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News aggregatorOver 600,000 Restaurants in Allergy-Friendly Eats DatabaseI’m really lucky when it comes to food allergies; I’m not allergic to anything except pineapple on pizza. (Seriously. What are y’all thinking?) But I have lots of friends who aren’t as lucky, which makes eating out a bit of a research project, sometimes. AllergyEats, available at http://www.allergyeats.com/, is trying to build a database of restaurants which have been rated by consumers as to their “allergy-friendliness.” There are chain ratings at the moment, but individual restaurants ratings were hit-and-miss depending on where you were looking. (The site launched earlier this year.) The interface is simple; choose among ten allergy concerns (peanuts, soy, dairy, wheat, eggs, gluten, etc) and enter your address, or just a state or zip code. You can also choose to enter part of a restaurant name if you like. I choose peanuts, dairy, and wheat, looking for restaurants within a 20-mile radius of 90210. I got 15,606 results. Allergy Eats has top-rated restaurants come to the top of the results (though searching for other places seemed to indicate that the site does not sort by chain ratings if no other ratings are available. Since sometimes there are not individual restaurant ratings available, I would like to be able to sort by chain ratings.) 90210 does have individually-rated restaurants. Top of the list here was Hugos Restaurant. Results are presented in a table that includes name of the restaurant, address, the allergy-friendliness rating (1 to 5 stars) and links to the restaurant’s official Web site, driving directions, etc. (Many of the chain restaurant results also have links to menus, ingredient lists, and documents that provide allergen information.) If you click on the “Details & Comments” button, you’ll get the restaurant’s detail page, which includes some expanded rating information and written reviews from users. (Example from Hugos: “Great!!! The menu had each item marked if it was gluten free and if it could be made gluten free. It was wonderful to be able to order with confidence that the kitchen was aware of gluten.”) Sometimes there were just ratings details and no written reviews. In addition to the database of restaurants, the site also contains links to tips on dining out, a short linklist, and a blog. You have to be registered to post reviews and comments, but membership is free. Whether you find individual restaurant reviews depends on your search, but I was very impressed with the infrastructure put together here, and there’s a lot of chain restaurant information. Nice work. You might also like:Jazz in an Archive, Jazz on Your ScreenI had never heard of Smalls Jazz Club until I read this item on JazzCorner.com. Now it’s my favorite jazz place in New York City. I’ve been to a few concerts and had a great time. No, I don’t live in New York City. I don’t have to; Smalls Jazz Club has a live video stream on its Web site every night. Yup, every night you can go to http://www.smallsjazzclub.com/ and listen in on great sounding live jazz from three or four artists from 7:30pm to 3:30am EST. The picture is quite good; as you’ll see in the screenshot there’s also some live picture-taking going on. This isn’t why I’m writing up Smalls in ResearchBuzz, though. I’m writing it up because not only does it have live Jazz, it keeps an audio archive of past performances on its Web site. Hundreds and hundreds are available here. The interface is interesting; pick an instrument, and you’ll get a list of the artists performing on that instrument. Pick an artist and you’ll get a biography and a list of performance dates. Choose a date and in a few seconds you’re listening to the performance. (There are even ten performances here featuring the accordion, an instrument I have not hitherto associated with Jazz.) Did I mention all this is free? The site accepts donations, but all of it is free. I like music, I enjoy jazz, I’m stunned that Smalls keeps a live video feed available and and such a huge selection of archives available at no cost. Rock on, Smalls. Wait, I guess it would be jazz on, wouldn’t it… You might also like:Large Database of Children’s Books Now AvailableThe University of Arizona has put online a database of its collection of non-US children’s books — the world’s largest collection. The database, which contains information on more than 30,000 books, is called The World of Words: International Collection of Children’s and Adolescent Literature. It’s available at http://wowlit.org/. You can do a simple keyword search (an advanced search allows you to query by a number of other factors, including ISBN, author, illustrator, and translator) or you can browse by region, age, or genre. I took a look at children’s books from the Caribbean. I didn’t get a count of results but they were ten to the page and there were 81 pages of results. Each result includes a picture of the cover and a brief summary of the book and metadata like page count, ISBN, author and illustrator, and theme. There’s a permalink for you and a form for a comment, though I didn’t see any entries with comments. The site will continue to be updated, and you’ll find additional information about children’s books and