INTERNET LEGAL RESEARCH WEEKLY
January 20, 2002
Tom
Mighell
Welcome to Issue #56 of the Internet Legal Research Weekly, a newsletter that delivers relevant and timely legal research information, and other fun stuff, to your inbox every Sunday. If you like what you read, please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage him or her to do the same! To subscribe, all you have to do is send an e-mail to ilrw-subscribe@topica.com. It’s free!
And away we go…..
Update -- Playing Favorites
In the very first issue of this newsletter back in October 2000, I discussed online bookmark managers. This week I'm feeling nostalgic, so I thought I'd revisit the topic, to let you know what's new with this very useful Internet research tool.
If you're like me, your Favorites folder is likely to be pretty big. But are the bookmarks in your home Favorites folder the same as those on your work PC? I usually find myself struggling to remember the URL of a website I put on my home PC the night before, only to discover I needed it at work the next day. Bookmark managers to the rescue! These websites can help you maintain one simple set of Favorites, and access them from any computer whenever you need them.
Online bookmark managers are pretty simple to use. Just go to one of these sites, enter the name of the site you want to save, assign it to a folder, and you're done. Figuring out which bookmark manager is best for you is the hard part; there are literally dozens of bookmark managers from which to choose. But I did find a noticeable difference from my review in 2000 – while there are certainly plenty bookmark manager sites for you to use, there don’t seem to be as many “quality” products out there as before. Some of the sites I reviewed last time have become more commercialized, or even left the bookmark management business entirely for more profitable ventures. Today I’ll only mention a few of the sites I believe are worth an extra look.
We’ll start, as we did in October 2000, with Backflip. In September of 2001 Backflip’s parent company realigned and a group of former Backflip employees elected to buy and run the website themselves. The service does not seem to have suffered for the change. Once you create an account, you can upload all of the sites in your Favorites folder – Backflip will create an identical copy of your Favorites on your personal Backflip page. Next, add the “Backflip It!” button to your browser toolbar – it’s easily done by simply dragging it from the web page onto your toolbar. When you’re at a site you want to add to your Backflip online folder, just click the Backflip It! button and it’s done. Another nifty feature of Backflip is the Daily Routine. If you have a number of sites you visit every day – news, weather, sports, etc. – just add them to your daily routine, and Backflip will take you from site to site with just a click of a button.
MyBookmarks is a very simple and easy to use site. The theory is similar to Backflip; you can import your whole list of Favorites so they will always reside on the Internet. However, MyBookmarks does not have Backflip’s ability to add a site to your online folder with a click of a button. When you find a site you like, you have to go back to MyBookmarks and add the site manually. A tad inconvenient, but MyBookmarks is still worthy of a test drive.
There seem to be more a few more software bookmark managers out now than when I first reviewed them in 2000. These sites require you to download a small program to store your bookmarks, but you’ll still be able to access your favorites on any computer after you’re done. First up is Bookmark Sync. Once you download the program and register, Bookmark Sync uploads all of your favorites to its website, and installs an icon in your system tray. Then, every time you change one of your Favorites, Bookmark Sync automatically makes the changes to your online collection. The only question I have is whether this program costs money to use – I found a message that I haven’t paid my $50 license fee yet, but I also didn’t see anything that would prevent me from using the service without paying for it. Strange. Keep in mind that if you want to be able to upload sites from any computer, you’ll have to install BookmarkSync software on every computer you use (you can still view sites from any computer without the software installed).
PowerMarks will charge you to store bookmarks -- $24.95, to be exact. You can try the program for 30 days before buying, if you like. The program’s interface is pretty cool. You can view a complete list of your bookmarks with an indication of how many times you have visited that site as well as whether the site has changed since the last time you were there. There is also a great Dictionary feature that is automatically populated with keywords from your websites. If you have a particularly large list of sites, you can use this to search your bookmarks. To place your Favorites online, you’ll have to create a separate (but free) NetSync account, and upload them there. One big downside to NetSync is that you won’t be able to view your Favorites from any computer; all NetSync does is make sure that your bookmarks are synchronized with any computer that you use. This is very handy if you want to keep track of a large number of bookmarks on several computers, but completely useless if you’re just looking for a way to view your home Favorites on any other computer.
