Archive for September, 2008
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
State of the Blogosphere / 2008
Welcome to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, which will be released in five consecutive daily segments. Since 2004, our annual study has unearthed and analyzed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, we resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind. For the first time, we surveyed bloggers directly about the role of blogging in their lives, the tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs, and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially. Our bloggers were generous with their thoughts and insights. Thanks to all of the bloggers who took the time to respond to our survey.
Blogs are Pervasive and Part of Our Daily Lives
There have been a number of studies aimed at understanding the size of the Blogosphere, yielding widely disparate estimates of both the number of blogs and blog readership. All studies agree, however, that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream.
The numbers vary but agree that blogs are here to stay
+ comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)
o Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US
o Facebook: 41.0 million | MySpace 75.1 million
o Total internet audience 188.9 million
+ eMarketer (May 2008)
o 94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users)
o 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%)
+ Universal McCann (March 2008)
o 184 million WW have started a blog | 26.4 US
o 346 million WW read blogs | 60.3 US
o 77% of active Internet users read blogs
Source: Technorati
Posted in Search News, Social Media, Source File, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
The 50 Richest Members of Congress
Everything that you are about to read might be wrong.
Roll Call’s annual attempt to rank the riches of Members of Congress is hampered by one fundamental flaw: It is based on the lawmakers’ financial disclosure forms, which are extraordinarily unreliable sources of information.
The disclosure rules allow Members to report assets in broad categories, so there is no way to tell the difference between a $20 million investment and a $5 million investment. The top category on the Members’ forms is “over $50 million,” so it is impossible to accurately account for anything worth more than that — like a professional sports team, for example. There is also a gaping loophole for assets owned by the Members’ spouse or dependent children; anything worth more than $1 million in value can be reported as “over $1 million.” There is no way to tell whether that is $1.2 million or $1.2 billion.
…
Beyond all of these flaws, there remains the fact that many, many financial disclosure forms filed by Members of Congress are simply inaccurate. A check mark placed in the wrong box can inflate or deflate a Member’s apparent net worth by millions of dollars, and misunderstandings of the rules have led Members to understate some assets, overstate others and claim additional assets they no longer own.
Where the errors are obvious or have created noticeable discrepancies from prior-year filings, Roll Call has attempted to contact the offices to get a proper understanding of the actual value of the asset or assets in question.
What remains below is a ranking of the 50 wealthiest Members of Congress based on the minimum net worth reported on their financial disclosure forms. To achieve these numbers, Roll Call totaled the assets listed on financial disclosure forms filed in 2008 (covering calendar year 2007) using the lowest number in the ranges in which Members are required to report. An asset from $500,000 to $1 million is counted as being worth $500,000, unless the Member has provided a brokerage statement or other documentation that offers more specific detail.
Liabilities, which are also reported in ranges, are calculated based on the minimum value, and are subtracted from total minimum assets to establish total net worth.
Posted in Government Documents and Political Information, Lists and Rankings, Source File | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
One-in-Five Speak Spanish In Four States — New Census Bureau Data Show How America Lives
At least one-in-five residents of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas spoke Spanish at home in 2007, according to new American Community Survey data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. Nationwide, an estimated 35 million, or about 12.3 percent, hablan español at home.
The annual release of American Community Survey data about the social, economic and housing characteristics of the nation’s population also show state rankings on topics such as which state had the highest household size (Utah), and which had the highest percentage of college graduates (District of Columbia and Massachusetts).
+ Detailed tables
+ MSA ranking tables (xls)
+ ACS Media Tool Kit
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
Posted in Fast Facts, Source File, Statistics | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
Industrial Development Abstracts
The Industrial Development Abstracts (IDA) is an important source of information on the activities of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) to assist industrialization in developing countries. Much of the work is unique and unpublished elsewhere.
…
IDA contains over 11,000 fully indexed abstracts of UNIDO documentation and includes descriptions of major studies and reports, reports resulting from UNIDO’s technical cooperation activities, reports and proceedings of expert working groups, workshops and seminars, and publications in series. The time frame is from 1981 to today.
…
All the reports abstracted in IDA are now available free of charge as image PDF files. However, they are not yet downloadable from the web site. Until they become available online, these files will be sent to requestors via the Internet. The files too large to send via the Internet will be sent on a CD-ROM at EURO 15.00 including airmail shipping charge.
Source: United Nations Industrial Development Organization
Hat tip: UN Pulse
Posted in Business and Economics, Databases, Directories, and Guides, Source File | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
Posted in Best of DocuTicker, Source File | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
U.S. Labor Department announces new online tools for workers and plan administrators
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) today announced new online tools to give workers access to financial information and an improved calculator that makes it easier for employers and plan administrators to pay online civil penalties for delinquent filings of annual reports under the agency’s Delinquent Filer Voluntary Compliance Program (DFVCP).