the creative factors behind them at the site blog. I actually found several of the YA books that looked like good reads. How about a direct link to a WorldCat ISBN search? You might also like:Morning Buzz — September 3, 2010New York City has a new database of the most neglectful property owners. Hey Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, I personally can’t wait to learn more about the new Global Digital Archive of Existing Historic Theatres. Keep us posted! Nifty, cool NASA pictures on Flickr. On the day that the ability to make calls on GMail was launched, one million calls were made. WOW. YouTube is now available in Croatian and Filipino. New research tool: Vascular Plants of Iowa. There’s a new database for unpaid taxes in Pennsylvania. Yow: British Library to share millions of catalogue records. Good morning, Internet… Alberta workplace safety records will soon go online. Blogger has introduced Blogger Stats. Have you seen the new full-length movie collection on YouTube? I think this set defines “mixed-bag.” Good morning, Internet… You might also like:The Culture of the Earth-Sized Time MachineSpurred 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 different times. The Andrews Sisters played contentedly with Frank Zappa, who followed Angélique Kidjo with elegance. Wolf Parade and Mosie Burks go just fine with The Balancing Act, Professor Longhair, and Kate Nash. I’m not restricted by era or place. I listen to what I like. After that I wondered what my other media consumption looked like, so I went back and looked at my recent favorites on Netflix. Here are the last four: 1) A British miniseries based on a Terry Pratchett book I have never, until the last year or so, been a great movie watcher. But a random mention by a friend led me to watching His Girl Friday (that link takes you to the full movie, which is free to view on YouTube) which led to other old movies which led to Netflix and Amazon Video-on-Demand which led to a far, far greater range of material available than I ever had before. And now I watch movies constantly, but for the most part they’re not the movies currently being pushed by Hollywood or advertised on television (and no, I still haven’t seen Avatar.) Of course it’s always been the case that one can enjoy things that aren’t currently popular in the culture. You might like ragtime or surf movies or whatever. But it was not until very recently that you could easily and very quickly obtain either access to such media or the media itself, thanks to digital delivery and quick shipping from giants like Amazon. A recommendation from a friend on Facebook can lead to an evening movie on Netflix. Stumbling across a blog post about a band can lead to an MP3 download on Amazon — or sometimes just some Web downloads. (After Imaginary Baseball League broke up, they put many of their songs online as free downloads. Jane Siberry has over a dozen albums and even some sheet music available for free. And these are just two examples.) If I think about it, if I hear about it, if I remember it, I can find it. And often I can very quickly download it, watch it, or listen to it — sometimes for free, and sometimes not. I am not limited by the most recent television shows, or the most popular music, or even what plays on the radio stations in my country. The shouting of the world does not matter as much as one person who whispers an authentic experience that causes in me a desire. Through a hundred years’ worth of movies, through the music of everywhere, through the books of all time, I build my own culture. I constantly develop and evolve an array of symbolism and metaphors and words and archetypes through which I define the world and through which I filter my own experience. What happens to the idea of national culture, to local culture, to personal identity, when everyone in the world can do this? How do we define ourselves when we have quick access to the sounds and sights of a hundred years across the entire planet, and immerse ourselves in and cause ourselves to be changed by them? As an Internet searcher I have used cultural vocabulary to narrow down my searches in ways that search engine parameters don’t offer. (I have talked about this in greater detail in Google Hacks and Information Trapping and have longer rants on request.) If you use a primarily-British slang word like “stroppy,” you will get a different kind of search result. If you use more recent words like “staycation” or even “LOLcat” you will be able to efficiently narrow your results in to a certain time stream. This breaks down if one person’s culture involves movies from the 40s and they’re far more likely to say “What’s buzzin’, cousin?” than “What up?” If you’re watching Monty Python all the time you might be more likely to use “stroppy” in a blog post anyway, no matter that you live in South Carolina and wouldn’t know a crumpet from a ham sandwich. When you are searching you are looking for something that other people said, or wrote, or experienced. Of course your topic might be extensive and complicated, but you’re essentially researching humans and their interactions with the world, whether that interaction is how many Mentos you need to do that cool thing with the Diet Coke, or how other people have done fundraising