A county Commissioner in Escambia County, Florida has been charged with a violation of Florida public records law violation for not turning over requested emails on time.

Florida State Attorney Bill Eddins reviewed complaints that Commissioner Gene Valentino violated Florida’s public records laws by delaying the release of the emails.

According to a press release from Eddins office:

“This review has determined that sufficient facts exist to believe that Commissioner Valentino did fail to timely or completely respond to a public records request and as a result has been charged with one count of violation of the Public Records Law.”

The public record violation allegations arose after a meeting between Gene Valentino and Pensacola City Councilman Sam Hall on April
28, 2009 occurrred in a private office in the City Hall building.

Commissioner Valentino and Councilman Hall are both voting members on the Pensacola-Escambia Promotion and Development
Commission ( PEDC ). The PEDC is a quasi-government entity that was created by an act of the State Legislature in 1967. The purpose of the PEDC is to promote economic development in Escambia County, Florida. Meetings of the PEDC are subject to Florida public records law and the state’s Sunshine Law.

Florida’s Sunshine Law applies to any meeting of two or more members of the same board to discuss issues that will potentially come before the board for a vote. At the time of the meeting, Commissioner Valentino and Councilman Hall did not believe that the economic development plan being worked on by Gene Valentino would come before the PEDC for action.

The public records law violation is a non-criminal offense that is punishable by a fine up to $500. Commissioner Valentino will appear in court regarding the charge on August 27, 2009.

Source: NorthEscambia.com

Facebook upgraded its social search engine Monday. The new Facebook search will return better results for profile updates, shared links, pictures, personal videos, as well as posted notes.

Facebook beta tested their new social search engine with a selected group of users for about a month and decided to launch the new search upgrade based on the positive results from the testing.

Facebook users can now search the last 30 days of news feeds for status updates, pictures, web links, videos and notes shared by their network of friends and the Facebook pages of which they are a fan.

People who opt to make their Facebook content public will have their status updates searchable by the entire Facebook community, not just friends.

Facebook users can hide their content from the new social search by changing their profile’s privacy settings.

Source: PC Magazine

The following state public records searches have been updated on the Skipease site and can be accessed at Public Records:

• Alabama Public Records
• Alaska Public Records
• Arizona Public Records
• Arkansas Public Records
• California Public Records
• Colorado Public Records
• Connecticut Public Records
• DC – Washington DC Public Records
• Delaware Public Records
• Florida Public Records
• Georgia Public Records
• Hawaii Public Records
• Idaho Public Records
• Illinois Public Records
• Indiana Public Records
• Iowa Public Records
• Kansas Public Records
• Kentucky Public Records
• Louisiana Public Records
• Maine Public Records
• Maryland Public Records
• Massachusetts Public Records
• Michigan Public Records
• Minnesota Public Records
• Mississippi Public Records
• Missouri Public Records
• Montana Public Records
• Nebraska Public Records
• Nevada Public Records
• New Hampshire Public Records
• New Jersey Public Records
• New Mexico Public Records
• New York Public Records
• North Carolina Public Records
• North Dakota Public Records
• Ohio Public Records
• Oklahoma Public Records
• Oregon Public Records
• Pennsylvania Public Records
• Rhode Island Public Records
• South Carolina Public Records
• South Dakota Public Records
• Tennessee Public Records
• Texas Public Records
• Utah Public Records
• Vermont Public Records
• Virginia Public Records
• Washington Public Records
• West Virginia Public Records
• Wisconsin Public Records
• Wyoming Public Records

Google, in response to the increasing competition to its search engine dominance from Microsoft Bing and other search engines, is raising the stakes with their work on a new web search technology that will speed up the indexing of search results.

Some web developers have been invited by Google search to test a new search engine and give their input. The graphical layout of the new search engine hasn’t changed, but the underlying search technology is getting upgraded. Google engineers hope the new search technology will index new content faster and reduce delay between the time new web content is published and the time it appears in a Google search engine results.

