its deadline to switch Los Angeles to the Google e-mail system. “Since winning a battle for the contract with rival Microsoft Corp. last year, Google has run into roadblocks at the Los Angeles Police Department, which has strict rules about the way its data is secured.” http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-google-la-20100724,0,4379217.story. Nifty! Using Flickr photos as [...]

Hooray! Opera has delivered the final version of Opera 10.6. Google Scholar has a new feature: searching within citing articles. More tools from Wolfram|Alpha: calculating degree days. Cleveland Jewish News has launched its archive, it covers 45 years and access cost depends on whether you’re already a subscriber or not. The site also launched an [...]

Need some help with social media for your business? Wondering what other companies in your sector are doing or what tactics they’re trying? Check out Moose Tracker, a Web site that gathers and sorts social media case studies in two dozen categories. At the moment there are over 600 sorted case studies on the site, [...]

Check out this very cool and huge infographic: How Google Works. Cornell’s Engineering Library to be updated — by having all the print materials removed. Um, what? Happy birthday to the Google Maps API! It has turned 5. Yahoo has launched Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger apps for Android, which is interesting and tangled. YouTube [...]

I got a note from the folks at WebFinance letting me know that they’ve launched a bunch of new dictionaries within the last few months. You can get a full list of the dictionaries available at http://www.businessdictionary.com/aboutus.php, but here’s a list of some highlights. InvestorWords.com — Over 7500 words relating to finance and investing with [...]

One of my responsibilities at work is keeping up with the various computers we use across several different locations. Among the things that has to be monitored is the expiration date of antivirus software installed on the machines. Getting this information together would have been a lot tougher if it wasn’t for Wolfram|Alpha. Some antivirus [...]

Monday was a historic day — I gave my first BingSquee. That is, I read an entry in a Bing blog, looked up the associated content, and my resulting “SQUEEEEEEEEEEEE!” was heard for miles around. I’m fairly sure I broke windows. What was I squeememorating? This recent post on the Bing Community blog, noting that [...]

“The Little Prince starts with a picture titled “Drawing Number One”, which grown-ups typically interpret as a hat, but only the acute eye of a child can reveal is actually a snake digesting an elephant. Well, unfortunately we were those kids who just saw it as a sum of two Gaussians.” Minneapolis is offering free [...]

The New York Times has published a bunch more subject headings to the Linked Data Cloud. I wrote about this last November when the NYT released 5000 person/place/organization names as subject headings (or, as I noted then, you can think of them as tags.) These subject headings are those that the NYT Open blog describes [...]

How the heck did I miss this? Google announced last week that now when you import files into Google Docs (JPEG, GIF, PNG, or PDF) you have the option of running optical character recognition on them. This is really huge; this means that instead of just static files, you’ll be able to upload sets of [...]

(Thanks to Katie Anderson for this morning’s picture. See a whole set of odd images, complete with horse heads, here.) From a press release I saw yesterday: “To help writers, editors, and content creators write effectively for the Web, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) is publishing ‘The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and [...]