The Pension Protection Act of 2006 required the department to post on its Web site actuarial information of pension plans filed with the Form 5500 annual reports. The site, located at http://www.dol.gov/ebsa/actuarialsearch.html, provides user friendly ways for workers and plan officials to search for plan information by such categories as plan name, employer identification number or date.
The DFVCP encourages plan administrators to file already overdue annual reports required under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. Delinquent filers can avoid potentially higher civil penalty assessments by satisfying the program’s requirements and voluntarily paying a reduced penalty amount.
Employers and plan administrators can access the new feature that allows them to electronically pay civil penalties at http://www.dol.gov/ebsa/calculator/dfvcpmain.html. The calculator uses the Department of the Treasury’s pay.gov financial management system. Users now can accurately and simply calculate the amount of civil penalties and pay those penalties online with a credit or debit card as an alternative to paying by check.
Source: U.S. Department of Labor
Posted in Business and Economics, New Websites and Resources, Source File | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
From the news release:
Semantic search engine hakia today announced an open call to librarians and information professionals to participate in a new program to unlock credible and free Web resources to Web searchers. Currently, hakia is generating credibility-stamped results for health and medical searches to guide users towards credible Web content. These results come from credible Web sites vetted by the Medical Library Association. Now, hakia is aiming to further its coverage to all topics, with the participation of librarians and information professionals.
Direct to Project Overview
Note: Gary is involved in this project and is quoted in the news release.
Posted in Search News | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
From the article:
The National Library will reprint 556 ancient books as part of an ongoing effort to preserve traditional Chinese culture and promote academic research.
Source: China Economic Net
Posted in Libraries and Librarianship, Search News | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
Open Source Intel Rocks — Sorry, It’s Classified
The head of the CIA doesn’t want you to know what he watches on television.
So-called “open source” intelligence — spook-speak for tidbits taken from newspapers, internet postings, and TV shows — is starting to play a major role in the nation’s spy agencies. That’s a major change, in a world that’s used to relying on secret satellites and clandestine agents. But old habits die hard. Open source intelligence may come from unclassified material that’s available to anyone with a TV or an internet connection. CIA chief Michael Hayden says the finished products have to be kept out of public view. They’re just too sensitive for average folks to see.
Source: Danger Room (Wired)
Posted in Access to Information, Open Source Intelligence, Search News | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
Space Based Ornithology:Remote Sensing & Bird Migration
This reference guide highlights the literature on using remote sensing to study bird migration.
Source: Science Reference Section, Science, Technology and Business Division, Library of Congress
Posted in Databases, Directories, and Guides, Science, Source File | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
Freshwater Ecoregions of the World
Freshwater Ecoregions of the World, (FEOW) provides a new global biogeographic regionalization of the Earth’s freshwater biodiversity. Covering virtually all freshwater habitats on Earth, this first-ever ecoregion map, together with associated species data, is a useful tool for underpinning global and regional conservation planning efforts, particularly to identify outstanding and imperiled freshwater systems; for serving as a logical framework for large-scale conservation strategies; and for providing a global-scale knowledge base for increasing freshwater biogeographic literacy.
Click on any of the ecoregions in the map below for more information, or use the menus at the top of this page.
Source: The Nature Conservancy
Posted in New Websites and Resources, Science, Source File | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
Posted in Search News | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
Posted in Best of DocuTicker, Source File | No Comments »
Monday, September 22nd, 2008
From the article:
Internet search giant Google hopes to hook the millions of cellular phone subscribers in India who do not use data or SMS-based services with its voice-based search. It is conducting pilot projects in Hyderabad and Delhi, and is expected to roll out more in Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata shortly. The company is expected to add audio playback for search queries on local news and entertainment.
About half the mobile phone users in India are believed to be using low-cost handsets that do not have access to data services. A toll-free voice-based search could easily tempt them. “Search still isn’t accessible or easy enough for those who just use the phone for voice calls, especially the rural subscribers,” says Vinay Goel, head of products, Google India, who visualises web search replicating itself on the voice platform.
Posted in Search News, Technology and Internet, Web Search | No Comments »
Monday, September 22nd, 2008
From the article:
Carnegie Mellon began the project, dubbed the University Digital Library, with the aim of putting all the world’s books online. But for the time being two-thirds of the 1.5 million books on the Web site, http://www.ulib.org, are in Chinese and only 400,000 are in English.
