1. April Site of the Month: PriceWaterhouseCoopers EdgarScan

You're searching for data on a particular firm or industry. You want detailed up-to-date financials, sales, employment information, or to get some
idea of a firm's product line or corporate strategy, or to analyze its competitors.

There's a mountain of information buried in EDGAR, the Securities and Exchange Commission's database of financial reports filed by publicly traded corporations. But sifting through this mountain to find just what you want has been a real chore, until now.

The accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers has built a terrific software front end to the Edgar database that let's you easily search Edgar data, and, even better, generate your own custom reports for particular industries. Want to rank publicly traded US biotech firms by R&D spending? You can easily do it.

We're pleased to recommend Edgarscan as April's Site of the Month; it's a great example of how a smart interface can refine a ton of raw data into a few ounces of pure gold. Give it a try:
http://www.pricewaterhousecoopers.com/gx/eng/ins-sol/online-sol/edgarscan/index.html

2. New Links Added

We've recently added a number of new links to the site, including:

-Infant Health
Annie E. Casey Foundation and Child Trends. Indicators of the well-being of infants, for states and metro areas, with rankings. Annual report.
http://www.aecf.org/kidscount/rightstart2/docs/rightstart.htm

-Child & Youth Indicators
Child Trends. Quarterly on-line journal discussing developments regarding child and youth indicators.
http://www.childtrends.org/w_welcome.asp

-Child Welfare
Child Welfare League of America. State data on child welfare conditions and programs.
http://ndas.cwla.org/

-Extreme Weather
National Center for Atmospheric Research. Economic impacts of extreme weather phenomena, including hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and lightning, by state.
http://www.esig.ucar.edu/sourcebook/

-Climate Records
Weather.com. Local data regarding average local weather conditions, including average temperatures, record temperatures, rainfall, and sunrise and sunset times.
http://www.weather.com

-Environmental Data
National Council for Science and the Environment. Links to environmental data for states and areas, from multiple sources. See in particular, State of Environment Reports, with links to state- and community-specific reports.
http://www.cnie.org/neighborhood.htm

-Office Sprawl
The Brookings Institution. Analysis of the geography of commercial office space in 13 metro areas (October 2000).
http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/officesprawl/report.htm

-Urban Sprawl
Fannie Mae Foundation. Study measuring dimensions of sprawl in 13 metro areas.
http://www.fanniemaefoundation.org/programs/pdf/proc_fairgrowth_galster2.pdf

3. Infrastructure Rankings by State

A key factor in many economic development debates is the quality of a state's infrastructure. A new report, compiled by the American Society of Civil Engineers, provides a comprehensive dataset and rankings for state infrastructure in several areas, including airports, dams, drinking and
wastewater facilities, roads and bridges, schools and solid waste disposal facilities. You can search data by state or infrastructure category. Data
for each state include key statistics on infrastructure quality and comments elicited from a survey of local civil engineers. Detailed tables for each
infrastructure category summarize, for example, state-by-state estimates of needed spending for drinking water facilities. A good place to look to get some estimates of infrastructure needs.
http://www.asce.org/reportcard/index.cfm?reaction=states

4. EconData.Net Survey Results

Thanks to the hundreds of you who participated in the EconData.Net Survey. More than ten percent of our registered users responded. Here, as
promised, is a summary of what you had to say.

A majority of users use EconData.Net several times a month or more frequently. About two percent of our users are die hards, they visit EconData.Net every day.

You like us, you really like us (apologies to Sally Fields). Of those responding, 94 percent rated EconData.Net "good" or "excellent". You especially like getting monthly updates from our Stat-Scan newsletter--half of all respondents expressing an opinion thought it was excellent. Users count on EconData.Net to alert them to new sources of data as they become available.

EconData.Net users represent an extremely diverse array of data analysts in finance, real estate, education, government, marketing, and human services organizations. Our largest single group of users (nearly half) report they are involved in economic development. About one in six are in education or research.

About half of EconData.Net users work for government agencies and non-profit organizations, and slightly less than one-quarter in private
businesses. The remainder are in educational and other organizations.

A sampling of user comments:

The summaries and weblinks are perfect. Very helpful, a source of information that is fresh and new.
Just keep doing what you're doing!
I LOVE that you send those heads-up emails--I'd get busy and miss a lot of it otherwise.
You're doing a fantastic job.
I find both the web site and the newsletter to be extremely helpful.

We received a number of specific suggestions for improving the site, and we're sifting through them to see which we can implement. Look for changes in the months ahead.

5. Next Month: The New Top Ten

Based on the results of last month's survey, and our own careful review of the latest improvements, refinements and additions to socoieconomic data websites, we'll be announcing the EconData.Net Top Ten. Look for it in May.