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Death and Taxes (Well, Taxes Anyway)

Yup, April is around the corner, and for you American readers that means two things: making sure your tax return is filed and enduring a massive media frenzy about making sure your taxes are filed. While WorldWideWeb Tax (http://www.wwwebtax.com/) can't help you with the latter, they can make sure you get all the tax information you can stand.

This site contains over 1,500 pages of tax information, including a master index of tax topics (an alphabetical list of topics, from 1040PC to Worthless Securities), questions about taxes (divided into several categories, including income, dependents, extension forms, etc.) and several pointers to forms. In addition, every state has an "at-a-glance" page which gives you substantial information about filing taxes in that state. This page is somewhat hard to read, but probably because they stuffed so much information onto one page that most browsers won't need to scroll down.

There is some commercial information here -- the site can file your tax return electronically, and there are some special reports on selected tax topics for sale -- but that's counterbalanced by the loads of useful free information. Absolutely worth a look.

Wisconsin Relaunches State Portal

Wisconsin has launched a new version of their Web portal at http://www.wisconsin.gov/. It defaults to a text version. (At least it does with Opera. With Mozilla it goes to a graphic version.) Hmm. I think I like Wisconsin.

Power Utilities Database Launched for Personnel

Competitive Analysis Technologies has updated "Power Utilities on the Internet," a database for power industry personnel. The site contains links to worldwide electric and gas companies, as well as service companies, industry associations, government agencies and industry periodicals. Also included are pricing sites and "131 databases of power utility information buried in the 'deep web.' " Information is updated every 90 days and is also available in hard copy or as an corporate Intranet "drop-in." Subscription information is available at http://www.catsites.com/publications.html.

Texas Attorneys Receive Free Access to Research

The State Bar of Texas and FindLaw have teamed to launch a Web portal with research powered by the National Law Library. Free to Texas attorneys, MYTexasBar.com offers keyword-searchable legal research, new feeds, practice-specific forums, and legislative tracking. The site also includes statues, case law, legal forms, weather information and online calendaring.

I'd tell you more, but I don't have an eight-digit Texas bar number to register with. The press release announcing the site is available at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010206/tx_nationa.html.

Washington Post Delivers E-News

The Washington Post has launched an e-mail newsletter program which delivers only personally-selected content to the reader. It's available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/newsletters.

Samples of each newsletter are available in popup windows and look to be HTML. (Ick.) Subscribing requires registering with the Washington Post (required information includes e-mail address and zip code; optional information includes date of birth and gender.) I'd like these a lot better if they were plain-text.

This is certainly a different mix of people than you'll find over at Celebrity Sleuth, and presented in a less "fluffy" manner. If you like that you'll probably want to try this. Worth a look.

Google Notes

A few notes on Google. Search Monster Chris Sherman notes that Google now distinguishes PDF Files from regular HTMLfiles. Get his article at http://websearch.about.com/internet/websearch/library/weekly/aa013101a.htm.

Google is also now offering free site search to universities. University Webmasters can get more information on this at http://services.google.com/googleuniv/login.

Not surprisingly, Google's University search list has gotten HUGE. Check it out at http://www.google.com/intl/en_extra/options/universities.html.

And the meta-search thing. As I mentioned briefly in ResearchBuzz, Google does not work with most meta-search engines. A Google representative indicated to me that meta-search engines who query Google without having a business relationship with Google are violating Google's terms of service. You may review Google's terms of service for yourself at http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html.