The 37 Best Websites To Learn Something New

Forget overpriced schools, long days in a crowded classroom, and pitifully poor results. These websites and apps cover myriads of science, art, and technology topics. They will teach you practically anything, from making hummus to building apps in node.js, most of them for free. There is absolutely no excuse for you not to master a new skill, expand your knowledge, or eventually boost your career. You can learn interactively at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home. It’s hard to imagine how much easier it can possibly be. Honestly, what are you waiting for?

More from medium.com>

Improved Search and QuickFacts Enhance Census Bureau’s Website

As a direct result of customer feedback, the U.S. Census Bureau recently updated two key tools on census.gov with new features to make accessing statistics easier than ever before. With an improved search feature generating better results oncensus.gov, users can discover a wealth of information and visualizations just by typing key words, such as “median income,” “population” or a particular NAICS code. For example, a search of “California population” will display the latest population statistics along with other popular statistics for California. Users are also able to filter their search by other content types, such as image and videos.

Congress.gov is Out of Beta with New Features

The Congress.gov site now includes the following:

New Feature:
*Congress.gov Resources - A new resources section providing an A to Z list of hundreds of links related to Congress
*An expanded list of "most viewed" bills each day, archived to July 20, 2014

New Feature: House Committee Hearing Videos
*Live streams of House Committee hearings and meetings, and an accompanying archive to January, 2012

Improvement: Advanced Search
*Support for 30 new fields, including nominations, Congressional Record and name of member

Improvement: Browse
*Days in session calendar view
*Roll Call votes
*Bill by sponsor/co-sponsor

When the Library of Congress, in collaboration with the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives and the Government Printing Office (GPO) released Congress.gov as a beta site in the fall of 2012, it included bill status and summary, member profiles and bill text from the two most recent congresses at that time – the 111th and 112th.

Since that time, Congress.gov has expanded with the additions of the Congressional Record, committee reports, direct links from bills to cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, legislative process videos, committee profile pages, nominations, historic access reaching back to the 103rd Congress and user accounts enabling saved personal searches.

More from the Library of Congress.

The Mind Unleashed: pseudoscientific clickbait

From The Rational Wiki:

themindunleashed.org is a pseudoscientific, woo-peddling, clickbait website with a propensity to misrepresent data from studies and present it as scientific fact for their own gain. With just a soupçon of bigotry for flavor.

Neither the site itself nor the whois say anything about who owns and runs the place.

Status of Government Websites During Shutdown (and some options)

With the federal government now shut down, many government services and agencies are closed, suspended or otherwise curtailed. The following list describes the status of select government web resources and some possible alternatives.
Note: The Internet Archive grabbed copies of a number of federal agency websites just before they were taken offline due to the lapse in appropriations. You can access the archives through the links on this blog entry.

More info HERE.

Top 10 datasets on data.gov

With agencies continually opening datasets and releasing APIs to app developers, Data.gov tracks its datasets according to a variety of criteria, from most accessed and highest rated, to oldest and newest. Here are the top 10 of the nearly 1,300 datasets currently listed under the “Most Relevant” category.
GCN (http://s.tt/1lEn3)

More HERE.

How to Find Out If a Social Media Account is from the Government

Every day, the federalgovernment uses social media services like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to communicate with you and provide easy access to government benefits and services.

But unlike most government websites, which are hosted on a .mil or a .gov domain, social media sites are hosted on commercial domains. Without the .gov or the .mil, it can be difficult to determine which social media accounts are official government sources of information and which are impersonators.

To help solve that problem, the federal government recently launched a social media registry in English and Spanish, where you can confirm the validity of a variety of government social media accounts.

"Link Rot" and Legal Resources on the Web: 2012 Analysis

Access to web-published content can be lost as websites are routinely updated, reorganized, or deleted over time. In the five years since the program began, the Chesapeake Group has built a digital archive collection comprising more than 8,600 digital items and 3,700 titles, almost all originally posted to the web but captured and preserved within the group's digital archive.

Every year, the Chesapeake Group investigates whether or not the documents in the archive can still be found at the original web addresses from which they were captured. The group analyzes two samples of web addresses, or URLs, pulled from the archive's records. ...

In 2012, 218 out of 579 URLs in the sample no longer provide access to the content that was originally selected, captured, and archived by the Chesapeake Group. In other words, link rot has increased to 37.7 percent within five years.

New media: increased news consumption; perils of classifying as public utilities

The State of the News Media 2012

A mounting body of evidence finds that the spread of mobile technology is adding to news consumption, strengthening the appeal of traditional news brands and even boosting reading of long-form journalism. But the evidence also shows that technology companies are strengthening their grip on who profits, according to the 2012 State of the News Media report by Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

More than a quarter of Americans (27%) now get news on mobile devices, and for the vast majority, this is increasing news consumption, the report finds. More than 80% of smartphone and tablet news consumers still get news on laptop or desktop computers. On mobile devices, news consumers also are more likely to go directly to a news site or use an app, rather than to rely on search — strengthening the bond with traditional news brands.

