Thursday, April 30, 2009
Tools: Search Traffic Offers Crystal Ball
An interesting New Scientist story says searching real-time web activity - like Twitter - can help predict trends in the economy, travel, home sales and more. This could be a fascinating tool for journalists. The story says car-related search queries cut the error rate of forecasted sales of autos and vehicle parts by 15 percent. Search query data came from a cool site called Google Trends, which allows you to explore search traffic for various keywords, including by country and date. Also interesting is the new Google Insights for Search, which allows advanced searching. I've added both tools to my resources links to the right.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
FOI: U.S. Military Intel Bulletin Back Online
The U.S. Army has agreed to put back in the public domain its Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Federation of American Scientists. FAS's Secrecy News blog reports in this note how a growing body of military and intelligence documents have gotten shifted out of the public domain. Past issues of the MIPB are now available at the FAS site here.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Awards: Congrats to Us!
The Canadian Association of Journalists and National Magazine Awards Foundations have announced their annual journalism and writing awards. Click here for the finalists for the CAJ prizes for investigative reporting and here to see the NMA prizes for that and a bunch of other stuff.
Big self-congratulations to us here at Investigate This! - yes, I am now referring myself in the third person; see how big my head has gotten? - for a nomination from each of these groups for my story titled The Pill Pushers - about how pharma sales reps court doctors with meals, honoraria and other freebies.
The story came out in the Vancouver weekly The Georgia Straight, where editors Charlie Smith and Martin Dunphy (love you, guys!) are some of this country's most ardent supporters of the kind of investigative reporting that's fast becoming an anachronism in most dailies, mags and broadcasting. But here's another antidote to that: the Pulitzers have also been announced. Check them out here.
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