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I noticed an article in Silicon Alley Insider about a new movie search engine that lets you look up clips. I’ve been seeing a lot of these lately, so I wasn’t surprised to see another one. I was wondering what would make this one stand out. Though it doesn’t have an overwhelming number of movies in its database (2,000, the SAI article says, with expectations to have another 3,000 up by the end of next quarter) I was impressed about the search options. 
When you go to the front page you’ll have the options to search for topics within movies, or when actors said certain things,...
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Thanks to Laboratory Equipment for the heads up. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has a new “community driven” Web site showing photovoltaic installations across the US. Open PV has over 67,000 installations catalogued. (Well, newish — it started accepting data in November.) You can access it at http://openpv.nrel.gov/. There’s a “Market Mapper” that lets you look at a map of the US and see a variety of statistics about installations, average cost per watt, etc. But if you just want to see what’s going on in your neighborhood, you can do a zip code search and see what’s been installed in your area. The vast majority of installations in this database — over 51000 — are...
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Just in time for Saint Patrick’s Day! Independent.ie had a story yesterday morning about an expanded archive from the National Library of Ireland. This site contains 34,000 photographs of Ireland covering 1860 to 1954, and is available at http://digital.nli.ie/cdm4/index_glassplates.php?CISOROOT=/glassplates. 
That URL is actually a pointer to several different archives, from the Clarke Collection (“76 images, showing Dubliners in their city between 1897 and 1904,”) to the Lawrence Royal & Cabinet Collections (“19,331 images from a collection of commercially produced photographs taken between 1870 and 1914, showing topographical scenes throughout Ireland,”) to the Tempest Collection (“41 images, showing scenes from county Louth...
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Google had some pretty busy labs last week! Aside from things like the new features for the Google Calendar, Google also announced Google Play, a tool that allows you to explore Google Reader items a little more visually. As I noted before, this is a labs item and you’ll find it at http://www.google.com/reader/play/. Google will give you a notice to get started, and once started you’ll get a slideshow of various items Google thought you’d find interesting. You don’t have to be logged in to a Google Account to use this app, but Google says “your experience will be personalized if you sign in.” My personalized experience included what looked like an video turned into an...
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What a great thing to read in the New York Times this morning! C-SPAN as you may know stands for Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network, and is a set of networks that broadcasts nothing but government proceedings and public affairs programming. Now this network has taken “virtually every minute” (according to the New York Times article) of its archives and made them available on the Internet. The archive Web site is available at http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/. The site currently has more than 160,000 hours of footage dating back to 1987. C-SPAN actually started in 1979, but according to the NYT article much of the early broadcasts are not available. There are about 10,000 hours of footage available pre-1987 which, the...
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I will not give in to the easy puns! But I will give in to the urge to stare at shiny rocks. Soooo shiny… the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) has launched The Gem Project, available at http://www.gia.edu/research-resources/gia-gem-database/. This site is based on the data from the Edward J. Gübelin collection of gemstones and it’s an interesting mix of browsable information and downloadable PDF. According to a story in National Jeweler, about 1,000 of the stones in the Gübelin collection have had data cataloged. 
From the front page of the site you can choose to browse beryls, corundums, garnets, spinels, or tourmalines. Picking a category...
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I got a treat last week when I read a little blurb in the Library of Congress blog about the recently digitized Morgan Collection of Civil War Drawings. This set contains more than 1,600 eyewitness sketches made during the US Civil War. I don’t have a direct URL for you, but go to http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/mdbquery.html and start your search with Morgan Collection of Civil War Drawings. 
That’ll give you 1655 results, from “The Veteran” to “Death of Reynolds — Gettysburg.” Each search result listed the date of the drawing and the artist; if you want to get fewer details but see thumbnails of the images click...
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I have been a fan of the Ignite events ever since I saw the Ignite talk about fighting dirty at Scrabble. A focused topic, an enthusiastic speaker, a couple handfuls of slides, and five minutes, and you’ve got some fascinating presentations. Recently O’Reilly Media launched a new portal for getting all the Ignite videos together in one place. Ignite Show Video, at http://igniteshow.com, currently has around 440 videos from past Ignite events but plenty more are to come. I did a quick search for scrabble and to my surprise the video was not only there it was there twice; it looks like two people listed it (what from its description appears to be the same video...
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Footnote.com, my favorite genealogy Web site that periodically gives terrific levels of free access, has announced that it’s making access to its US census documents available for “a limited time.” First: what’s “a limited time”? Don’t know. And what’s “the Census”? You can get to the census documents at http://go.footnote.com/census/?iid=642 but don’t expect to see everything here. At the moment the most complete censuses are the 1860 census (100%) and the 1930 census (98%), with partial availability from the 1900, 1910, and 1920 censuses (none of these three censuses are over 5% complete.) Now, what is available is kind of interesting; Footnote believes in crowdsourcing of genealogy documents. Once you’ve found someone in the census and you’re...
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I have a love/hate relationship with Google Spreadsheets. On the one hand, I love how easy it is to integrate Web data into spreadsheets, and how easy it is to share and collaborate with others. On the other hand, the limitations for integrating data and spreadsheet sizes drive me banonkers. Score one for Google, though — yesterday’s announcement of a script gallery for Google Spreadsheets may tip the balance back towards luv. So how do these scripts work? You can get the technical details at this blog post, but I’m just thinking macro. If you want to see ‘em at work open up a Google Spreadsheet, then choose Insert->Script. You’ll get a script gallery in a popup...
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