Blinkx is one of the oldest video search engines on the net and has indexed about 32 million hours of video. Never mind the talk about patented technology and all that jazz — this thing works and works well. However, it doesn’t like Firefox, use IE itself or IE Tab for best results.
Monthly Archive for February, 2009
Trapcall will reveal the caller name and number when transmission of caller ID is blocked. If the party receiving the call on his mobile telephone subscribes to the free service, they will see the caller’s phone number. If the called party subscribes to the paid service, they will also receive the name of the caller. Trapcall is not available on all cell phone networks in the US, but it does work where it is available. I don’t know if it will work in Canada.
This is something to be aware of when calling subjects of an investigation or making pretext calls.
Twingly is designed to search Twitter, Identi.ca, and many other microblogging services. It also searches blogs. However, its results from Twitter are not as timely as Twitter Search for some reason.
Twingly has some very interesting search capabilities. For example, to search for tweets and other microblog entries posted since the beginning of this year, use the search syntax: since:2009-01-01 then the search term. Using until: you get results from before 1 Jan 09. To search for microblog posts sent to or by a particular user enter from: or to: and the user’s name.
Like Tweetag, it doesn’t seem to measure up to Twitter Search for timely results. It is hard to judge how it performs with the other microblogging services.
Our RSS Feed has moved to http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TheConfidentialResource
The old feed is being redirected but if your reader fails to locate the feed please re-subscribe.
Whostalkin, a beta search engine, focuses on social media sites and blogs. The concept of expanding searches to include social sites is gaining momentum.
Whostalkin looks promising for finding information from social sites such as Twitter, blogs, blog search engines with meta searches, and a number of other types of social sites. This might return hits that represent ‘inside chatter’ as it searches many content-rich, but offbeat, sources.
I don’t have a lot of experience with this, but I will use it as much as possible over the next couple of months to get a better understanding of its utility.
Tweetag is a search engine for “tweets” that allows you to look for trends on Twitter and helps you find Tweet discussions that matter to you.
According to the FAQ, “Tweetag analyses more than 200k tweets per day. For each tweet, we do a little magic to automatically tag the tweet real-time. As all tweets are now tagged, we can generate nested tagclouds which offer a great new way of browsing through the sea of tweets.”
For popular topics just add the topic to the URL as in http://tweetag.com/obama/.
The Court of Appeal for Ontario launched an RSS feed for when:
- Decisions are added to the decisions page
- Case lists are available
- Leave to appeal notifications are posted
- Non-publication orders and in-camera hearings are announced
Additional feeds are under development and in the future you will be able to subscribe to separate feeds for each service.
Check out this new service at http://www.ontariocourts.on.ca/coa/en/rss/index.htm.
Searchme offers a simple web search interface, but the results are not what you might expect. The results display an image of the actual website.
Searchme also offers a category feature. Small icons appear denoting categories to help you refine your search. For example, type in steven harper and the category science fiction and fantasy appears along with one for Canadian Government.
You can create Stacks of your favorite websites to view later. I find this very useful for presentations where I have a broadband connection. Public Stacks exist but I haven’t figured out how to search them or if one must just page through them.
I tried Searchme quite awhile back and found it slow and cumbersome. However, it works much faster now, but I wouldn’t make it a mainstay quite yet.
I always prefer documentary evidence. It doesn’t change its story or forget things. Eye witnesses on the other hand…
Eyewitness Accounts Increasingly Found to be Faulty
A group of volunteers watched the first episode of “24″ and then either took an immediate recall test about the show or played a game. Next, all of the subjects were told false information about the episode they had seen and then took a final memory test about the show.
The results, reported in the January issue of Psychological Science, were surprising. The researchers found that the volunteers who took the test immediately after watching the show were almost twice as likely to recall false information compared to the volunteers who played the game following the episode.
Abstract of the original Psychological Science article.
Every writer, reporter, and investigator should read the article entitled Checkpoint by award-winning author John McPhee in the Feb. 9-16, 2009 issue of New Yorker Magazine . The abstract is available, but you must be a subscriber to read the full article online. Of course, you could go to the library and read the article, or just buy the magazine.
An excellent post from the Sources & Methods blog on Wednesday, October 29, 2008:
Male Or Female? (GenderAnalyzer)
GenderAnalyzer is a free site that seeks to automatically determine the sex of a particular blog’s author… UClassify, the company that sponsors the site, also has a free service called TypeAnalyzer which determines…a Myers Briggs Personality Type automatically…Since so much activity online is either functionally anonymous or deliberately deceptive, everyone from advertisers to law enforcement professionals to national security types are trying to figure out who is doing/watching what.
Terrorist interest groups lobbying against waiting period on IEG (improvised exploding garments).
In December 2008, Google created a centralized profile system that will provide personalized information to all the Google products. These Google Profiles are minimalist things compared to LinkedIn and Facebook. However, they are accessible to search engines for indexing and may appear in search results. This may be Google’s first step into the social network arena as the Google Profiles launch came on the heels the Google Open Social product launch.
These profiles may be searched at the Google Profile search site. I was experimenting with this and found an enormous number of trashy profiles. One can search by name, but the fun starts when one searches by any rude or vulgar term that comes to mind. Of course, one could perform useful searches using company names or names of real people.
I used to do a series of lectures about the skills I found most lacking in the education of detectives. The lecture about evaluating the revealed wisdom that pours forth from the Internet was always fun to deliver.
One example that I used when I started doing these, was a site that identified the second gunman in the Kennedy assassination — there was Elvis holding a Thompson sub-machine gun on the grassy knoll. It was on the Internet so it must be true.
Here is the 13 point check list for evaluating information upon which I based the lecture. Continue reading ‘What They Don’t Teach in Detective School’
Associated Press is reporting that Swiss police came across an enormous marijuana crop using Google Earth. What a bummer dude!
That’s a lot more interesting than looking at some competitor’s plant to count the parking spaces and loading docks.