Thursday marks ResearchBuzz’ 400th issue. The Web site that became ResearchBuzz started in April 1998, with the newsletter starting in October 1998. 400 issues! Almost nine years! I’m pretty amazed.

To celebrate, I’ve made several upgrades and changes to the site.

1) Full-text RSS feeds — I’ve always been pretty resistant to full-text feeds because even without them, I’ve had problems with my content being grabbed by scrapers and reproduced without attribution or permission. But I’m trying them now in the hope that reader happiness outweighs scraper naughtiness. (I’ve also done a couple of other little site things, like upgrading WP and finally fixing the domain so the landing page is actually http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp .)

2) Massive Kebberfegg update — As you might remember, Kebberfegg ( Kebberfegg.com ) is a tool to generate keyword-based RSS feed without having to run around to a bunch of search engines. It launched in October 2005. I have updated it now so that it generates over 55 feeds in eleven different categories. Of course it’s still free to use, and a very fast way to generate LOTS of keyword-based feeds!

3) New Search Engine — SearchOfficialBlogs.com — Last June, I mused about an official corporate blog filter. With the advent of the Google Custom Search Engine I figured it would be a good time to try to build one. SearchOfficialBlogs.com searches over 140 different official blogs — from politicians, celebrities, musicians, companies, institutions, etc.

4) New Search Engine — JustAskAnybody.com — 100 Ask-An-Expert and advice sites and pages, all gathered together via Google Custom Search Engine in one giant search engine of massive expertise. Get lots of answers with a simple search at JustAskAnybody.com .

5) More virtuality — More developing and planning is going on in Second Life (virtual classes in information trapping are being mapped out), and I think I’ll be moving soon from my current location to a larger site with more prims and some serious mad scientist-ing. Visiting ResearchBuzzSL.com will take you to a slurl.com map of the current digs. More details on the way.

Everybody, thanks so much for reading and supporting ResearchBuzz. You’re awesome.