The good folks at the Internet Archive have put together a brilliant, hugely valuable service—a searchable video archive of 350,000 news programs from the past three years from national broadcasts, using closed captioning transcripts as the search data. These sort of indices exist (it’s how The Daily Show does such great research), but access to them is via expensive commercial services. Making the same data available for free is going to let people do some really interesting work atop it. My cousin (well, ninth cousin twice removed…seriously) Tracy Jaquith did a lot of the work to make this happen, and I can see that it’s come a long way since I saw it under development almost a year ago. →