According to a Google spokesperson: “”Google is always working on new technologies to improve the quality of our search services. We hope this new system will improve search in the areas of speed, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.”

Google’s new search engine technology has been dubbed “Caffeine”.

Google is also improving the freshness of its search results by including real-time results and more current news, along with updates from social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Source: UK Telegraph

Our inmate search and National Sex Offender Registry page has been updated.

We just updated the prison inmate search page with new links to the Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate search; National Sex Offender Registry Database as well as US state prison inmate search sites and state departments of corrections.

State prison inmate search updates and department of corrections sites include:

Alabama prison inmate search.
Alaska prison inmate info.
Arizona prison inmate lookup.
Arkansas prison inmate locator.
California prison inmate info.
Colorado prison inmate finder.
Connecticut prison inmate search.
Delaware prison inmate records.
District of Columbia prison inmate look up.
Florida prison inmate locator.
Georgia prison inmate finder.
Hawaii prison inmate search.
Idaho prison inmate search.
Illinois prison inmate info.
Indiana prison inmate records.
Iowa prison inmate lookup.
Kansas prison inmate lookup.
Kentucky prison inmate locator.
Louisiana prison inmate locator.
Maine prison inmate info finder.
Maryland prison inmate search lookup.
Massachusetts prison inmate locator search.
Michigan prison inmate finder search.
Minnesota prison inmate look up search.
Mississippi prison inmate search site.
Missouri prison inmate search info.
Montana prison inmate search.
Nebraska prison inmate search locator.
Nevada prison inmate record search.
New Hampshire prison inmate search.
New Jersey prison inmate record search.
New Mexico prison inmate finder.
New York prison inmate search and locator.
North Carolina prison inmate search info.
North Dakota prison inmate search and finder.
Ohio prison inmate search.
Oklahoma prison inmate search.
Oregon prison inmate locator.
Pennsylvania prison inmate locator.
Rhode Island prison inmate lookup.
South Carolina prison inmate search.
South Dakota prison inmate lookup.
Tennessee prison inmate search locator.
Texas prison inmate records search.
Utah prison inmate search and lookup.
Vermont prison inmate search.
Virginia prison inmate search.
Washington prison inmate locator.
West Virginia prison inmate search.
Wisconsin prison inmate search.
Wyoming prison inmate search and offender lookup.

You can visit the updated prison inmate search directory at Inmate Search.

In the past 24 hours Facebook started allowing people to claim custom URLs, using their real names, for their personal Facebook profiles.

This will make searching and finding people on the Facebook social network easier, especially when searching for a person whose Facebook profile has been indexed by a search engine like Google.

In the first three minutes, about 200,000 people claimed their usernames. After fifteen minutes, Facebook users had chosen half a million custom URLs. After one hour, over 1 million people on Facebook had claimed usernames.

From the numbers you can see that this URL service has been very popular with Facebook users and should make people searches online that much easier for people who are trying to find old friends, coworkers and family.

Source: Mashable.com

According to a recent CNN article, people who search online for phrases like “song lyrics” or “free” are engaging in risky search engine behavior. Along with “free music downloads”, these search terms put 20 percent of search engine users in danger of landing on sites that push malicious software, known as “malware.”

A research report by antivirus software company McAfee has found the most dangerous search engine terms that can land people on pages with a high likelihood of virus and malware attacks.

The McAfee study looked at 2,600 popular keywords used on the Google, Yahoo, Live, AOL and Ask search engines. The study then analyzed approximately 413,000 Web pages that rank for those search terms.

Categories that had the highest risk of contaminating your PC with viruses and malware are: screen savers, free games, work from home, Olympics, videos, celebrities, music and news.

The riskiest phrases were: word unscrambler, lyrics, myspace, free music downloads, phelps, game cheats, printable fill-in puzzles, free ringtones and solitaire.

