Thursday, November 6, 2003

New Tool for Info Seekers Where Google does not tread: Amazon.com now lets users search for text inside 120,000 books -- not just search for author's names and book titles. Registered users get to see pages of the books a search finds; unregistered searchers get to be teased with a list of titles and brief exerpts. Example: A search for "curse of the Bambino" at Amazon.com finds not only the book by that title, but Uncle John's Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader and Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within. A search can produce surprises -- such as finding the Red Sox curse in Stephen Jay Gould's I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History. The article about searching text at Amazon is in today's Times, which also has  an Online Diary item (headed "Mystery Books") about "Stump the Bookseller," a Cleveland book dealer's Web service that helps readers find books when they can't remember the title or author. There's a $2 charge for the service, which involves real humans trying to solve your book puzzle. The same "Online Diary" opens with another Web service journalists and webloggers might find helpful: Upcoming.org. This free-to-subscribers site lets users publish and link collaborative events calendars, comment on events entered by others, and syndicate listings to their personal weblogs. It's being refined, but the end result could help a group coordinate a night at the movies or a political campaign -- a service with echoes of both meetup.com and friendster.com. Miss an event? Maybe it would help you track down people who were there. (I really should take a longer look at those sites, and tribe.net, which someone else pointed me to recently. So much Web, so little time.) On the subject of tools for journalists, the American Press Institute has added new resources to its Journalist's Toolbox collection, including an updated page of "Politics/Elections" links. 9:33:45 AM

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