Yankee in Canada.com

While fooling around with Google News this afternoon, I discovered a few additional Canadian newspapers that are currently being indexed.  In the interest of sharing, here is the full list of sources I have discovered to date.  If you have more, leave a comment with the source code and I’ll add it to the list.  If this sort of thing turns your crank, a good source for more data is the Google News Report.

Newspapers

News Release Distribution Sources

I have used (and have been a huge fan of and quasi-cheerleader for) Copernic Agent since it first came out in the late 90s.  The Professional version should be in every information professional’s toolkit.  Imagine my delight when Copernic’s desktop search tool came out in 2004 after suffering through years of terrible Microsoft file searching.  Ugg.  I now use Copernic Desktop multiple times per day to search my email, shared network drive, browser history and contacts.  I haven’t used Microsoft’s search tool in almost two years except when searching for a specific filename.  But that’s now going to change…

Copernic has just released version 2 of its desktop search tool and from initial observations, it’s an exceptionally strong improvement on an incredible tool.

New features in version 2 include:

• Search across all categories
• Spelling errors are corrected with a "Did you mean?" prompt
• Sorting options for search results are expanded and now include, for example, author for files, presumably pulled from file properties.
• "My Searches" allows for saving canned searches to be re-run in the future.
• The NEAR search operator is now supported
• More advanced search fields, the best among them being "File Name" (goodbye MS search)
• Wildcards are now supported

And best of all, the deskbar now provides direct access to your search results without having to open the full application.  Brilliant!

Screenshots

Deskbar

All search

Josh Hallett over at hyku has written up a great how-to piece on blogging a conference.

• The Tools
  • Hardware
  • Laptop/PC/Mac
  • Connectivity
  • Camera
  • Portable Audio Recorder
  • Software
  • Blog
  • Offline Blog Editor
  • Flickr
  • Flickr Upload Tool
  • Technorati
  • Audio Editing Software
  • FTP Software
• Strategy
  • The Team
  • Blog/Tech Guru
  • Bloggers (2-3)
  • Photographer (Optional)
• Planning
• Writing Ahead of Time
• Session Coverage
• Other Coverage
• Photos
• Audio/Podcasts
• Video
• Outreach/Conversation
• Wrap-Up

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has a new report out, Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers.

Summary of Findings at a Glance

• Blogging is bringing new voices to the online world.
• Telephone surveys capture the most accurate snapshot possible of a small and moving target.
• Contrary to the impression created by the press attention on political blogging, just 11% of bloggers say they focus mainly on government or politics.
• The blogging population is young, evenly split between women and men, and racially diverse.
• Relatively small groups of bloggers view blogging as a public endeavor.
• The main reasons for keeping a blog are creative expression and sharing personal experiences.
• Only one-third of bloggers see blogging as a form of journalism. Yet many check facts and cite original sources.
• Bloggers are avid consumers and creators of online content. They are also heavy users of the internet in general.
• Bloggers are major consumers of political news and about half prefer sources without a particular political viewpoint.
• Bloggers often utilize community and readership-enhancing features available on their blogs.

Related
Pew Internet & American Life Project
Princeton Survey Research Associates

Just back from the SLA conference where it was almost painful not to have a working laptop and while at the same time considering making the jump from PC to Mac via the new MacBook, I found the following from Ipsos very interesting.

Demand For “anytime, anywhere” Internet Access Drives Continued Surge In Notebook PC Ownership Around The World

"New York, NY, July 17, 2006 – Growing availability to low cost, high-speed and often wireless Internet service appears to be propelling laptop and notebook sales around the world, helping close the so-called “digital divide” between technology’s haves and have-nots, say researchers from Ipsos Insight in their annual The Face of The Web study of global Internet trends."

The full press release (with charts) is available at:
http://www.ipsos-na.com/news/pressrelease.cfm?id=3135

I have seen a few posts lately on a number of different dicussion lists that reference the now-defunct JAKE database.  For folks looking for journal titles and the electronic collections that index them, CUFTS, developed at the Simon Fraser University Library, is another excellent tool to use.  (As far as I can tell, JAKE is no longer being updated.)

• CUFTS Main Page
• Journal Search
• Resource Comparison (to compare titles and coverage dates of different collections)
• cufts2marc (to create USMARC records of titles in CUFTS collections)

At last count, CUFTS included 245 different electronic collections of journal titles.

If you are like me, and have access to limited journal collections, CUFTS is very handy when trying to figure out who indexes various journal titles.  And while it’s always wise to get lists of journal titles directly from
the vendor, CUFTS can also help when making decisions about
subscriptions.

Trendio.com is reported on in the Wall Street Journal today.  Similar to Google Trends, but with a twist, Trendio gives every user $10,000 in play money to purchase shares of words.  As the popularity of the words increase in the news media (based on Yahoo! News sources) the shares’ value increases.  Users’ portfolios of shares are ranked daily based on their value.  Neat!

A Dollar for Every Word: Trendio.com Lets Investors Play the Word Market
By AARON RUTKOFF
Wall Street JOurnal
May 20, 2006
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114720494966648075.html
[Registration required]

Alot is being written about Google Trends today.  It’s a very interesting tool, especially for quick comparisons of search popularity.  Further refining the results by city, region, language and date adds another useful element.  I thought I’d give it a whirl with some commonly adversarial duos:

• Bill Gates v. Steve Jobs
• Paul Martin v. Stephen Harper
• George Bush v. John Kerry
• Jennifer Aniston v. Angelina Jolie

The best part of this tool is the linking to the news story that caused a spike on a certain date.  It’s historical, of course, but if you were trying to compile a news timeline, for example, Google Trends would come in very handy.

Unfortunately, there isn’t enough search volume to show Betty Cooper v. Veronica Lodge. Oh well.

I stumbled across Karen’s Power Tools the other day while looking for a program to give me a text-file list of files and folders on my computer.  You would think that would be easy, right?  Wrong.  At least not using Windows.  Karen’s Directory Printer does the job beautifully.  I haven’t had the chance to use any of the other tools yet, but if they’re anything like Directory Printer, they’re just plain great.