The study also showed how cyber criminals are increasing in sophistication and how antivirus software often lags behind the latest developments by cyber criminals.

Despite the growing virus and malware risks, McAfee CEO David DeWalt doesn’t believe there will be a “cyber Armageddon” that will cause worldwide destruction of servers, computers and web infrastructure.

However, he did say that “In the past year, we’ve seen a pretty dramatic shift in what we call malware.”

DeWalt further noted that: “It went from a hacker in a basement, to organized cybercrime to now, literally, terrorism and other forms of organized geopolitical attacks.”

Source: CNN.com

A recent decision by Facebook could make online people searches easier than ever.

Facebook announced that, as of this Saturday, they will start publishing URLs ( web addresses ) for user’s profiles, using people’s real names.

These new search engine friendly URLs will make finding past friends and family on Facebook through normal search engine searches easier than ever, further shrinking the degrees of separation in our virtual online world.

Kudos to Facebook for this decision.

Source: Facebook.com

Twitter is a goldmine of two things: people and the topics they are currently talking about.

There are numerous services out there that help you mine the Twitter database to find out information on the trending topics on Twitter as well as the people who are tweeting about them, here are a few:

Hashtags.org –
this site posts real-time information about Twitter’s hot topics (#hashtags).

Back Tweets -
a search service that finds out how many links to a web site have been posted on Twitter.

Retweetability Index -
a site that measures and ranks Twitter users based on the influence of their tweets.

Twitter Search –
Twitter’s own search engine function for searching people and topics on Twitter.

Tweet Effect –
allows Twitter users to find out which Twitter updates made people follow or leave them.

Tweet Scan –
a keyword search engine and popularity cloud of topics on Twitter.

Tweet Stats –
people can graph their Twitter stats with this service.

Tweet Volume –
search for keyword or phrase volume on Twitter.

Twinfluence –
lets people calculate the indirect influence of themselves and their followers on Twitter.

Twist –
a search and statistical tool that allows people to find the trends on Twitter.

Twitalyzer –
is a Twitter tool that measures the activity of a given Twitter user and reports on their influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other key success measures on Twitter.

Twitter Sheep -
a Twitter application that allows people to form a tag cloud based on the biographical information of their followers.

Twitter Friends –
Twitter friends lets you find out about the hidden network of Twitter contacts that are relevant to you; visualize the Twitter network of relevant contacts and their contacts and see which of your Twitter contacts are online at the moment.

Twitturly.com –
a real-time report of the top links posted on Twitter.

Source: KD Nuggets Data Mining Resources

The Classmates.com people search is typically used by a person to reunite with former classmates that they have lost contact with, but it has recently reunited a brother and sister that had been separated for over 40 years.

Mobile, Alabama pastor Joseph Lett ( age 48 ) used the Classmates people search to find his long-lost sister that he had been told about by his mother, when he was only 10 years old. The only information he had for his search was his sister’s first name “Patricia”.

It just so happens that Patricia had been living 2,000 miles away in Sacramento, California, raising a family with six grown children. Patricia had always wondered about the life that she never had with her family.

Patricia had been given up at birth and never knew her biological family. She spent her life with a couple of foster mothers until adulthood.

About a month ago, Patricia updated her social network profiles on Match.com and Myspace. She added current pictures and wrote about her childhood spent with foster parents.

At the same time, Joseph began searching on Classmates.com for his long-lost sister.

Joseph says, “I went online and I typed in Patricia Lett under the search and her picture showed up. The picture spoke a thousand words.”

He instantly recognized the features of his mother in Patricia’s face.

Joseph then sent an e-mail to Patricia’s Classmates.com e-mail address, but she did not respond. He then tried searching for her on Myspace, where he made contact with her.

The two eventually talked on the phone, where they confirmed that Joseph’s mother Lilly Bell Lett was the mother listed on Patricia’s birth certificate.

Another successful family reunion thanks to the power of web searching and social networks.

Source: ABC News