+ Yahoo’s OneSearch app for mobile gets new tricks (via News.com)

+ Google Latitude: Share Your Location On Google Maps (via Search Engine Land)

+ Google quietly declares email war on Yahoo (via Reuters)

+ American Chemical Society publications delivers research faster than ever (via EurekAlert)

From the Announcement:

The National Library of Medicine Dietary Supplements Labels Database now includes several interface improvements, more products, and an auto-complete (search) feature.

Other recent additions/changes include:

* Search box on every page
* Age/gender categories under “Products”
* Glossary page with A-Z anchor links
* Updated FDA Recalls, FDA MedWatch and FTC Actions
* More products (3000)
* New “Help” page.

The Dietary Supplements Labels Database includes information from the labels of over 3,000 brands of dietary supplements in the marketplace, including vitamins, minerals, herbs or other botanicals, amino acids, and other specialty supplements.

The database is designed to help both the general public and health care providers find information about ingredients in brand-name products, including name, form, active and inactive ingredients, amount of active ingredient/unit, manufacturer/distributor information, suggested dose, label claims, warnings, percentage of daily value, and further label information.

Links to other NLM resources, such as MedlinePlus and PubMed, are provided for additional health information. In addition, links to related Fact Sheets from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS), National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) are also available.

Direct Link to Database

Source: NLM

+ EBSCO Announces Multilingual Health Databases, New Political Science Resources

+ Autonomy adds audio to e-discovery platform

+ InstantWatcher speeds your Netflix searches (via AltSearchEngines)

+ Carfax Database Reaches Major Milestone; Six Billion Records Now Available To Public

First aid tips for pet owners

What would you do if

• your dog ate the bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips that was left out on the kitchen counter?
• your cat had a seizure right in front of you?
• your dog fell down the stairs and started limping?
• your cat was overheating on a hot summer day?

To avoid the feelings of panic that may accompany these situations, we recommend the following steps to better prepare you for a pet medical emergency. The following links summarize the basics you need for giving first aid care to your pet.

Source: American Veterinary Medical Association

+ Washington Post Launches WhoRunsGov.com in Beta (via ResearchBuzz)

+ Introducing NYPL Mobile (via NYPL Labs)

+ Why you can’t find a library book in your search engine (via The Guardian)

+ Google & the Future of Books (via The New York Review of Books)

From the News Release:

Forty-one percent of states report declining state funding for U.S. public libraries in fiscal year 2009, according to a survey of the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA) conducted by the American Library Association (ALA). Twenty percent of these states anticipate an additional reduction in the current fiscal year.

Source: ALA

+ Search findings from the U.S. presidential inauguration (Official Google Blog)

+ Cost-cutting Google scraps newspaper ad program (via AP)

+ Real-Time News: PubSub Gets Ready for a Comeback (via RWW)

+ NYC interactive visitor center and web site unveiled (via AP)

The .50-meter resolution image of the National Mall was collected by GeoEye-1 on January 20, 2009.

Direct to Image

You can download a high resolution version of the image here.

Source: GeoEye

From the Article:

Boxee gives users a single interface to access all the photos, video and music on their hard drives, along with a wide range of television shows, movies and songs from sites like Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, CNN.com and CBS.com.

Unlike the increasingly long and convoluted channel directories on most cable and satellite systems, Boxee offers a well-organized directory, which can be navigated using the remote controls that now ship with most computers.

The most ardent Boxee fanatics — almost all of its 200,000 early adopters seem to have turned into online evangelists for the company — then connect their computers to their living room televisions.

Direct to Boxee

Source: NY Times

From the Article:

…there are the relics from the earlier age of photography, historical photographs that have been preserved in national libraries and archives or photo agencies and news media operations. Their relative scarcity alone can make them seem like treasures.

They, too, are finding their way onto the Internet. Compared with the stream of photographs being uploaded (an estimated three million a day on Flickr alone), the historical material can seem a mere trickle. Yet over the last year there have been important new efforts to put these classics online, both to find new audiences for material typically used by researchers and to use those audiences to breathe new meaning into photographs from long ago.

Last month, in what is believed to be the largest donation online of “free” photographs — that is, unrestricted for commercial or noncommercial use — the German national archive uploaded nearly 100,000 historical photographs to the Wikimedia Commons, the virtual archive for material used in Wikipedia articles.

Source: NY Times

E-File Opens for 2009 With New Features to Expand Taxpayer Access, Help Speed Refunds

The Internal Revenue Service today announced the Jan. 16 opening of an expanded IRS e-file program for 2008 federal tax returns, highlighted by new features that will allow expanded access to electronic filing and help people looking for faster refunds.

IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman encouraged taxpayers to explore e-file this year as the best option to file accurate tax returns and get fast refunds during the current economic downturn. The e-file program also includes new improvements to the Free File program that will allow nearly all taxpayers to e-file for free.
…
Last year the average refund was $2,429. The IRS realizes people need their refunds quickly. Shulman urged people who haven’t e-filed before to consider the e-file option this year.

IRS e-file totaled nearly 90 million tax returns in 2008. Almost 58 percent of all returns were filed electronically. Last year, there was a surge in e-file from home computers. Nearly 27 million people prepared their own e-file return. That’s an increase of more than 19 percent from the previous year.

Source: Internal Revenue Service

From the Article:

The goal: Just as people create ancestral family trees, create a family health tree. It may sound old-fashioned in this era of gene discovery. But genetics specialists use these “pedigrees” to look for patterns of inherited illnesses that can provide a window on someone’s brewing health risks.

“Family health history is the first genetic test, but it encompasses much more than genes,” says James O’Leary of the nonprofit Genetic Alliance.

The surgeon general’s office issued the first attempt to guide creation of family health trees in 2004, with a form patients could print out and carry to the doctor.

Today, the site reopens – at familyhistory.hhs.gov – after a facelift to make it not only more in-depth but truly electronic.

It’s private; users download the information to their own computers. Then they can e-mail a tree-in-progress to family members to fill in missing information.

Direct to Website: https://familyhistory.hhs.gov

Source: AP

From the Summary:

Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions. Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the “declared” set of friends and followers.

Direct to Complete Article

Source: First Monday

Hat Tip: S.C.

From the Web Site:]

In its 19th annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted “bailout” as the word of the year. In the specific sense used most frequently in 2008, bailout refers to the rescue by the government of companies on the brink of failure, including large players in the banking industry

Direct to News Release (PDF)

Source: American Dialect Society

+ Ohio library settles suit over religious meeting (via Columbus Dispatch)

+ House requires info on presidential library donors (via AP)

+ Google cuts temps but budget stays high (via AP)
What does this mean for Google Book Search digitization?

From the Article:

Browser add-on Flickr Gallery Plus adds extended functionality to Flickr’s set view, allowing users to click through to see full versions of each shot without having to reload the page. Once installed it will go out and pre-fetch the larger sized version of each shot, making big sets a cinch to speed through. This includes the addition of keyboard shortcuts (something you can’t get in Flickr without a Greasemonkey script) which lets you go back and forth between shots using your arrow keys.

Direct to Flickr Gallery Plus

Source: CNET

See Also: Cooliris is another cool tool to search and browse images on the web. Free!