PassingNotes.com

i got an email from jeff kiley over at heritage microfilm earlier this week to let me know about a bunch of new things they’re doing…now, since blogs are a big public relations outlet, and because i’m a sarcastic and generally obnoxious mofo, you can imagine that when i get a message to the effect of “we’re only putting out the word through bloggers in this special blogger-only promotion” that i’m thinking, “and i’m only telling special companies to fuck off this week in dave’s special ‘i’m-busy-so-fuck-off’ campaign‘…but i did click on through jeff’s links and i was floored with what they’ve done…

this set of sites offers some serious ideas for the big search engines…namely, the ability to build and share search collections with integrity and reliability from day one (i know, that’s old news, but it’s not really being done by the big engines - why?)…technically, furl and spurl and others have been doing this for ages with link collection sharing, but this is different…and these others are not offering an interface with timelines or other advanced search options including front page image retrieval…

heritage microfilm is the company behind the newspaper archives, and what you need to know is that unlike elGoog, yahoo and ms search, their database contains “35 million pages of historic newspapers dating from 1753-2006″ and they index the full text…they are very, very focused on what they do, and they make their money offer premium services to users of their core archive collection (you’ll see links to ‘premium content’ throughout their sites)…

so what did they do to make ‘em interesting enough to really blog about here? they started building special collections - most debuting this week for the very first time including these very cool ones:

the fbi archive - just like it sounds…
the september 11th archive - an incredible researcher/historian/community resource…
the titanic archive - just an example of how they built a big specialty collection from a whole slew of 1912 archives..

…but what’s really gonna harden your nips is the fact they can build these on the fly based on any user request - just present a quick case to the company (researchers, you can email me for jeff’s info if you’re interested)…and according to jeff, all of these sites will always remain free…my idea: why can’t i just build ‘em on the fly myself and share them as i wish without having to even contact the company? now that is giving power to the users….

oh, and my favorite thing about the whole company is from the original site: i can always use their “birthday newspaper” feature fo’ free to create cool cards and stuff for my kids…(as in, ‘news from the day you were born’)….

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