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ABOUT.COM
Internet Prospector; June '99
Wait! Hold your horses! This is not a new Web site.
It's
Miningco.com's new name, which the company hopes reflects
the top-of-the-line, Charles-of-the-Ritz make-over it's
being given. The name change is part of a strategy to pit
the middle-of-the-Net-pack site against the big players like
Yahoo and America Online and portal sites in the stock
market. About.com's goal is to become a $20 billion company.
Part of what this means is there now are lots more links to
shopping sites which generate commission revenue for the
company. About.com's public relations explains the change:
"MiningCo.com was the right name for us when we were focused
solely on mining the gems of the Net. But we've grown to be
about that and so much more. We are about real people
finding solutions and answers. We're about community. We're
about original content. We're about e-commerce, about
thousands and thousands of topics, and about the trusted
recommendations of our human guides. We've grown to be
about so much of what our users are about."
About.com features channels and an amazing and eclectic list
of topical guides. The site's original concept of using Web
experts as guides for every topic remains intact. Each
guide is a real person who provides links to great sites,
writes original content and runs a chat room and message
board about related topics. They have added a "guide of the
day" feature. However, it was not clear to me how I could
access the guide of the day's topic, since it was not listed
as a channel. Then, at the bottom of the page under "Just
About Talk About All About" I found "About A to Z" and
bingo, there were the topics and their guides.
Maybe their new layout needs a little work, but it's still a
great site for finding general and specific background about
a topic. I typed "entreprenuers" in the search box and got
some interesting articles about entreprenuerialism (is that
a word?) in general, which helped me understand some of my
prospects' prospects better.
You can still get there via your old Miningco.com bookmark,
but the new URL is
http://about.com
ISLEUTH
Internet Prospector; June '99
Last visited by the Prospector in November 1997,
The Internet Sleuth, or iSleuth, has changed its look
somewhat. Now you can search using multiple search engines
which include Alta Vista, Excite, InfoSeek, Lycos,
WebCrawler and Yahoo or search Alta Vista UseNet News and
DejaNews. Category searching is also available. In
addition, you can search iSleuth itself, which checks the
titles, descriptions and URLs of all databases and search
engines listed on iSleuth. The Internet Sleuth is now part
of The Big Hub family of Web sites and is accessible from
http://www.thebighub.com
MOLLIE'S HOMEWORK HELPER
Looking for some interesting Fourth of July facts? Or facts about almost
anything? Mollie, an engaging labrador retriever and experienced Net
surfer, provides a great site with topical links such as history, social
studies, languages, sciences, etc, etc, etc. There is a specific link
called Fourth of July under "History" where you can also find This Day
in History, Today in History, 4000 Years of Women in Science, Biographical
Dictionary, Famous Birthdays and Search For People Born on a Certain
Day. Under other topics, find Composers, Daily Fun Facts and Invention
Dimension. Also find a set of reference book links in the "Library"
section. Mollie has two URLs:
http://www.parkbank.com/_vti_bin/shtml.exe/homworkhelper.htm/map
ONLINE BOOKS PAGE
This full-text index allows you to search the content of over 5,000
books available online. There are also hotlinks to directories, archives,
on-line libraries, bibliographies and journals. It also offers special
features: A Celebration of Women Writers, Banned Books On-Line and Prize
Winning Books On-Line which is in the works. Search all books or go
to author, title or subject search pages. Using forms, search for books
by author by entering the surname, first name in the Author field. For
more specific results, you may enter surname,first name plus place a
word from the title in the Title field. Can't remember if the name is
Silverberg or Silverburg? You can select the Exact start of name option
and just enter Silver. There is also a forms-free search page.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/books.html/
PATSCAN (University of British Columbia)
Internet Prospector, Sept.. '97
Patscan links to the UBC Law Library's tutorial on Searching and Navigating
through Lexis/Nexis, a must for all L/N users.
http://www.library.ubc.ca/law/search.htm
RESEARCH IT!
Internet Prospector, April. '97
Find a dictionary, thesaurus, translator, geographical tools, a biographical
dictionary, currency exchange feature, ticker lookup, stock quotes and
a zip code directory here.
http://www.itools.com:80/research-it/
MY VIRTUAL REFERENCE DESK
Internet Prospector, Jan. '98
Here is a positively amazing site chock full o' links to reference sites.
There are links to dictionaries, thesauri, APA and MLA guides, US and
world newspapers, search engines, encyclopedias, weather, biography,
geneaology and government sites and more. Everything is categorized,
or you can use the index. One can spend hours here and still not see
everything -- the site grows faster than you can explore it. MVRD
desk is produced by Bob Drudge, father to famed Web reporter Matt Drudge
of the Drudge Report.
http://www.refdesk.com/
U.S. CENSUS BUREAU'S GAZETTEER
Try the U.S. Gazetteer for income and other demographic information
for any zip code region. Just enter a city name and zip
or state, then click on search. This will take you to another
page that has your search results. From here you can click on
the code for 1990 census reports or a Tiger Map. From the
Tiger Map, you can add Census Map Statistics. Scroll down the
page and use the pull down menu to select census track statistics
by income. A new map will appear with color codes of the
region by income. You can change the parameters of the map
to zoom closer to your mark. Go back to the results page
and click on the census code to obtain a selection of reports.
Median Household Income and Median Family Income will give an
average wage for that zip code.
http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/gazetteer
REFERENCE DESK
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