October 3, 2004

Welcome to Issue #166 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!

Track your favorite tunes
If you use the great NetNewsTracker service and you like music, you'll love TunesTracker, which searches the iTunes Music Store daily for your favorite artists, and notify you when new songs are available. You can have up to 50 searches running at one time, and it's all free.

A new look for Jeeves
Ask Jeeves has unveiled some new and interesting features this week. First is the ability to save specific search results to an online folder, which will hold 1,000 search listings (more if you register, for free). You can also organize, annotate, and share the sites you save. Gary Price has a lengthy review of all the new things going on over at Ask Jeeves.

Newsbot Bias
If Google News were a person, would he/she be a Republican? That's the question J.D. Lasica asks in Balancing Act: How News Portals Serve Up Political Stories. One of the issues seems to be that of depth vs. editorial selection, a point raised by Chris Sherman in Is Google News Biased? I agree; when your goal is the biggest scope of coverage, you have to sacrifice some amount of editorial control over the stories that are selected.

The next generation of Vivisimo
Where do they come up with these names? Clusty is a new metasearch tool from the folks at Vivisimo, and it looks a lot like its parental unit. In fact, it works a lot like Vivisimo, but has additional tabs that allow you to quickly change your search to news, images, shopping, encyclopedia, or even gossip. For more on Clusty, check out Pandia and New Company Starts Up a Challenge to Google.

Blawgs of the Day
Here are a few of the law-related weblogs I have come across the past two weeks: Andy Havens is a law firm marketing consultant, and he's writing about serious marketing for law firms and legal marketers over at Legal Marketing. New Jersey law firm Stark & Stark has debuted its second weblog (also designed by lexBlog), the New Jersey Law Blog. Susan Crawford is an Assistant Professor at Cardozo Law School teaching cyberlaw and intellectual property law, and she's publishing the appropriately-named Susan Crawford Blog. The U Law Blawg features a discussion of legal news affecting colleges and universities. It's published by Robert DeKoven, a professor at California Western School of Law.

Help Desk

The Start menu in Windows XP automatically keeps track of recently used programs, just above the All Programs button. Here's how to change the size of the list or clear its contents. Right-click on an empty space on the taskbar, and select Properties. Choose the Start Menu tab, and click the Customize button. Then click the Clear List button on the General tab, or change the number. In the Advanced tab, the Clear List button clears the list of recently opened documents.

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!

Stanford Securities Class Action Clearinghouse
The Clearinghouse is probably the single-best place to find information on class action securities litigation. There's an index of filings of securities issuers named in securities fraud lawsuits, as well as 7,000 complaints, briefs, filings, and other litigation-related materials. This site is chock full of great, relevant information -- give it a look.

Federal Bar Association
The online presence of the FBA is a simply-designed affair, with helpful links to members of the Association. But anyone can take advantage of the resources here, including a calendar of upcoming events, publications, a practice area directory, and a nice set of related federal links.

Illinois Criminal Justice RSS Feeds
This site is going to be helpful to you only if you have started using RSS feeds in your research (and you should be, by the way - ask me if you want to learn more). Here is a nifty page from the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, with RSS feeds in four areas: Recent News, Grants, Recent Publications, and Links. A valuable way to keep up with criminal justice information in Illinois.

USDA Economics, Statistics, and Market Information System
Here you will find nearly 300 reports and datasets from the economics agencies of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. You can search by keyword or by title, or browse by subject, which include Agricultural Baseline Projections, Field Crops, International Agriculture, Livestock, Dairy & Poultry, Rural Affairs, Trade Issues, and more. The reports are available in text, PDF, spreadsheet, and other formats.

American College of Trust and Estate Counsel
This is the public area of ACTEC, an international association of trust and estate lawyers. Non-members can find an ACTEC fellow, learn more about estate planning and administration, and take advantage of a nice set of Internet links on the topic.

If you still haven't made up your mind who to support in the upcoming presidential election, perhaps the Onion's 2004 Election Guide can help. At the very least, it will take your mind off the real election, if only for a while.

Want something a little different to carry your laptop? Try the 14" PowerPizza, a pizza box for your notebook.

If you're an eBay user AND a giver to non-profits, MissionFish may well interest you -- just sign up, tell them the name of the charity you want to support, and a percentage of the final value of what you sell on eBay will be donated to the non-profit.

Well, that’s it for Issue #166 – 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.

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