On Friday the Trust for Public Land (TPL) announced the launch of a new land conservation database, available at http://www.conservationalmanac.org/. The site has had information available on conservation before, but is now offering parcel-level data and mapping features. The new features are currently available for Florida, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, and Oregon. This morning Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, and Wyoming will be added.
I went straight to the map (http://www.conservationalmanac.org/secure/map.php) and opened up Florida. When you visit the map you’ll get a little ten-slide introduction that gives you an overview to using the site. Once you’ve opened a state (remember not all states have data available yet) you can see protected lands on a parcel level and get information about each parcel. There’s also a detailed report that includes a little more information, nicely detailed in a PDF file.
I thought this was an interesting way to get information on conserved lands, but since there are only five states available you may have to wait a while to use it; I’m not sure of the schedule in adding states. I also noticed when using it that sometimes getting maps of conserved lands was very slow. I’m looking forward to seeing it complete and maybe a little bit faster…
Footnote.com has announced a new addition to its Vietnam War Collection: Army Photos and Unit Service Awards. As you may know Footnote.com is usually a subscription service but the company is making its Vietnam War collection free for the month of February. You can access it at http://go.footnote.com/vietnam/.
The Army Photos are directly available at http://www.footnote.com/documents/241910021/photos_vietnam_war_army/. There are almost 29,000 images available here and at this writing the collection is denoted as “76% complete.” The first page has lists of recent comments and “discoveries” that have been made, but there’s also a search box. I did a search for patrol and got 400 results. You can also browse items via 31 categories (from aerials to vehicles.)
The Army Unit Service Awards cover documents related to Presidential Unit Citations, Valorous Unit Awards, and Meritorious Unit Commendations. The documents cover duties of service, duties performed, and letters of recommendation, and are available at http://www.footnote.com/documents/241893090/vietnam_unit_service_awards/. You can browse these items if you like (they’re organized by unit) and you can also do a keyword search. Remember these are unit citations, and not individual citations. You can get more information on unit citations at http://www.homeofheroes.com/medals/ribbons/1_ribbons_unit.html.
As long as you’re here, you might want to check out some of the other materials relating to the Footnote.com Vietnam War collection, including Marine Corps photos (almost 20,000) and an interactive version of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where you can leave a tribute to one of the people listed on the wall, or provide other information (like a picture.)
Bing announced last week several initiatives that will tie it in tighter with Facebook. Facebook recently had its sixth anniversary, which is pretty old in Internet terms, but has gotten really hot in the last couple of years.
Bing is the search provider on Facebook. In other words, when you run a search on Facebook and get all the results that Facebook can provide — people, groups, and so on — you get Web results at the bottom, and those are provided by Bing. Bing’s Web search integration will be extended to outside the US, covering all of Facebook’s 400 million users, and Bing will soon be integrating additional features into its Facebook Web results, including (I hope!) its rich search answers. (So I can search on Facebook for red beans and rice and get fan pages, groups, and recipes!)
I suspect there will be a closer tie-up with Facebook appearing in Bing’s search results, but after a few tests searches I’m not seeing it yet. As Bing mentioned in its announcement, it’ll take several weeks/months for all this to shake out.
This is good for Bing. They’ve got a big role in one of the hottest properties on the Web. Twitter has an API and is appearing in all kinds of search results. What are the other hot independent Web properties that haven’t teamed up with a major player? Yelp, maybe? Foursquare?