***

The Perils Of Classifying Social Media Platforms As Public Utilities

Are social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter "information monopolies" that should be regulated as public utilities? While calls for social networking regulation are on the rise, there are good reasons why policymaker should avoid the rush and rethink classifying them as "public utilities." Public utility regulation has traditionally been the arch-enemy of innovation, and this could have lasting effects on such a dynamic industry. Treating today’s leading social media providers as essential facilities threatens to convert predictions of "natural monopoly" into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

***

The Future of Apps and Web

The Web Is Dead? No. Experts expect apps and the Web to converge in the cloud; but many worry that simplicity for users will come at a price.

Tech experts generally believe the mobile revolution, the popularity of targeted apps, the monetization of online products and services, and innovations in cloud computing will drive Web evolution. Some survey respondents say while much may be gained, perhaps even more may be lost if the “appification” of the Web comes to pass.

10 Words That Should Never Appear on Your Website

From BNET:

"Here are words and phrases you should remove from your website — not just from your About Us page but from many other pages as well."

Top 10 Web Hosting Services

Consumer-Rankings.com "performed in depth research on the leading web hosting service providers." It "compared their pricing, features, bandwidth and storage space, ease of use, customer support and more to help you determine which hosting provider is right for your personal or small business website. According to our 2010 logs and stats, 59% of our visitors preferred iPage.For a quick overview of the most popular web hosting services click here."

Government Challenges, Contests, and Prizes

Visit Challenge.gov to participate in government contests and challenges for the chance to win a variety of prizes (monetary or non-monetary).
You may be challenged to solve a problem, make a suggestion, shoot and upload a video, create a logo, build an online game, invent something, and much more. A new challenge from Kids.gov, for example, calls for posters that answer the question, "How do I become President?" Find more details about this and other challenges.
Even if you don't have a solution for a specific challenge, you can share challenges with friends or sign up to show support for a challenge.

2010 Census Web Site Running 2nd in the Webbys

If you found the 2010 Census Web site creative, innovative, engaging, and packed with the information that helped you answer questions and helped you help us get out the word about the Census, we encourage you to visit the Webby Awards site and cast your vote.
The Webby Awards are the premier honor for innovation and creativity on the Web.
The Webbys are the "Oscars of the Internet," recognizing the highest achievements in web innovation and creativity in four categories: websites, interactive advertising, online film & video, and mobile. Every Webby Award category has two winners – the committee’s winner and the People’s winner, chosen by the public through massively popular interactive voting.
Last year the 13th Annual Webby People's Voice Awards received 750,000 votes and over 8 million visits in 3 weeks. This year the Webby Awards are teaming up with AOL to drive record voting and user engagement with the best of the web.

Census 2010 is under Society, under Government.

Top 10 Best Newspaper Websites

The Bivings Report decided to break out a list of the best examples of good newspaper websites, judging sites not only on their web features but also on the design, aesthetics and general usability of the site.

Some readers noted that it is heavily skewed to those sites associated with larger newspapers.

Help Improve the Census Bureau Web Site!

please take 10 minutes to fill out the 2008 Survey of Census Bureau Web Site Visitors. The U.S. Census Bureau is conducting this study to evaluate its online presence, products, and services to you. Your opinions and ideas are important to them. Your responses are voluntary and will remain confidential. This survey is being conducted under OMB Clearance Number 0607-0760, which expires on November 30, 2010. For further information regarding this clearance, please contact the Customer Liaison and Marketing Services Office at 301-763-4094.

Great .gov Web sites

These 10 sites show agencies putting the power of the Web to work. From Government Computer News. No, Census is NOT on the list.

The Death of Census.gov?

Following up on yesterday's piece about the SEC's EDGAR changing, the J.J. Hill Library wonders whether other government sites will follow. "A recent study from Princeton researchers suggests that the government give up creating their own Web sites altogether and instead focus on creating data feeds of government information to third party site creators. Interesting, in that this would surely result in better-designed sites, troubling in that it may bring agendas into the mix of public data. We’ll keep a keen eye on the developments."

I opined: "How will this play in the copyright issue? Currently, most govt stuff can't be copyrighted, but if the vendor brings 'value-added', then who owns what?
Maybe I'm being overly cynical. Probably not."

Indian Affairs Web site reconnected

After years of litigation requiring its Internet links to be disconnected, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is back on the World Wide Web. I had written about a workaeround to the closure here.

Can the Web Make You More Productive?

Every weekday, I get an e-mail from About.com containing links to some thematic area. Might be about film, or health, or holidays. I've ound it at least interesting and occasionally useful. An e-mail from last week posed the question of the title above.

The first link was to Top Ten Productivity Web Sites. A number of them are organizational tools. I have a Gmail account, useful for a number of functions, including this blog. My favorite tool in this grouping is TinyURL., where you go to tinyurl.com/create.php and plug in a URL that goes to the second line of an e-mail you're sending and make the URL much shorter.

The second link was to Tips for Searching Effectively with Google. Look near the bottom to see how to find synonyms and searching within a range of numbers, things I've done in the past but had forgotten.

The final link is to How to Do Everything in Mozilla Firefox. I use Firefox at homwe, though not at work, and I like it better than Explorer; your experience may vary.