Since Wolfram|Alpha launched in 2009, I’ve often wondered if the company would allow users to use their extremely powerful computing infrastructure to analyze their own data along with data sets available on the open web.

Well, they have and that’s what Wolfram|Alpha Pro is all about. As I wrote a few week’s ago, I’m a frequent W|A user and long-time admirer of the company and it’s founder, Stephen Wolfram. I think they’ve scored again.

The service has an introductory rate of $4.99/month with a reduced rate of $2.99/month for students. The company offers pricing for the enterprise. So, what does this initial launch offer?

Wolfram|Alpha Pro: Key Features

• Ability to Analyze Your Own Datasets Input of upload a data set and let Wolfram’s technology automatically recognize and analyze the data. For example, a timeline of your email, your credit card expenses, or a data set obtained from Data.gov.

• Data in more than 60 file formats can be uploaded and analyzed. From an XLS spreadsheet to an HTML document to the audio in a WAV file. Image files (in many formats) can also be analyzed. As you would expect, many science and math formats are also included.

• Access to extended keyboards like the one available with the Wolfram|Alpha mobile apps.

• Visualized and interactive results using the CDF (computational data format) that Wolfram launched last July.

What’s not available today is the ability to publish and compare, comment on or share results. According to Stephen Wolfram, these options are forthcoming.

I’ll can say now that while some of what Wolfram|Alpha Pro has to offer might not be for everybody today it very likely will be in the future as the amount of data available to analyze (personal data and publicly available datasets) continues to skyrocket.

In other words, Wolfram|Alpha pro is getting in on the ground floor of personal data analysis with a powerful but at the same time very easy to use tool that will appeal to everyone as data analysis moves out of the lab and office and into just about everyplace else.

Postscript by Barry Schwartz: On February 8th, Stephen Wolfram posted more details about this Pro offering on their blog.

FAA Mobile Web App

• Since it’s a mobile app nothing to download
• Lookup aircraft tail numbers, get airport status, and several tools for aviators
• Learn more
• Direct link to FAA Mobile App

New From The IRS: Exempt Organizations Select Check

• Learn if an organization has tax exempt status or if that status has been revoked
• Data sets can also be downloaded
• Learn more
• Direct link to Database

USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map

• From the U.S. Department of Agriculture
• Use Zip Code for local info
• Learn more
• Direct link to Interactive Map

Interactive Access to CDC’s HIV and STD Data

• Uses GIS Software
• Download/export data
• Interactive charts, graphs, and of course maps
• Learn more
• Direct link to New Interactive Resource

National Archives Transcription Pilot Project

• Crowdsourcing from the Feds!
• Help transcribe about 1000 pages from 300 documents
• Documents date back to late 18th century
• Learn more
• Direct link to Pilot Project

Maplight.org Company Pages

• MapLight is an excellent resource for political contribution info
• New “Company Pages” feature aggregate contribution data, recent articles, positions on legislation and more
• Currently available for U.S. Congress, California legislature, and Wisconsin legislature
• Remember, this is a beta resource. Pages for some companies not yet available.
• Learn more
• Direct link to Company Pages Interface

Global Think Tank Directory

• From the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania
• More than 6500 institutions included in the directory
• Search or browse by continent and country
• Direct link to Global Think Tank Directoryy

So, queries like:

• Tom Brady Joe Flacco Passing Yards
• 49ers 2011
• New York Giants field goal attempts, field goals made
• Chicago Bears Record 1985
• Ray Lewis Tackles
• Detroit Lions vs. Denver Broncos Passing Yards

all return results that often include visual elements like a graph.

Statistical data for every NFL team and every NFL player back to 1985 are available and the number of statistics and the combinations you can create are endless.

What’s available? This page lists all of the categories of stats available. A guide like this is something new for Wolfram|Alpha and I’m very happy to see it. Hopefully, more of these guides are in the works.

Where Is The Data Coming From?

It’s one thing to provide access to statistics, but it’s quite another to make sure they come from a reliable source.

Wolfram has partnered with STATS based in Chicago’s northern suburbs. STATS is the leading provider of sports data. It’s you follow a sport or sports, play in fantasy leagues, or just look at the latest scores, you’ve seen and used their services.

