Tara Calishain is the co-author of Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research, 2nd Edition, and author or co-author of four other books. She is the owner of CopperSky Writing & Research.
In This Issue:
Middle East Information Network Debuts
NameGuard Looks for Name Use on the ‘Net
Author Offers Newsletters for His Books
See All the Pretty Pictures in the Time Inc. Picture Collection
LLRXBuzz Archives
LLRXBu zz Research Tip Archives
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Middle East Information Network Debuts
PRNewswire: April 24, 2000. The Middle East Information Network is a new non-profit website providing resources about the Middle East. Its goal is to provide non-partisan information about the breakdown of the region, the religious and political beliefs, and the peoples’ daily lives.
The site is located at http://www.mideastinfo.com/ . If you’re looking for specific country information, choose a country from http://www.mideastinfo.com/countries.html . You’ll be provided with a country file with links to major sites, a couple of pictures, and links to a country profile and a map. Countries have varying amounts of information; Egypt, for example, has more links on its page than Oman.
The News page ( http://www.mideastinfo.com/news.html ) has a moderate amount of links but lets you know what language each link is in so you don’t waste time exploring media you won’t understand. The document room, should it expand more, ( http://www.mideastinfo.com/document.htm ) is a good idea. It’s a collection of speeches, treaties, and other material related to the Middle East. There isn’t much material here yet, though; this area needs developing.
This week Pac-Info ( http://www.pac-info.com ) has added plenty of new sites to its collection of publicly-accessible databases, including:
Canada – Stolen Property
Canada – Courts – Judgment Database
U.S. Nationwide – Court of Appeals, 6th Circuit
California – Northern Bankruptcy Court
Alaska – Bankruptcy Court
(Lots of bankruptcy courts added this week.)
SearchPointe, Inc. is launching Chiropractor Search as a comprehensive source of professional background and credential verification information on chiropractors. This service contains about 65,000 profiles of doctors of chiropractic licensed to practice in the U.S. Users can search by name or location and obtain office address, office phone number, a map with selected offices marked. The doctor profile provides a variety of information including gender, education, status of license and disciplinary action data.
You can check out the search at http://www.SearchPointe.com/chirosearch.shtml . In order to do a proximity search, you have to provide your address, which is a little annoying. Why can’t you just look for a chiropractor within ten miles of Rome, New York? Anyway, once you fill out the search form you get a list of up to 100 licensed chiropractors in that area. By choosing one of them, and clicking Profile, you can get information about that chiropractor, including the chiropractor’s name, phone number, address, birth year, education, and gender. (The last three were not always available in the listing.)
If you want to, you can pay an extra small fee and order a report giving the chiropractor’s license number and a report of any sanctions they might have against them. You can also subscribe to an alert service to let you know when the chiropractor’s status changes
NameGuard Looks for Name Use on the ‘Net
NameProtect.com is launching NameGuard, a free brand intelligence service focusing on the management and protection of a company’s domain names, trademarks, and other valuable brands on the Internet.
You can access the NameGuard service at http://www.nameprotect.com/tmmonitoring.htm . You’ll be asked to give your domain name and e-mail address. Check out the sample report; with this service you’ll be able to monitor pending trademarks that are similar to yours, domain names similar to yours that have recently been registered, domain names you could consider registering, similar names that are up for auction, and tools you can use to protect your name (like a fee-based trademark search.) You will receive a monthly report.
Author Offers Newsletters for His Books
Bruce Maxwell has written several books, including How to Track Politics on the Internet, and How to Find Health Information on the Internet (both published by Congressional Quarterly Books.) To capitalize on his expertise, he has begun a series of newsletters related to the topics of his books. You can access them at http://silverhammerpub.com/ . The newsletters available are:
PoliSites — Political Use of the Internet and New Sites
Health Newsbrief — News Stories About Developments In Health
Women’s Health Newsbrief — News Stories On Health Geared To Women
To subscribe, click the checkboxes for the subscriptions you want and click put your e-mail address in the submission form. If you want to see back issues of any of the newsletters (they’ve only been active a couple of weeks, so there’s not much in the line of archives) click on the “More information” link with each newsletter and you’ll find a link to the archives. Each issue looks to have around a dozen links with comprehensive summaries and source information.
See All the Pretty Pictures in the Time Inc . Picture Collection 
Time Inc. has an enormous collection of pictures at http://www.thepicturecollection.com/ . Once you register at the site (registration moderately intrusive; it asks for your name, address, phone, company address and phone, what you do, and how much you spend annually licensing stock photography.) You’ll get the opportunity to search through their database of thousands and thousands of photographs.
You get a lot of options in your searches. You can search by keyword, category, date, location, whether or not they were published by Time Inc., and the publication in which they appeared. The search is not forgiving. If you misspell “Dorothy Parker” as “Dorthy Parker” you’re not going to get any results. “Bu zz Armstrong” will get results and “Buz Armstrong” won’t. So make sure you get your spelling right.
You’ll get results as pages full of thumbnails — small photographs. Click directly on a photograph for a larger image (complete with distinct but non-intrusive watermark) and information such as the date the picture was taken, where, a description of the picture, the names of the principal subjects, and contact information for licensing the photograph.