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Welcome to Issue #156 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 visit Inter Alia and fill out the subscription form -- it's free!

Brush up your Google
Think you know everything there is to know about Google? If you don't (or even if you think you do), pick up a copy of How to Do Everything With Google. Before you buy it, check out Chris Sherman's synopsis of the book.

Doctors and blogs
They are doing some cool things over at Medlogs, which is aggregating the weblogs of physicians, nurses, patients, and others. You'll also find from the Health Biz, Medical News, and Resident/ Student weblogs. What a great idea, putting all of these in one place.

The new Science.gov
Okay, maybe it's not new (and this story is a little old), but Version 2.0 of Science.gov has debuted, with new relevance ranking technology that helps users "get to the best documents quickly."

A Directory for Doing, not Searching
Gimpsy is a different type of directory -- all of the categories are verbs -- Create, Enroll, Hire, Sell, etc. The site allows you to quickly get to the things you want to do, hopefully saving valuable time. It's still a work in progress; some of the categories don't have any entries, but you are welcome to suggest sites you think would be helpful. SearchDay has more from the creator of Gimpsy.

Your own personal Web archive
Gary Price reports on Seruku, a toolbar-based application that helps you find and access all web pages that have appeared in your browser. Check out the free 45-day trial; it's $24.95 to keep if you like it. What's nice about a product like this is that it saves Web pages automatically, without you having to do a thing, unlike products like Surf Saver or Furl.

Search for campaign audio and video
CampaignSearch uses a new technology called StreamSage, which allows users to search video and audio files from C-Span, NPR, PBS, and other sites on the presidential campaign. A very cool election-related site.

Personalize your news search
Findory has an interesting approach to reading the news. When you click on a news story there, Findory remembers your interests, and the next time you come back it will attempt to personalize the news to your tastes. Read the review from SearchDay, and give it a try yourself.

Helpful sites for the legal searcher
Bob Ambrogi explores several useful research sites in Be a Master Web Searcher. He spends some time talking about sites we have discussed here before: Soople, an easy-to-use interface for Google searches, and Queryster, a meta-search tool that allows you to compare searches across several search engines. Give these (and the other) sites a spin.

Blawgs of the Month
I've been gone awhile, and the law-related weblogs just piled up! Here are a few worth mentioning: The Florida Asset Protection Blog is brought to you by attorney Jonathan Alper, wherein he discusses asset protection law and planning in the Sunshine State. The law firm of Ryan, Jamieson, Morris, Ryan & Smith hosts the Michigan Comp Law weblog, featuring current updates and information on workers compensation law in Michigan. Intellectual Property Updates is brought to you courtesy of William F. Heinze. And Kevin Coluccio, a lawyer in Seattle, is working on the Asbestos Law Blog, with recent news on asbestos and mesothelioma.

Improving your online search experience

According to a new study from Find/SVP, 84% of business executives feel that Web searches take longer than they should due to poor results, and estimate that loss of productive time using search engines to conduct online research cost businesses $31 billion last year.

Wow. Nothing like throwing out a number like that to put the problem with online search in perspective, huh?

Fortunately, there are ways to sort through the mess, and save you or your law firm several dollars off that 31 billion. One of the best I have found is LegalRA, your legal "research assistant for Internet information." The folks at LegalRA have put together a terrific set of search and storage tools, and you should definitely check them out.

Here's the theory: searching the Internet is only half your problem. Once you have the results, how do you organize them so they are easy to use? Enter LegalRA. Over the next few weeks, I'll be introducing features of the site I think legal researchers will find incredibly useful.

In the interests of full disclosure, you'll see on the LegalRA home page that I'm a member of the site's Advisory Board. I have been helping out with the design and concept of the site, because I think a tool like this is necessary for lawyers and other legal professionals to get a grip on the chaos presented by Internet research. Give it a try!

Help Desk

Here's another tip for Outlook users: getting ready to head to a friend's (or client, or witness, etc.) house, and can't remember how to get there? Just open that person's contact in Outlook, and select Actions, then Display Map of Address. You'll be taken to Microsoft's MapPoint website, where you can see a map to the address, along with an option to get directions.

Do you have a question about searching the Internet or your computer in general? Drop me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net – I’ll post your question (don’t worry, I won’t use your real name) and try to get an answer for you!

National Organization for Rare Disorders
NORD is a non-profit agency that has been working toward the prevention, treatment, and cure of rare diseases, since 1983. A rare disease is defined as one that affects less than 200,000 people, and there are more than 6,000 rare disorders. If you know the name of a disease, just type it in and you'll be taken directly to a report. Otherwise, you can browse the Index of Rare Diseases, or read about more than 1,100 disorders in the Rare Disease Database. Full Reports cost $7.50. You can also find contact information for organizations that support or help with certain disorders.

Picturing Justice
This is a different type of journal. It's devoted entirely to law and popular culture. The site is set up a little like a weblog, with the home page devoted to the most recent articles and movie reviews. You can also browse by subject -- Silver Screen, Small Screen, and News and Views. A fun approach to the law.

Law for Laymen
The URL above will take you to the website of Rinke Noonan, a St. Cloud, Minnesota law firm. Click on the "Law For Laymen" link either at the top or side menus, and you'll be taken to the firm's attempt to provide an explanation of American law. There are a number of categories, from Administrative Law to Zoning; just click on a folder and you'll see a number of pages with basic information on each subject.

FirstFind
A project of the Westchester, NY library system, FirstFind is, quite simply, a library of useful information on the Internet. The topics you can browse include Legal Issues, Education, Family, Government, Housing, Immigration, and others. Each link will take you to a set of other links that will help you get the answers you need. Not a ton of information, but helpful nonetheless.

Litigation Stock Report ($$)
A publication of the Thomson Corporation, the goal of LSR is to cover substantive and procedural matters in all state and federal non-bankruptcy courts where at least one party is a publicly-traded U.S. company. You can check out brief summaries of the cases currently being followed, or become a subscriber to receive full reports. It ain't cheap, however; it costs $2,500/year to follow just one case.

Although Microsoft has offered newsgroups for its products for some time, this appears to be a new (or revamped) offering: Microsoft Discussion Groups. Looks like a nifty way to get help on Microsoft Office products.

If you have ever pressed Ctrl-Alt-Delete and checked out the "Processes" that are running on your computer at the present moment, you may be baffled by the names you see. Some of them are easy to decipher: iexplore (Internet Explorer), AcroRd32.exe (Acrobat Reader), etc. But what about the others? What do those programs do, and why are they on my computer? Here's a page that can help: What the heck is that file? Here you'll find links to several sites that can help you figure it all out.

Well, that’s it for Issue #156 – 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.

Subscription Information: If you want to keep on receiving issues of the Internet Legal Research Weekly, send me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net, or visit Inter Alia and sign up there! If you no longer want to receive the newsletter, just click on the link at the bottom of this newsletter. Or, send me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net and I'll remove you from the list.

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Questions? New websites? Just want to talk? Send me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net.