STATS has been around since 1981 and I’ve been watching them grow ever since. The STATS first office was only a few blocks from where I grew up. Currently, the company is owned jointly by the Associated Press and News Corp.

The one caveat (at least for now) is that NFL statistics are NOT real-time or near real-time. In other words, if you’re watching the games on Sunday, the stats accessible via Wolfram|Alpha will not be updated after every completed pass, made field goal, etc. Currently, NFL data is updated weekly.

Hopefully, this will change by next season and real-time data will be available. Also, I would love to see all-time statistics included in the database. For example, all-time NFL rushing leaders, all-time Chargers passing leaders, all-time Bears vs. Lions record, etc.

Wolfram will also be working with STATS to provide the same type of info for other sports including baseball and basketball.

Wolfram|Alpha’s Largest Hurdle

I said even before Wolfram|Alpha launched that the company’s biggest challenge is not the technology or data sources. They’re experts in this area and continue to do a great job.

The biggest obstacle Wolfram faces is marketing. Marketing Wolfram|Alpha in a time when most people live in a Google or Bing-centric world, is a serious challenge. Of course, this is challenge is one for many companies.

Luckily, after many years, I’m slowly starting to see more people open to trying something different and adding more tools to their search toolkit.

Of course, what search tool you use and when you use it all depends on what you’re looking for and your information need. More and more often, Wolfram delivers not only the data you need but also visualizations and related material.

Comparing Wolfram|Alpha to other search tools can be unfair. It’s not a general purpose search tool but rather a “fact engine” or interactive reference resource that you can query using natural language using data from curated and trusted sources.

I speak from experience that once people understand what Wolfram can and cannot do then see practical examples of what Wolfram has to offer, they’re often hooked.

By adding NFL statistics (and soon more sports statistics) Wolfram|Alpha has powerful ammo to reach out to new users with and not only provide them authoritative American football statistics but also show them all that their product has to offer.

Exciting!

An easy to use but powerful web tool (it’s also free) named PolitickerUSA can save you a lot of time and effort informing you as to what members of congress are tweeting about right now.

In one location you can quickly access the non-stop real-time stream of tweets from Senators, Reps, President Obama, governors, and a few of the republican presidential candidates.

You can also filter the entire PolitickerUSA stream of tweets using a hashtag or word into the filter box. You do not have to click <enter>.

But Wait, There’s More

Here are a few other things you can do with PolitickerUSA.

1. Clicking any word or hashtag in a word cloud will run a search on Twitter for that hashatag or word.

2. Politician Trends allows you to quickly isolate and visualize the latest tweets from a specific politician.

3. A table of all politicians accessible using PolitickerUSA is available linking to their Twitter stream and providing their handle.

Kudos to the PolitickerUSA developer Brian for making the site available. You can read more about how he built the site here.

Almost 3,000 of these publications are open access so the full text is quickly and directly accessible on the web for free.

For many years, professionals, academics, students and others have used services that alerted them when new issues of scholarly/academic (peer-reviewed) publications were published or about to be published.

If you’re not a researcher or academic these publications can still be useful to alert you to what’s likely coming in the future or how the technology or idea is being implemented. You can also learn the names of researchers and where the research is taking place. You can then often utilize the web to learn more about the reseacher and the organization their affiliated with.

Even if you don’t have the time to read the full text of the articles themselves, being able to scan the abstracts that are almost always provided for free can be helpful.

Using JournalTOCs: Nuts and Bolts

Although it’s not always necessary I suggest register for the service (free). Registered users have all of the publications they’re following backed-up on the JournalTOCS server and can also use the site to view material.

Discovering and finding finding publications to be notified about, and setting up alerts is straightforward. You can search (title or ISSN) or browse by publisher or subject.

As you spot titles you would like to follow, check (or tick) the box next to the title. Next to each title you’ll find a direct link to the publication’s home page and another link if you simply want to grab the RSS feed to add elsewhere.

All of your selections (of course they can be edited as needed) are listed on a personalized page that is accessed using the pulldown in the upper-right corner of the page. Just click on your login name.

From this page you can also save and export a complete list of followed journals as an OMPL feed to use in a newsreader app. This page also has a check box that toggles (off by default) a feature that will send alert notifications to the email address that you used when you registered for JournalTOCS.

