quote:Originally posted by Tarrsk: No need for Mapquest when the far superior Google Maps is available.
Y'know, while Google's interface is spiffy, I use Yahoo Maps much more often. The sidebar options are excellent; to pick one example I use a lot, it takes two clicks to include the location of every subway stop on the map.
It's my preference as well. And not just because I was using the old version for years, and it knows huge numbers of my addresses.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Oh, and I should probably plug InfoPlease, seeing as how I work there. Tons of information, incorporating an almanac, encyclopedia, atlas, and much more. Plus we have editors and factcheckers, for those who like that sort of thing.
(The kids' version is Fact Monster. There's a large overlap between the content, though each site has some stuff not in the other.)
Posts: 884 | Registered: Mar 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Shmuel: Oh, and I should probably plug InfoPlease, seeing as how I work there.
Shumel, I thought these listswere very interesting.
I've thought about putting up similar lists compiled by other sources (e.g. AFI's best 100 movies) on a commercial website I'm affiliate with. My very fuzzy memory of copyright law tells me that compilation of lists cannot be copyrighted. Is that pretty much the understanding of your editorial staff as well?
quote:Originally posted by Shmuel: Plus we have editors and factcheckers, for those who like that sort of thing.
*amused* Such as those who are thus employed?
Indeed. Though I'm also a Wikipedia partisan... both have their place.
quote:Originally posted by vwiggin: Shumel, I thought these lists were very interesting.
Aww, thanks. I was the one who put that one up.
quote:I've thought about putting up similar lists compiled by other sources (e.g. AFI's best 100 movies) on a commercial website I'm affiliate with. My very fuzzy memory of copyright law tells me that compilation of lists cannot be copyrighted. Is that pretty much the understanding of your editorial staff as well?
Not quite. There are some cases like that; my understanding is that phone books can't be copyrighted, as the compilation isn't deemed to be creative in any meaningful way. Similarly, lists of the baseball players with the all-time best batting averages are pretty much fair game. The stats are readily available to the public; it's just a matter of assembling and ranking them.
On the other hand, stuff like the most influential people who never lived or the 100 best movies of all time are thoroughly subjective, and creative works in their own right, and you do need to get permission from the copyright holders. Ditto Nielsen ratings and other statistics involving original research.
Fortunately, the copyright holders are often just fine with your using their lists, provided that you give them credit. The AFI, for example, releases their lists to spark interest in classic movies, and films in general. They want the lists to be spread far and wide. Getting permission is not a problem in such cases.
In some other cases, we do have to pay to reprint content. We sometimes decide not to carry lists because the asking price is too much. (For instance, I looked into adding some top 10 lists from the Princeton Review's college rankings this year, but they wanted a small fortune.)
Finally, it should be noted that anything put out by the United States government is in the public domain. We get a lot of our statistics that way. (Our files help considerably toward knowing where to find everything and compile it usefully.)
Posts: 884 | Registered: Mar 2005
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If I had to pick sites that everyone, from your great-aunt Judy in Arkansas to Bill Gates, should know about, it would be these:
Amazon eBay craigslist Google (including Google Maps, Froogle, and gmail) Snopes wikipedia Merriam-Webster (www.merriamwebster.com, a much better dictionary than dictionary.com) Monster America's Job Bank
Hm. That's only nine. I'll have to think about the last one.
Posts: 1903 | Registered: Sep 2003
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quote:Originally posted by vwiggin, and overlooked by me until now: Thank you very much Shmuel. That was extremely helpful!
You guys have been around since 1938? No wonder you know so much.
Well, the radio show incarnation dates back to 1938. The first edition of the almanac was published at the start of 1947.
I've actually gone back and looked at the first few editions in our archives (very, very carefully), and while everything has been revised over the past sixty years, and tables have come and gone, it's still recognizably the same book. I love that. Posts: 884 | Registered: Mar 2005
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