Archives: May 2005
Research Site of the Day
An internal page at the U.S. Census Bureau is devoted to Foreign Trade Statistics, and they certainly have a quite a bit of statistics to offer. The main page features news headlines and links to new reports and other information, but the best stuff can be found behind the links at the top -- Reference, Regulations, and Statistics. You'll find codes, foreign trade guides, export forms, federal register notices, and of course statistics.
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Getting in the right Mindset
Yahoo! has introduced a new twist on its search services -- this one is called Mindset, and it's designed to help sort your results based upon whether you're looking for more commercial or informational-type sites. It does this by means of a slider, which re-sorts your search results as you move the slider from "shopping" to "researching." There's more on the new service here.
I tend to agree with Greg Linden on this -- I don't think the slider bar is particularly useful, and I just don't think most researchers will use it. I think it's also because I don't completely understand how it works. I prefer a site like Clusty to refine or better organize my search.
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Blawg of the Day
Day on Torts is a new lexBlog blog published by John Day, a personal injury lawyer in Nashville, Tennessee.
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Research Site of the Day
I'm sure I have mentioned Findory before -- it's a great new search engine for the news, and they are doing some interesting things there. The idea behind Findory's Personalization Technology is that the more links you click on, the more personalized Findory becomes for you. As you click on articles, they will appear as "Recent Sources" on the right-hand menu. Additionally, each article you click on will be saved in your reading history, for future reference. Perform a news or blog search and have the results sent to you in an RSS feed or by e-mail.
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Blawg of the Day
Cathy Kirkman is a lawyer at Wilson Sonsini, and she has a great new lexBlog blog, the Silicon Valley Media Law Blog.
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Research Site of the Day
SquareTrade is an alternative dispute resolution site of another flavor -- it's devoted to resolving disputes between online sellers and purchasers, primarily of eBay and several other sites. If you feel that you have gotten the raw end of a deal, just sign up here. The mediation process takes place entirely online, and the cost depends on the site involved; the prices range from $20 to $100, also depending on the value of the property in question. You've got to believe that a site like eBay has lots of disputes between sellers and buyers -- this seems like a nice way to get those disputes resolved.
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Blawg of the Day
If you thought there was a blog for just about every type of law, you were wrong -- until now. Enter the Video Game Law Blog, which discusses current legal issues regarding the XBox, PSP, and many other video games.
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Blawg of the Day
Objective Justice is a group blawg "dedicated to the objective pursuit of justice in law, politics, economics and culture," which welcomes posts from all law students, professors and practitioners. It's maintained by Sean Sirrine, a law student from Boise, Idaho.
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Blawg of the Day
David Gulbransen, who obviously doesn't have enough to do as a Chicago law student with a full-time job, is also blogging about it at Preaching to the Perverted.
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Phishing Protection in your Toolbar
Internet services company Netcraft has released its Netcraft Toolbar, which is designed to spot and thwart phishing attacks. The toolbar helps to identify fraudulent sites that might be masquerading as PayPal or your bank site.
A product like the Netcraft Toolbar is great, but it assumes that the user has been fooled by the e-mail and clicked through to get to a web site. My hope would be that users learn how to spot a phishing attack at the e-mail stage, and never have to worry about getting to the fake web site.
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Blawg of the Day
Bob Coffield is a member of the firm of Flaherty, Sensabaugh & Bonasso in Charleston, West Virginia, and he is putting his experience in health care law to work publishing Health Care Blog Law.
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Monitor your Monitor
You've just bought that big, new 24" flat-panel monitor. Want to make sure you got what you paid for? Check out the Dead Pixels Test, which will show you any bad pixels on your screen. Nifty tool.
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Blawg of the Day
Tech gurus Toby Brown and Lincoln Mead have begun writing at Barchives, a blog devoted to examining various aspects of owning and operating a bar association.
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Blawg of the Day
The folks at Shepard Mullin have another weblog, on another great legal topic -- the Financial Institution Law Blog will concentrate, of course, on up-to-date information on financial institutions.
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Keeping up with your Congressperson
Plogress is a cool site -- here you can keep up with what your representatives are doing in Congress. You can drill down to see what bills they are affiliated with, or just subscribe to the RSS feed for your rep -- then you can get updates whenever he or she takes action!