Each table of contents alert is hyperlinked to either the abstract and bibliographic information and/or the full text of the article.

But Wait… There’s More

You can also use JournalTOCS to keyword search for bibliographic information (and in some cases full text) for each article listed in all alerts.

To do a keyword search of all articles in the database, select “for Articles by Keywords” radio button directly below the search box on the homepage. It’s worth mentioning that this a search of metadata and not of the full text.

Learn more about searching and browsing the database here.

New Journals Added

Although one of the founders of JournalTOCS, Roddy Macleod, is now retired from the Heriot-Watt University Library, he continues to work on the project and regularly adds new titles to the collection. As Roddy adds these titles to the database he posts updates on his personal blog. Here’s an example of a recent update.

By the way, JournalTOCS accepts suggestions about new journals to add to their database on this page. Publications must meet the following selection criteria:

• Scientific and scholarly journals that publish peer-reviewed research papers are covered.
• The journal must have an editor, an editorial board and a peer-review system.
• The journal must publish TOC RSS feeds for its most recent issues.

APIs? You Bet!

JournalTOCs has several free APIs available and many don’t require registration. Details here.

Final Comments

JournalTOCS is a very valuable service that also happens to be free. As we said at the outset even if you don’t normally ready scholarly publications, using JournalTOCS can let you take a few spare moments to quickly get an idea about projects, tools, and ideas that you might see sometime in the future. Plus, reading this type of material (sometimes the abstracts can be enough) might spark a new idea or fuel a discussion with friends and colleagues.

If you want to read the full text you might be able to find free versions (often preprints) of the articles on the Internet using services like Microsoft Academic Search, Google Scholar, SSRN, arXiv, and many others. In some cases, you might find a copy on the author’s personal homepage or the homepage for the organization their affiliated with.

If the final version of the articles (or preprints) are not on the open web, you might be able to access for free from a local public, academic, or special library. Many libraries offer access to many remotely accessible databases with full text articles available 24X7x365. We will talk how this works in an upcoming post.

Finally, a growing number of academic journals are now “open access” and the full text material articles are free for everyone to access and read.

For example, two weeks ago, Wolfram|Alpha launched a new real-time flight tracking feature that displays information about flights flying close to your own location.

I’m a major Wolfram|Alpha user and supporter. However, since Wolfram is using GeoIP, which approximates location rather than using something more precise like GPS coordinates or ADS-B data (more on that below), accuracy can be a problem.

So here are several additional specialty web sites and mobile tools that provide both near real-time and historical data for tracking flights.

FlightAware

The web version of FlightAware is my all-time favorite resource for air traffic info, primarily for flights in the U.S. and Canada, or flights to and from both nations, though more and more data for flights, airlines and airports around the world are becoming available from FlightAware. Not only can you map many flights in the air (data is anywhere from real-time to delayed five minutes), but you can also slice and dice the data in a number of ways. The company has been around for more than five years.

For example:

• Flights headed to and from a specific airport
• Minute by minute air speed and lat/long
• Real time flight cancellations
• Flights in the air by type of aircraft
• Flights in the air by carrier

FlightAware provides some historical info for free. You can access even more if you’re a registered user (free) and, as you might expect, even more for a fee. They also offer a number of business services and open source software.

Also, I encourage you to take a look at the lengthy FAQ. It answers a lot of questions including where the data comes from.

Flight Aware Mobile

Apps are available for five different mobile device platforms as well as a mobile optimized site.

Since many mobile devices have GPS built in, FlightAware (and other apps) offer a “nearby” feature that provides much more precise info about planes nearby compared to what’s available using GeoIP (what Wolfram|Alpha uses).

Plane Finder

This service from pinkfroot provides air traffic info for flights globally, and the service is especially useful for flights outside of the U.S.

Plane Finder uses data sent directly from planes equipped with ADS-B technology monitored by ground stations. For more on how ADS-B works see Plane Finder FAQ and this extensive Wikipedia entry.

Plane Finder offers a free, near-real-time map at Planefinder.net. If nothing else, this free resource is great eye candy and will likely wow them in your office or at family events. The plane icons representing flight paths move as planes move.

Also, with two clicks you can begin tracking a flight using Google Earth.

