Check out www.paperofRecord.com, an online repository of newspaper articles (most from Canadian papers), complete with full images of the original product.

One of the best utilities for debugging and testing web apps is Firebug (http://getfirebug.com/). I use it to debug CSS, Javascript and to test load times for sites ... this is an extremely useful Firefox plugin ... anyone who does ANY development work needs this tool!

Check out BlogScope's tools for visualizing content from over 30 million blogs and 520 million posts. The site (http://www.blogscope.net/) currently is in preview/beta release, but has some nice tools allowing you to track the popularity of a search term, as well as running a comparison against two search terms (see below for an example). BlogScope also allows the embedding of their charts in other content ... such as blogs.

 

Overall, this is a good tool, it will be interesting to see if they develop additional analysis modules, as they could begin competing against some of the larger buzz monitoring outfits.

Despite my reluctance to spend $$ these days, I just might have to upgrade to Blackberry's Storm touchscreen PDA. Initial looks are promising, with Iphone like functionality promised, plus it works with the Verizon network. Also heard from another techie that I could use the phone as a wireless modem, freeing me from having to access unsecure wireless networks. Read more about pricing at: http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=492&tag=nl.e539. 

ATT&T just launched a new video search engine "VideoCrawler" (http://www.videocrawler.com/), bringing yet another player into this crowded space. Like others, VideoCrawler allows searching, rating, tagging and sharing of video plus audio, Internet radio, Internet TV, games and ring tones.

Check out a great article by Risa Sacks, a fellow AIIP member and phone researcher extraordinaire. I've frequently turned to phone research (especially when doing government or industry research), and generally have had good luck, once I've connected to the right person.

Read the article at: http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/oct08/Sacks.shtml. 

Note to self; check out Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/) before the end of the year. They now offer SQL Server 2005 support, which you can couple with Windows 2003/IIS to develop .NET applications. Since Microsoft's Azure is not yet ready for prime time, Amazon's services might be a good alternative.

Interesting article, especially the renewed focus on clay as a training surface. Read more at: http://www.usatoday.com/sports/tennis/2008-11-05-USTA-overhaul_N.htm. Also interesting is their focus on finding players earlier ... 9-10 years old? Not sure how well that will work, as the player who is a phenom at 9 might get burned out, fail to grow, or get injured.

You spend over an hour attempting to figure out why a "DIV" tag displayed on IE, but failed to display on Firefox, only to realize that you're testing Firefox on your staging server, not the dev server where you were making all of the changes. (Note to self ... look at the address bar!!!)

Quick hit for those wondering just what to buy during the upcoming purchase season. If you know someone who dotes on their dog or cat, check out www.bestfriendsstudios.com.

This site features a variety of pet themed gifts, including custom Christmas stockings, personalized stationary, decorative pillows. The site even allows you to send in a photo of your beloved dog and they'll create a custom pillow based on your pet!

Anyway, this could be a nice change from the generic gift card or chain store purchase (though Best Friends Studios offer gift cards as well).