Source: AP
Posted in Libraries and Librarianship, Search News | No Comments »
Monday, September 22nd, 2008
Experience versus talent shapes the structure of the Web
We use sequential large-scale crawl data to empirically investigate and validate the dynamics that underlie the evolution of the structure of the web. We find that the overall structure of the web is defined by an intricate interplay between experience or entitlement of the pages (as measured by the number of inbound hyperlinks a page already has), inherent talent or fitness of the pages (as measured by the likelihood that someone visiting the page would give a hyperlink to it), and the continual high rates of birth and death of pages on the web. We find that the web is conservative in judging talent and the overall fitness distribution is exponential, showing low variability. The small variance in talent, however, is enough to lead to experience distributions with high variance: The preferential attachment mechanism amplifies these small biases and leads to heavy-tailed power-law (PL) inbound degree distributions over all pages, as well as over pages that are of the same age. The balancing act between experience and talent on the web allows newly introduced pages with novel and interesting content to grow quickly and surpass older pages. In this regard, it is much like what we observe in high-mobility and meritocratic societies: People with entitlement continue to have access to the best resources, but there is just enough screening for fitness that allows for talented winners to emerge and join the ranks of the leaders. Finally, we show that the fitness estimates have potential practical applications in ranking query results.
+ Supporting Information (PDF; 302 KB)
Full article available to subscribers or for purchase.
Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Posted in Papers and Presentations, Search News, Source File, Technology and Internet | No Comments »
Monday, September 22nd, 2008
Resource of the Week: ResourceShelf Special Collection — Media Guides, Factbooks, Fact Sheets, Press Kits
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor
Last June here on ResourceShelf, we started “collecting” media guides, factbooks/fact sheets, and press kits from a variety of government agencies, professional societies and other organizations. Why? Because they are so utterly useful. Since these resources are designed for primarily for media outlets, they are content-rich, and may also include photos and/or contact information.
You can usually ferret these out on your own when visiting organizational websites by clicking on links that say “Press,” “Media Center,” etc. Generally, you’ll find a collection of press releases (though if you look at as many of these sites as I do, you’ll find yourself shaking your head over all the press release archives that haven’t been updated since you had to connect to the Internet with a modem and an acoustic coupler). If you’re lucky, you’ll also find online media guides, factbooks or meaty FAQs. These can be good ready reference material or fodder for papers and reports.
A dozen examples of what we found:
+ Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress: Fact Sheets
+ GLAAD Media Reference Guide, 7th Edition (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation)
+ Guide to Researching Public Records (Federal Election Commission Press Office)
+ Human Genome Project Media Room
+ Major League Baseball: Media Guides (PDF) for All 30 Teams
+ A Media Guide to Disability (Connecticut Council on Developmental Disabilities)
+ National Weather Service: Information Center
+ Planetary Fact Sheets (NASA)
+ Psychology Topics (fact sheets — American Psychological Association)
+ Terrorism and Other Public Health Emergencies: A Field Guide for Media (via U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Newsroom)
+ ToxFAQs: Frequently Asked Questions About Contaminants Found at Hazardous Waste Sites (Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry)
+ U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: Species (Endangered Species, Birds, Invasive Species, Pollinators, Image Library, Wildlife Fact Sheets)
Posted in Media Guides, Factbooks, Fact Sheets, Press Kits, Resource of the Week, Source File | No Comments »
Monday, September 22nd, 2008
Posted in Search News | No Comments »
Sunday, September 21st, 2008
From the abstract:
We describe a Web-based metadata quality tool that provides statistical descriptions and visualisations of Dublin Core metadata harvested via the OAI protocol. The lightweight nature of development allows it to be used to gather contextualized requirements and some initial user feedback is discussed.
by: Nichols, David M. and Chan, Chu-Hsiang and Bainbridge, David and McKay, Dana and Twidale, Michael B. (2008)
Source: Proceedings The 8th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (via E-LIS)
Posted in Cataloging and Metadata, Information Science, Papers and Presentations, Source File | No Comments »
Sunday, September 21st, 2008
ANA releases text of Department of Justice letter
The ANA has sent a letter to Thomas O. Barnett, Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), citing its objections to the announced Google-Yahoo search advertising partnership now under review by the DOJ. In preparing this letter, ANA conducted a comprehensive, independent analysis, which included input from the Board’s members and face-to-face discussions with Google and Yahoo.
The letter, authorized by the ANA Board, notes that a Google-Yahoo partnership will control 90 percent of search advertising inventory and states ANA’s concerns that the partnership will likely diminish competition, increase concentration of market power, limit choices currently available and potentially raise prices to advertisers for high quality, affordable search advertising.
+ Letter (PDF; 292 KB)
Source: Association of National Advertisers, Inc.
Posted in Business and Economics, Search News, Web Search | No Comments »
