Someone is doing some really progressive work with the Economic Census at the U.S. Census Bureau. They continue to make solid improvements in their presentation of information to respondents as well as now for researchers and others in combing through the mounds of materials they produce. I am hopeful that they will continue this trend by making more of this data searchable in upcoming interfaces, but...
For now, I wanted to highlight that the main Survey of Business Owners website (part of the Economic Census) has been overhauled and is worth a look. While there are a lot of great reports here, two of the most helpful are towards the bottom of the page: Company Summary and Characteristics of Businesses. Many of the questions we get from reporters and local officials center on questions answered in these documents like how are minority-owned firms fairing? How are start-ups funded? (although I take some issue with this data because of its strong survivor and recall biases) and what are the receipts of businesses by race and gender of the business owner?
The second new feature of the Economic Census is the ability to sign-up for industry-specific nofications. NotifyMe is a pretty simple service to use and allows for a great deal of granularity in the industry classifications one subscribes to, but that's also probably my only critique of the service. The North American Industry Classication System (NAICS) is sufficiently complex even for researchers (let alone many entrepreneurs and the general public) that offering a web-based system which requires check boxes for each NAICS category is cumbersome. It might be nice in the future if they offered a means of searching the titles of these industries. This might also provide a means by which Census could look for emerging industries or how to improve their list as search data can provide a real insight into what users are looking for. Even with that criticism, I think this service will be useful for entrepreneurs who want real-time, really-specific information.