Finally, I’ll mention some other sites that looked cool but I didn’t have time to check out. I should mention that Clickmarks, a site I wrote about last time, no longer exists in its current form; the site now caters to enterprise customers, apparently as Backflip’s parent company decided to do. But there are plenty of others to take its place, such as Vizimarks, Bookmark Commando, KeeperLink, BookMarkTracker, MURL, and BestLinx.
Attorney Dennis Kennedy wrote a great article on the subject of bookmark managers about a year ago for LLRX. There are also several pages that list all of the currently available bookmark managers on the Internet, including this one and a page from the Google Directory.
Are you using a bookmark manager? Do you really like one that I didn’t mention in this issue? Drop me an e-mail and let me know what you think about this Internet utility.
Help Desk
Weekly Computer Maintenance – Step #2:
This week I’ll continue discussing the five things you should do every week to keep your computer up to date and in tip-top condition. This week’s tip is Update Your Software Regularly – if you don’t do this already, you should definitely update your software on a regular basis. Okay, maybe not every week, but at least once a month, to make sure you’re running the latest versions of the software installed on your computer. Many software manufacturers release updates to correct bugs or problems in previous versions, or to introduce new features. Updating your Windows programs is especially important, to protect your computer from possible attack by hackers.
I use two programs on a regular basis to update my software. The first is Windows Update. If you have Windows 98 or above, you already have it installed on your computer. It’s either part of your Start menu, or part of your Tools menu in Internet Explorer. Just follow the instructions and Microsoft will let you know which software updates you should install and which are optional.
For your other software, I recommend a free product called CatchUp. Just download the small program and it scans your computer for all of your installed software, then goes out on the Internet and finds out if there are updates to your programs. This is one cool utility.
Do you have a question about searching the Internet or your computer in general? Drop me an e-mail– I’ll post your question (don’t worry, I won’t use your real name) and try to get an answer for you!
Legally Relevant – Sites on the Internet
Securities Mosaic ($$)
This is a relatively new site for professionals who work with federal securities regulations and disclosure documents. There’s a terrific review of this site on LLRX, and I couldn’t go into nearly as much detail as T.R. Halvorson and Kathy Biehl have. So just a brief summary; Securities Mosaic offers the most current federal securities laws and regulations (including full-text search), searchable databases of SEC releases and regulatory changes, real-time SEC filings from EDGAR, securities regulation alerts, and a glossary of regulatory terms and definitions. The individual subscription rate is $300/year, but is much lower for larger groups of users.Treatment Advocacy Center Homepage
The goal of the Treatment Advocacy Center Homepage is the elimination of legal and clinical barriers to treatment of severe mental illness. There are some great resources on this site – briefing papers on mental illness, a list of mental health law statutes by state, news articles, fact sheets, medical resources, and more. A useful site for those dealing with mental health law issues.Global White Pages
This site claims to have the most comprehensive way to trace telephone numbers for private persons around the world. You can search by selecting an area of the world, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia, Australia/Pacific, Middle East, Caribbean,
and Africa. What this site really does is take you to other people finder sites for that particular country. For example, you can only search AnyWho to find United States numbers. The other drawback is many of the white pages sites are in the language of the country or area you’re searching. Still, this is a good all-in-one place to find worldwide white pages.Asbestos Litigation Library ($$)
This is part of the BriefSmart website, which has copies of depositions, briefs, and other documents relating to asbestos litigation nationwide. Many documents on this site are not going to be helpful to you – there are too many individual Plaintiff depositions that may not be relevant at all to your research. However, there do appear to be some useful memos and other documents that might help you in asbestos litigation. It all comes at a cost, however; from $7.00 to $80.00, depending on the type and size of document.Division of Bacterial and Mycotic Disease Information
The Centers for Disease Control have put together an alphabetical list of bacterial and mycotic (that means any disease caused by a fungus) diseases for your reading pleasure. Most of the conditions and diseases mentioned provide quite extensive general information, technical data with symptoms and other facts, links to other websites that might discuss the disease or condition, information about surveillance, and other sources or articles on the subject.Now for some fun and useful stuff:
I only have one fun page today – but it’s pretty funny. See why you should never let a child play with a color marker.
Last but not least, a useful site to go along with the article on bookmark managers. GoToMyPC is a site that allows you to control you computer at home or at work from any other computer in the world. It’s just $9.95 a month for individual use.
Well, that’s it for Issue #56– I hope you liked it! If you did, pass this along to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage him or her to subscribe. Also, feel free to drop me an e-mail any time if you have questions, or if you have websites or other topics you want included in a future issue.
Tom Mighell
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