for family members with Cystic Fibrosis. If the ubiquity and immediacy of consumable media means the idea of culture in a country, location, group, or individual will change, then I need to think about that a lot. Because if the culture changes, then they change. And if they change, their interaction with the world changes. And if the interaction with the world changes, then the way they write or vlog or make a podcast will change. And searching and discovering will both be different. Note: This has been bothering me for a while, and I had to write it down. Normal “Lookit this cool thing I found” ResearchBuzz posts will resume shortly. You might also like:Morning Buzz — August 27, 2010Amit 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 to the Google Buzz API. Wow! A huge list of free textbooks covering a variety of subjects. Cool resource from Phil Bradley: Ask Scotland. Twitter goes college recruiting at http://twitter.com/twitteru. Google Spreadsheets now has in-cell dropdown and validation. Will be very handy. You can also show all your formulas in one click as well. I could have really used this a couple of years ago… From the LA Times: “Facebook sues start-up for using ‘book’ in its name”. Really, Facebook? REALLY? I need a dislike button because this stinks. Google’s “Street View” car was recently stopped in France. The state of Texas has launched its own education channel on iTunes. “The Texas Education iTunes U channel allows teachers to upload material from their classes to help students understand new concepts or do more research in a specific subject area. Students and parents can access the material through home or school computers, and those with iPods can download the information to the handheld devices.” Nice. Good morning, Internet… You might also like:Printable Flyer Templates Now LiveTemplate 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 numbers of templates.) If you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can request a new template. All templates are available in DOC and PDF format. You have to accept a terms of use to download them but you don’t have to register. This site isn’t Kevin’s only one, not by a long shot; you can see more of his printable template empire at http://www.savetzpublishing.com/. He has sites for fax covers, clip art, coloring pages, calendars, timesheets, family tree templates, grocery lists, mazes, etc etc etc etc etc. You could give your printer quite a workout going through his sites. Check it out. You might also like:Facebook Gets on the Checkin BandwagonFoursquare. 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 http://touch.facebook.com/. There will be a “Check In” button (Facebook will also ask to know your location.) You’ll get a list of places near you and you can either check in to an existing place or add one. Of course this shows up on your wall. Not only can you check in yourself, but you can tag friends who are with you. Surely nobody would abuse THAT feature, would they? (More about that in a minute.) You can also see other people who are checked in with you in the same place.) Personally I have no interest in participating in Facebook Places, though I’m sure all y’all would be fascinated by my extensive treks between home, work, and the grocery store. If you don’t want to play either — or if you want to make sure that your friends don’t check you in to places — visit this detailed article by LifeHacker which walks you through making sure your checkins are not shared, and that your friends can’t check in to places for you. You might also like:New Online Database for Gaelic Place NamesThanks 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 (across several fields) or view all place names from A-Z. I did a search for Glasgow. I got an information page showing the Gaelic name (Glaschu) and meaning, along with information about the location including location and local authority, elements (“G/P glas, ‘green, grey’ + *cu, ‘hollow’”), and pointers to external resources and more information. In addition to the Gaelic names database the site also has some Gaelic maps, guidelines to Gaelic place names and orthography, a link list, and a blog (with one entry so far.) You might also like:Morning Buzz — August 25, 2010Google 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 query words you actually typed in, or the words that Google has “corrected” them to? Finding food carts with Bing. It only works in Portland, so far… YouTube has a Fall TV Preview available. The state of Colorado now has a cold case database online. It’s official: Yahoo search is now powered by Bing. Sniffle. Firefox 4 has a new beta. Googler Matt Cutts is back from Mt. Kilimanjaro and he brought pictures. Love that sunset! Check ‘em out. Good morning, Internet… You might also like:Remix Your Politix With Museum of the Moving ImageHere’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 ability to view the commercials by type (biographical, fear, backfire, etc.) or by issue (civil rights, taxes, war, etc.) The site has been up for a couple of years. I am covering it now because of the newly-launched AdMaker, an editing tool that will allow you to remix campaign ads or make new ones. The new tool is available at http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/admaker. This