One note: Plane Finder does not provide departure and arrival times.

Pinkfroot offers Plane Finder apps (fee-based) for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows Phone.

Finally, pinkfroot offers Plane Finder AR for iPad.

This is one super cool app. You can point iPad camera-phone at a plane in the sky or on the ground at an airport. If it’s transmitting the ADS-B, you’ll get details about the plane and flight. In other words, flight tracking plus augmented reality.

More Apps To Track Flights

Two additional aviation apps to mention.

First, Flightwise Tracker Pro (iOS). This free app does not provide arrival and departure times but does near real-time info using several types of maps, weather, a limited amount of historical data, nearby flight info, pictures of the aircraft, and aircraft registration information for some planes (although this feature will hopefully improve).

Second, FlightTrack, FlightTrack Pro, and FlightBoard.

These apps are available for several platforms from Mobiata, a company that was acquired by Expedia in 2010. They’re all excellent resources that look great and are worth the price. I love the many ways you can receive flight alerts from FlightTrack (and the company has a sense of humor—many alerts are accompanied by the familiar “ding” sound that you hear when you press a flight attendant call button on a commercial flight).

My favorite Mobiata app is FlightBoard. This app provides arrival and departure information (real-time) for flights at more than 1,400 airports around the world. It also looks great. In fact, its design is based in part on the flight information boards at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.

Listening Live To Pilots & Air Traffic Controllers

A visit to LiveATC.net (they also have iOS and Android apps and mobile-optimized site) provides links to aviation radios in locations around world. An online archive of all recordings is available for 50 days after a flight.

One final thought: These resources are fantastic for educators wanting to enhance geography, social studies, and math lesson plans—kids of all ages will love tracking flights in real time.

Although I’m a Firefox user, last week’s update was not a big deal for me.

Why?

I’ve had access to Twitter’s search engine and Twitter’s “who to follow” database from my Firefox search box for a long time. In fact, I have had access to many search engines, library catalogs, database lookups, and other searchable databases I use a lot, want to demo, or use often.

Plus, I decide what search tools to add, remove, and how to order the resources I select.

How do I do it?

No, I don’t use Mycroft extensions and I’m not a developer so this does not involve any coding.

Say hello to a new, free Firefox add-on called “Add to Search Bar”.

With this free tool I’m able to quickly and easily add most search tools to my search bar without having to code or download anything but the add-on itself, and I only had to do that once.

Adding any search tool to your Firefox search bar takes only a few clicks and is completed in a matter of seconds.

Let’s say you want to add the Search Engine Land database of archived posts to your search bar.

Here’s the entire process that should take you only a few seconds.

1. Install the Add-On (you’ll only need to do this once).

2. Head to a SEL page and look for the search box on the site.

2. Select the search box.

3. Right-click in the box and the select “Add to Search Bar” from the drop-down menu

4. Next, approve the addition. You can also rename the search resource, add a keyword (or single letter) to trigger the search from the navigation toolbar, and even change the icon.

5. Click save

6. That’s it, you’re done, and Search Engine Land (or whatever you’ve named it) should now be located in your search bar.

How fast and easy was that? By the way, when you select the search bar you’ll spot “Manage Search Engines” at the bottom of the drop down.

Selecting this option allows you to reorder and remove search tools from the search bar. You’re also able to assign a letter or keyword so you can run the search from the navigation bar.

For example, when I want to search for Search Engine Land posts about AdSense or AdWords, I would type [SEL AdWords OR AdSense] directly into the address bar and click enter.

Firefox developer Malte Kraus (aka Dr. Evil), deserves the credit for not only creating this tool but for continuing to tweak the code to make the add-on more stable and ready to go.

If you like Add to Search Bar, you might also want to take a look at another add-on from Kraus named Organize Search Engines. It lets you add separators and folders to your search bar search engines.

Taking a few minutes perhaps once or twice a week to review and build your collection of go to search tools can pay off both in saving time and getting you the best results possible.

Vertical search companies might also want to suggest this resource to their users as a way to get their search tool into the search bar of users.

Finally, iOS users might want to take a look at something similar (in terms of personalization and ease of use) with a $.99 app that we’ve been testing (so far, so good) named Search Ninja. More about this app soon.

