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A dozen sites
I'm diggin'

1. Check this cool weather site by the Las Vegas Sun. Make sure you see the top of the page forecast grahics.

2. Stay on top of Gustav with this site that includes radar, satellite, tracking maps, warnings and more.

3. The coolest storm tracking site I have seen in a while.

4. Vloggerheads fights back against YouTube chaos.

5. YouTomb is where videos go after they're booted off YouTube.

6. The evolution of voting in America is shown by interactive mapping.

7. The Las Vegas Sun has a crew driving to the Democratic National Convention and is filing multimedia stories along the way.

8. I have never seen anything like this amazing "Swan Lake" performance. [Flash]

9. The Livescribe Pulse Smartpen links written notes with audio. Cool for journalists and students.

10. An educator friend of mine in Lebanon reports that citizen- generated news is all the rage in Arab countries.

11. Here are photos of folks learning Soundslides in Poynter's recent seminar "Multimedia for College Educators." We'll offer this twice in 2009, in February and July.

12. This is my current home page.

All of my Diggin' sites are saved on Poynter's del.icio.us page.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends on the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. We will correct errors and inaccuracies when we become aware of them.

Criminal Record Hits New High

It is a stunning, record-high number: 7.2 million Americans were under supervision in the nation's criminal justice system in 2006, a recently released report shows. The resulting cost to U.S. taxpayers is about $45 billion, The Washington Post reports.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics offers information about prison inmates at midyear 2007 and about jail inmates at midyear 2007.

Here are some excerpted highlights:

On June 29, 2007, 62 percent of inmates held in local jails were awaiting court action or had not been convicted on their current charge, up from 56 percent in 2000. The largest jail jurisdictions -- 173 with an average daily population of 1,000 or more inmates -- accounted for 52% (402,300) of the jail population at midyear 2007.

During the 12 months that ended June 2007, local jail officials added slightly more beds (15,502) than inmates (14,571). Local jails operated at about 96 percent of their rated capacity at midyear 2007.

Based on jail jurisdictions that reported data, non-U.S. citizens accounted for nearly 8 percent of the jail population at midyear 2007, up from 7 percent in 2006 and 5.4 percent in 1999.

Black males comprised 35.5 percent of all inmates held in custody in the nation�s prison and jails at midyear 2007. About 4.6 percent of all black males in the general population were in prison or jail, compared to 1.7 percent of Hispanic males and 0.7 percent of white males.

It is not just the sheer number of people in jail or prison, or on parole or probation, that is so shocking. Earlier this year, The Pew Center on the States says more than one in every 100 American adults is behind bars.

Posted by Al Tompkins 4:32 PM June 17, 2008

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