page only has a couple of full commercials for remixing (one with John McCain and another with Nixon/Humphrey) but there’s also a feature that allows you to mix your own commercial. You’re given snippets of media and tools in several different categories, including images, audio, video, transitions, effects, etc. Editing is via a simple click and drag layout; clicking on the end of a snippet and pulling it allows you to edit it down where you want it. (Video is added with audio, but an audio control on the right allows you to control the volume.) You can only add one layer of video at a time but multiple layers of audio are supported. Don’t see what you like in the available media? AdMaker allows you to easily upload your own and integrate it into your commercial. And that’s how I ended up with video of a bear wandering around the woods with a voiceover of Bill Clinton saying he’d inhale if he had to do over again, all to the background soundtrack of Laurie Anderson’s Sharkey’s Day. And if you registered with The Living Room Candidate, you can save your masterpiece for later perusal. I had a tremendous amount of fun with this. I hope Museum of the Moving Image expands the number of clips available in AdMaker. I can imagine some talented people making great ads. You might also like:Afternoon Buzz — August 24, 2010Whee! 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 app. Speaking of Montana, the state also has a new site to assist hunters. Google has launched a developer’s preview of its Chrome Web Store. Harvard launched last week an online William James exhibit. Congrats to iTunes U for topping 300 million downloads. Good afternoon, Internet… You might also like:Google Now Providing Many More Domain ResultsI’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 two. Now you’ll get as many as Google thinks are appropriate. This won’t be for all queries, of course. Google will only roll out the multiple results for queries that seem to indicate an interest in a single domain. For example, There is a sponsored link at the top of the results, and a pointer to shopping options, but aside from a few results at the very bottom of the page everything comes Now this is going to be very handy if you are in fact looking for results from one place, but I was worried about doing actual company research. Would Google make it difficult to find company-related information that wasn’t on that particular company’s domain? I did an experiment, searching for Target pharmacy. The first eight of the results were on the Target.com domain, Google’s new feature working as you’d expect. Then I tweaked the search, adding one word, so the query was now Target pharmacy sucks. (NOTE: This was for an experiment only. I’ve used a Target pharmacy once to buy Sudafed and it was a perfectly acceptable experience.) This time none of the results were from Target, most were from discussions and surprisingly one result was pro-Target (the post was complaining a different pharmacy sucks.) I tried using softer words instead of sucks — bad, problem, and trouble — and only trouble brought me several results from the Target.com domain. Does Google’s change mean that we’ll never see “two results from a domain” again in search results? Absolutely not. I wondered about that and found results in the old fashion in just a few minutes. I did a search for facebook researchbuzz and found two sets of two results from, well, Facebook and ResearchBuzz. As a searcher, the lesson I’m going to take away from this change is to avoid using company and domain names in searches unless I really want to slant my results that way. And if I do have to use these names in a search, I’ll counterbalance them with descriptive terms that hopefully keep the results from being limited to one domain. But I don’t think this adjustment is going to radically change the way I do searching. You might also like:Morning Buzz — August 21, 2010Do 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 campaign.” Yahoo has made a bunch of API changes. There’s a new tool available to find clinical trials for Alzheimer’s Disease. New Mexico State newspaper archives to be digitized. Check out these companies that Presented at Betaspring. I like the idea behind Catapulter. Esther Dyson looks at the future of Internet search. There’s a New Google Analytics Management API. The Nebraska History Museum has put its doll database online (over 800 of ‘em!) Good morning, Internet… You might also like:Morning Buzz — August 20, 2010(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, and an attempt to get to the bottom of things. Connie Crosby takes a look at 5 sources for stock video. SEO By the Sea has some interesting thoughts on how Google is handling searching for “entities”. Thanks to HS for the heads up, but the news is unpleasant. Movie search engine Speedcine, about which I wrote just over a year ago, has apparently gone defunct. The barest minimum of details here. Good morning, Internet… You might also like:Morning Buzz — August 17, 2010The 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 new online photo archive. Slideshare has just announced new pro accounts. “ICRC Launches Online Database of Customary International Humanitarian Law”. ebrary has launched a