Television

The hearing will air on C-SPAN3. It’s available on some cable systems (incl. FiOS and AT&T Uverse) and on Dish Network (Channel 212).

Web

Your best bets are either the C-SPAN3 web stream or a stream direct from the Senate Judiciary Committee.

C-SPAN’s Capitol Hearings website is where you can find an audio feed of today’s hearing.

After the Hearing

After the hearing ends (give them an hour), the video will be permanently available here in the amazing and award winning C-SPAN Video Library. It will also include a mechanically generated (using closed captioning) transcript of the hearing along with a lot of additional features.

You can search the C-SPAN Video Library at the top of any library web page OR using this advanced search interface.

More Google on C-SPAN

Previous Appearances by Eric Schmidt on C-SPAN.

Appearances by All Googler’s on C-SPAN (31 People are Listed). Each program includes a text transcript.

In a New York City courtroom today, Judge Denny Chin heard from Google, the Authors Guild and the American Association Of Publishers about progress in talks.

Bloomberg reports that Jeannine Daralyn Durie, a lawyer for Google, told the judge that the company has made “substantial progress” in talks with publishers.

The American Association of Publishers also says talks are advancing:

“Today, we informed the court that the Association of American Publishers, the five publisher plaintiffs and Google have made good progress toward a settlement that would resolve the pending litigation regarding the Google Library Project.

Michael Boni, a lawyer for the Authors Guild, said the group “very much wants to work out a settlement” with the company, according to a Reuters report.

Judge Chin also remains hopeful for a settlement even though he said, “you’re essentially starting from scratch.”

While the negotiations continue, Judge Chin did approve a schedule of events that will move the case to to trial (if necessary) toward the middle of next year.

Law Professor and Google Book legal expert James Grimelmann has posted the preliminary schedule on his blog, beginning with plaintiffs moving for a class certification by December 12, 2011 and Google responding by January 26, 2012. He adds that settlement talks will continue while the pretrial proceedings are taking place.

Grimelmann also reports about a question the judge asked to the attorneys:

Judge Chin inquired about the framing of the case. He asked whether the legal issues focused on the display of snippets, or whether the plaintiffs wanted to “expand” the suit. Both [Bruce] Keller [Attorney for Publishers] and Boni [Authors Guild] made a point of emphasizing that they saw the case more broadly. Keller explained that it was about copying, scanning, storing, and displaying the works (including, but not limited to snippets). Judge Chin expressed surprise that the list didn’t include “selling.”

For a thorough review of today’s events and the complete pretrial calendar, Grimelmann’s blog post is not only a good place to begin but also an excellent resource to monitor as is his Twitter stream.

(gavel image courtesy of Shutterstock.com)

Say hello to Web Grepper. More about the name in a moment.

What’s a Web Grepper?

Web Grepper allows users to run searches on the ENTIRE Blekko index (more than 20 billion URLs according to a recent presentation) to reveal data that you could not search and find using keywords. In other words, you can also search material in the actual HTML coding of a web page.

It’s another tool for your web intelligence toolbox.

Here are a few examples of Web Greps that Blekko has run during the testing:

1. The number of sites utilizing Facebook Comments vs. sites using Disqus

2. The number of urls and domains using nofollow tags

3. Sites with rickroll links

4. Determining which type of feed is more popular, ATOM or RSS? (see image below; click for larger version)

Given the increasing amount of data included in the coding of a web page these days the possibilities are many. Plus, having this data and being able to see trends over time will also be both interesting and helpful.

How Can You Use Web Grepper

Simply head to the Blekko homepage and enter the slashtag /webgrep into the search box.  Next, click the request a report button and enter what you would like to have grepped. Next
, Blekko’s community of  users vote on what greps to run. Blekko will run reports twice a day, Monday-Friday.

Blekko also said they’ll be reviewing reports to make sure that Web Grepper is not be used as a hacking tool to obtain personal and private info.

The Name Web Grepper

Web Grepper is based on a command-line text matching search tool originally developed for UNIX named grep.  For more background here’s the Wikipedia entry.

Disclosure: I have a small amount of Blekko stock options that I received after doing some consulting for Blekko in 2009. I have not consulted for the company since that time.