March 18, 2007

Welcome to Issue #262 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!

I'll be off next week, attending TECHSHOW in Chicago. If you're in the Chicago area (or even if you're not), why not drop in? TECHSHOW offers 3 days of terrific educational programming on legal technology. For you solo/small firm lawyers out there, we have Solo & Small Firm Day on Friday, with two tracks of sessions just for you, at reduced rates! And for those who would rather get something for nothing, just pick up a free EXPO pass to visit more than 100 legal technology vendors. If you're interested in attending, just contact me, or visit wwww.techshow.com. See you in 2 weeks!

Cool Tool of the Week
I've been using CoolIris for a couple of months now, and I really like how it makes my Web browsing more efficient. CoolIris is an add-on that works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Flock -- it allows you to preview the page for most any link on the page you're currently viewing. When you hover your mouse over a link, a blue dot appears at the end of it -- move your mouse to the dot, and a mini-browser will pop up with a preview of the site attached to the link. You can then open that link in a new window or tab, e-mail the link, or stick the frame so it stays open. Best of all, it's free.

Keeping up with Track Changes
Dennis Kennedy and I have written another Strongest Links column over at Law Practice Today -- this one is called Staying On Track with Track Changes. We decided to talk about a something that lawyers use all the time -- the Track Changes feature in Word and other Microsoft Office products.

Blawgs of the Week
Here are a few of the great law-related weblogs I featured this week on Inter Alia:

Wireless use is certainly on the rise in the legal profession -- lawyers are using it more often both at work and at home. If you set up your wireless connection yourself, your first step should always, *always* be to set up WPA encryption. Most wireless routers come with two types of encryption -- WEP, which is fairly easy to break, and WPA, which is significantly stronger. Depending on your router, you may get the options to use TKIP (which corresponds to WPA) or AES (more like the newer WPA2).

To turn on this security, visit the wireless security section of your router's control page (you'll need your router's instruction booklet to figure out how to get there). After you select WPA encryption, you'll need to set a WPA key -- the longer the key the better, and the more you can avoid real words, the better. Even something like "mammajammalamma313" is plenty long, hard to bust, but easy to remember.

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!

Medstory
Medstory is a new search engine, still in beta, that offers "Intelligent Search for Health & Medicine." The features are really interesting -- I did a search on "melanoma," and at the top of your results you'll find "Information that Matters" -- specific categories of information regarding melanoma, including Drugs and Substances, Conditions, Procedures, In Clinical Studies, Complementary Medicine, Personal Health, and People. Each of these categories has five related topics, and you can click on any of these to narrow your search to that topic, or include that term in your original search query. Beneath these categories are the Web results -- but even here you can narrow your results to specific types of information -- news, audio/video, clinical trials, or research articles. You can even subscribe to an RSS feed for each search.

Child Welfare Information Gateway
This site is a combination of the former National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect Information and National Adoption Information Clearinghouse sites, and their new mission is to provide access to information and resources to help protect children and strengthen families. All of the data from those sites are still here plus more -- links to information on supporting and preserving families, out-of-home care, achieving and maintaining permanency, and more. You can also search the library, for state statutes, statistics, and the Children's Bureau Express Online Digest. Finally, there are a number of free subscriptions to receive e-mail alerts of new child welfare publications.

Congress.org
Here's another one of those sites that attempts to encourage greater participation in the political process by providing information about your governmental officials, and making it easier to communicate with them. Through this site, you are able to identify and contact elected leaders in Congress, the White House, and state legislatures, post letters online and read letters from other users, enlist others on issues that are important to you, receive e-alerts of your representatives' congressional votes, and view and take action on particular issues.

StolenID Search
At first glance, the StolenID Search looks like something no sane person would want to try: the site invites you to enter your Social Security or Credit Card number, to determine whether either has been compromised. Why in the heck would I want to give up such important information? But read the site's FAQs and other information carefully, and you'll see that this is probably pretty safe -- even the URL demonstrates that you're on a secure site. Plus, it's backed by some pretty heavy-hitters in the industry: TrustedID, Verisign, and ScanAlert. Finally, as the site says, just the credit card or social security digits, without any additional identifying information (name, address, expiration date, security number, etc.), are pretty much useless to the identity thief. If you can get past your qualms about security, StolenID Search looks to be a great way to keep tabs on your personal information.

Advanced Interviewing Concepts
Here's an interesting site -- it's published by Mark McClish, who has been involved in federal law enforcement for over 20 years, including teaching interviewing techniques to federal law enforcement officials. He's providing some interesting information on analyzing statements for truthfulness, including tips for looking at types of language. He provides concrete examples, analysis of some famous cases, and he's also providing training through software or online classes. I have no idea whether the stuff he's talking about is valid, but it sure is interesting.

For the diversions area of the newsletter this week, I again have nothing useful for you -- just time-wasting games. Enjoy:

Don't let the Blots down! In Scribble, you use the power of the pen to help small creatures navigate a treacherous landscape.

In Orbit, you try to direct a comet around a series of planets, without hitting any of them -- the gravity fields can make that hard!

Well, that’s it for Issue #262 – 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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