free collection of ebooks on the subject of cyberbullying. NARA has a new feature, “NARA Coast to Coast,” and kicks it off with Native American records across the country. Good morning, Internet… You might also like:Johnny Carson, Now In Digital Archive FormDid 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 mine until 1999 and weren’t transferred to digital format until last year (!) The archive is available at http://www.johnnycarson.com/. Unfortunately the site really is about selling some upcoming DVDs, but it’s still worth visiting. The current featured clip shows Johnny Carson and Burt Reynolds getting increasingly risqué with a can of whipped cream (which is very funny. Johnny Carson’s outfit is a bit of a riot too.) Other clips include Jay Leno from 1977 (his hair, it is bouncin’ and behavin’), Betty White (from 1983) and Siskel and Ebert (from 1986). Clips show in a popup window and all the ones I looked at had captions available — a nice touch. But as I said, this site is more to sell the DVDs than to provide a comprehensive overview of Carson content. If you’re interested in the licensing side of things, visit https://licensing.johnnycarson.com/. You have to register (and registering is extensive) but once you’ve done that you’ll be able to search by keyword, transcript, etc. I only wish that was available for the general public! This is the kind of archive where I would pay a few bucks for a day pass and just enjoy the nostalgia… You might also like:Finding the Really Popular TweetsI 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 have Twitter lists available as RSS feeds. TWITTER ARE YOU LISTENING!? ARGH!) Ahem. The fact remains that I worry about missing things. The Web site Chirrps (http://chirrps.com/) offers one potential solution — a directory of popular tweets. The front page has the latest popular tweets and popular tweets in the news category. But there are many other categories available. I looked at the most popular tweets in tech. Each listing shows the original tweet, an excerpt from the linked article if appropriate, and the date and time tweeted as well as the number of times the item was retweeted. Looking at popular tweets in general I found some that had been retweeted thousands of times, but it looks like the most popular tech tweets were retweeted more like a couple hundred times. If the categories are not narrow enough for you, you can also do a search. I did a search for database and while I didn’t get a count, I got lots of results. Results were divided into recently popular, popular in the last 24 hours, and popular in the last 48 hours. The most popular item had been retweeted 43 times. Interesting site. It’s not a complete solution for me — there are no RSS feeds for the search results, and I’m not sure how much of the twitterverse is being covered — but it’s useful enough to go in my toolbox. You might also like:Morning Buzz — August 16, 2010In 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 Labs. Guy uses Google Earth and lots of driving to write huge message about Ayn Rand. Do you want to hear my Rand Rant? You don’t? Okay. Pandia has an interesting article on the top five real-time search engines. Wanna tweet at work but need camo? Elliott Kember’s got you covered with Spreadtweet. But remember, if he goes to jail you have to bring him cookies and beer. Google has bought virtual currency firm Jambool. Somebody bought Lycos. For $36 million. It ain’t 1999, is it? Hey! Where are Wolfram|Alpha widgets showing up? Galactic Inbox, an HTML5 game inspired by GMail. I have a game, too. It’s called “I hate the GMail redesign.” It’s not much fun to play. Oh, don’t worry about that odd sight on Google Street View. It’s just a ten-year-old playing dead. First the horse-headed guy and now this. Is getting weird on Street View going to be a lasting meme? Good morning, Internet… You might also like:Mathew Brady Civil War Photos Get Organized on FlickrThe 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 of images in this collection but I would guess thousands… The Brady photos are available here on Flickr; this page also shows the sets. Unfortunately Brady’s name is put first in the set, so it’s hard to read the sets for descriptions here. Still, on this page you can see sets for Zouaves, Union generals, railroads, prisoners of war, and camp scenes, and several place names (among other things.) (There is also a clearly-marked set of images of causalities. This set does have images, sometimes graphic, of wounded and dead people. Please be aware.) I took a look at the Civil War Entrenchments and Defenses set, which has at this writing 111 photographs. A set of thumbnails was on the front page, with some details available on mouseover. All the images I looked at more closely had geotags and some additional information, though most of them did not have comments. These new sets make it a lot easier to browse these remarkable photographs. One tip: when looking at individual photos be sure to look at available sizes. All the images I looked at had maximum sizes that were very large — 3000 x 2405, for example — and at that size the level of detail is fascinating and at the same time absolutely chilling. You might also like: |
Photo FunHere is a random photo from Flickr: |
