LLRXBuzz – July 24, 2000

Tara Calishain is the co-author of Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research, 2nd Edition, and author or co-author of four other books. She is the owner of CopperSky Writing & Research.



In This Issue:

Bizjournals’s New ‘Demographic Daily’

Busy Legal Eagle? Here’s The Site For You!

Speaking of Big Cities

Pac-Info Announces Changes

Pick a word, any word….

AltaVista Launches AltaVista India

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Bizjournals’s New ‘Demographic Daily’
Bizjournals.com has launched Demographics Daily, a Web-only publication with demographic and metropolitan statistics from around the nation. It contains more than 300 spreadsheets with data that business owners and executives can download. The spreadsheets include population projections, education levels, home ownership, and income levels and can be viewed at national state and county levels. It also features daily news items for demographics and metropolitan statistics and stories from around the nation about demographics/consumer trends/economic news.

To access the site, which is at http://www.bizjournals.com/journals/demographics/ , you’ll first have to undergo free registration. After that you’ll be taken to a main page with a variety of links to different types of demographic information, including metro-area demographics in the US (demographics such as unemployment and area growth over the last ten years are provided, along with a note about how an area ranks in all 79 of the areas surveyed.)

The “Coast-to-Coast” section provides a roundup of news stories about demographic trends all over the country. (Kudos to Bizjournals — an excellent way to re-purpose their content.) If you’re just looking for a particular metro area check on the left side of the page for the area in which you’re interested. The downloadable spreadsheets, unfortunately, are going to set you back a few clams. The spreadsheet listing is at http://www.bizjournals.com/journals/demographics/database.html and is divided into categories — from Age to Other. Once you pick a category you get a list of the spreadsheets available in that category, with sample data and links to download in tab-delimited text or Excel format. An unlimited subscription for downloading spreadsheets is currently $795. You can also buy single copies of spreadsheets for $185 each. Worth a look.

Busy Legal Eagle? Here’s The Site For You!

CEOExpress Company has launched LawyerExpress, a website that brings legal, business, and lifestyle resources on the Internet into one page at http://www.lawyerexpress.com/ . The site features a fully customizable desktop and compliments the company’s other “Express” including CEO Express, JournalistExpress, and MDExpress. Unfortunately LLRX and LLRXBuzz are not mentioned, but otherwise this resource looks very complete — you’ll find everything from CataLaw to The Onion.

Speaking of Big Cities
Want more information on the largest cities in the world? Check out http://www.citypopulation.de/ , which provides information on the largest cities in the world. You can choose all the cities in the world with populations of over 1 million, or your can break your search out by country for their metro areas. For example, choosing Greenland gives you a list of those cities having over 500 inhabitants. (Different countries have different numbers for what constitutes “critical mass” and a listing in citypopulation.de.)

Once you click on a country, you’ll see — well, you won’t see much unless you have Java turned on, so do that first. Once you have Java turned on, you’ll see a framed page with a list of countries and their populations on the right. On the left you’ll see a map of the country in which you’re interested. Click on the city or region name on the right, and you’ll get its highlighted location on the map. You can move the map around, re-center it, zoom in/out, etc. Some of the information is also available in Excel spreadsheets.

Pac-Info Announces Changes
If you’ve never used public record link site Pac-Info ( http://www.pac-info.com/ ) you might be wondering what’s up with the site. Until recently it hadn’t added any new materials since late May. Last week Pac-Info announced several changes to the site. They have stopped having external links opening in a new browser window. They’ve also reworked the site’s code and claim that you’ll find some improvement in load times. Also, they’ve stopped using frames and going to “pseudo-frames” (which from review of the site looks like the same layout, only without frames.

At some point the site will be completely revamped and will become searchable and database driven. In the meantime you can monitor the new sites added to Pac-Info at http://www.pac-info.com/locations/n_sites.shtml .

Pick a word, any word….
Have you ever written a summary, brief, or late LLRXBuzz column, and found yourself stuck for a word? Don’t drag out the thesaurus — check out the phrase finder at http://www.shu.ac.uk/web-admin/phrases/ .This is a fun memory jogger. In the search box enter a word. The search engine will find any phrases relevant to your word. It’s a pretty smart engine — searching for “eagle” found both eagle phrases and bird phrases. You’re invited to submit phrases to be added to the database, though the database keepers are looking only for commonly-used phrases. For more information on phrases you can check out http://www.shu.ac.uk/web-admin/phrases/list.html . This list, browsable by first letter or retreivable as one long (280K+) file, provides meanings and/or origins for a host of phrases.

AltaVista Launches AltaVista India
AltaVista has launched an index of over 1.25 million Indian web pages at http://in.altavista.com . Rather get a searchable subject index of information about India? Check out ScrubIndia at http://www.scrubindia.com/cgi-bin/search/scrubindia.cgi . (ScrubIndia is NOT affiliated with, or part of, AltaVista.)

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