INTERNET LEGAL
RESEARCH WEEKLY
October 7, 2007
Tom
Mighell
Welcome to Issue #282 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!
News Update -- from the Inter Alia Weblog
No news this week -- my free time is STILL taken up writing the draft of our book! Instead, let's talk about the:
Blawgs of the Week
Here are a few of the great law-related weblogs featured on Inter Alia this past week:
- John Mesirow of Mesirow & Stravitz has a weblog with an interesting look. The Washington, D.C. lawyer authors Legal Juice, "freshly squeezed for your daily enjoyment." He's writing about odd, unusual, and interesting legal stories, with some odd cases thrown in too.
- The Injury Law Report is brought to you by the firm of Garrow & Evans in Washington, D.C. Among other things, they are discussing federal torts, consumer injuries, food contamination, injuries to children, medical errors, whistleblower claims, and more.
Help Desk
This week, a tip for you Outlook users out there. When you reply to an email, by default Outlook formats the text in blue. If you want to reply in black or any other color instead, just click Tools, then Options, and click the Mail Format tab. Click the Stationery and Fonts button, and then under When replying and forwarding.... (Outlook 2003) or Replying or Forwarding Messages (Outlook 2007) click Font. Then you can change the font to any color you want.
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!
Legally Relevant – Sites on the Internet
National Weather Service -- RSS Feeds
Regular readers will know that I'm a big fan of RSS, and the amazing power it has to deliver information to people without them having to do a lot of work to get it. These feeds from the National Weather Service are no exception -- it offers RSS feeds for about 1,800 locations across the United States. Just select a state, and you'll get a listing of the different observation locations within that state with an RSS or XML feed. Subscribe to that feed in your favorite newsreader, and you'll receive regular updates of official weather observations in that area.Parliament of Australia
This is a really nice website. It's very easy to navigate, and find information from Australia's legislative body. You can get transcripts of parliamentary debate, listings of members of parliaments and the committees and departments they serve in or on. Of course Bills and Publications are also available for review, as are separate links to the House of Representatives and Senate. And the Australian Parliament definitely demonstrates it understands its Internet audience -- it's offering podcasts and live audio broadcasts of its proceedings, and there are no less than thirteen RSS feeds providing news updates from the House, Senate, and Parliamentary Library.Pew Institute for Ocean Science
This organization is "dedicated to conducting, sponsoring, disseminating, and promoting world-class scientific activity aimed at protecting the world's oceans and the species that inhabit them." The Institute has a number of projects going on, for which images, some audio and video, and publications are available. You can view abstracts for many of the publications authored by Institute members, and there's even a newsletter on marine conservation called SEASPAN (get it?).See Also
The Texas Law Review at my alma mater has created this blog-like site that serves as an online companion to its print publication. It presents responses and critiques to recently published articles in the journal. The site hasn't been updated since April, but that's probably because they don't have an issue out yet this school year. What a great idea to have an online supplement to a print publication.Society of Toxicology
The mission of SOT is to advance health through understanding of toxicology. Again, although many of the resources on this site are designed to benefit Society members, there are still some good links here for the researcher. There's page of Toxicology Specialists, which could serve as a resource for possible expert witnesses. They've also collected a really great selection of websites on toxicology issues, both under Sites of Interest and in the Toxicology Resources Database.
Finally, some fun and useful sites to start off your week:
Expressivo is a cool text-to-voice reader program. For $29, you can listen to websites, emails, RSS feeds, articles, or even books -- it reads the text and creates and MP3 file of the content, which you can then take with you for later listening.
Check out Guess-the-Google -- you get a screen of images retrieved from Google Images, and you have 15-20 seconds to figure out what keywords delivered those search results. Leave it to a search nerd like me to give you a game on keywords.....
Well, that’s it for Issue #282 – 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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Questions? New websites? Just want to talk? Send me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net.