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Blawg of the Day
Mary Mack is Technology Counsel and Director of Solution Design at Fios, and she's blogging about her knowledge of Electronic Discovery at Sound Evidence. The blog is part of the excellent Discovery Resources web site.
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Don't Get WiPhished
Those dastardly phisherpersons are searching for other ways to compromise your computers: now they are using Wireless networks to get to you. When you try to log in at a hotspot, you'll be presented with a fraudulent login page. When you log in to the fake page, the hacker downloads as many as 45 viruses to the computer.
The article mentioned above doesn't say this, but in most hotspots I find, I have to provide a credit card to log in. The phishers could easily provide a fake login page to capture this information, too. Make sure you are logging in to a real wi-fi provider site before you give up this information, or the gateway to your laptop.
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Your Competitive Intelligence Bookmark File
The folks at the Justia Legal SEO Blog have put together a list of the 60 Essential Free Competitive Intelligence Resources for your Legal Desktop. There are separate pages for 1-11, 12-24, 25-39, 40-44, and 45-60. There are some good sites here -- make sure they're part of your Favorites.
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Blawg of the Day
E. Thomas Kemp is an attorney in Richmond, Indiana, and he's blogging about life and law in Eastern Indiana at Kemplog.
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Blawg of the Day
Anthony Castelli is the Cincinnati Personal Injury Attorney, providing "information regarding personal injury claims from a Cincinnati personal injury and accident lawyer focusing on Ohio law."
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Blawg of the Day
Another blawg offering from Portugal -- Santerna, dedicated to commercial law topics in Portugal, Brazil, and other countries.
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Google First Portal Attempt — So-So
Google is finally wading into the portal market with its Google Personalized Home Page, to compete with the wildly popular My Yahoo! and My MSN pages. I have to say, as a first effort, it's pretty skimpy -- there aren't nearly as many features offered as the other two services. Let's see how it grows.
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Blawg of the Day
BarWrite Blog aims to provide useful and even interesting information about the bar exam and related matters. There are also links to private coaching sites and other bar exam resources.
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Blawg of the Day
The LEFIS Blog is the blog component of the Legal Framework for the Information Society, the mission of which is to introduce information technology into law schools. It's maintained by three Portuguese lawyers.
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Blawg of the Day
The Legal Ethics Blog is the product of Ben Cowgill of Lexington, Kentucky. It features, as you might imagine, "news, commentary, and resources regarding legal ethics and the law governing lawyers."
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An Ounce of Prevention
If you don't want to worry about removing spyware from your computer, there's a (relatively) simple answer: don't allow spyware on your computer in the first place. Easier said than done? Maybe. But this article on How to Avoid Getting Spyware is a pretty good guide on best practices to follow. I follow most all of these steps, and I have been spyware-free for months.
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A New Dogpile
Meta-search tool DogPile has a newly-redesigned site, plus a nifty little tool called Missing Pieces. You can do two things here: Comparison View lets you easily see how Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves results differ from each other, and the Missing Pieces applet shows the overlap between these three search engines.
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Blawg of the Day
The firm of Hoyes Michalos & Associates is providing consumer protection information for Canadians at the Ontario Bankruptcy Blog.
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Copyright Gets RSS
Gee, it's IP RSS day here at Inter Alia -- the U.S. Copyright Office is now offering 4 RSS feeds so you can keep up with the latest copyright developments:
-- Copyright Office Home Page
-- NewsNet
-- Federal Register
-- Current Legislation
Thanks to Bob for the pointer.
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Patent Info Via RSS
ION RSS reports on the new PatentMojo site, which will turn any patent search into an RSS feed. The service costs $15/month, but you check out the free feeds (Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc.), or sign up for a free 7-day trial. ION RSS notes that FreshPatents is offering essentially the same service (and more) for free, so check them both out.
Update: Jonathan from PatentMojo creator Stikigroup wrote to clarify that "FreshPatents only offers searches matching the title/abstract, agents, agents by city and application location. PatentMojo has the ability to turn *any* USPTO search into an RSS feed, thus offering a much more flexible solution for trimming out unwanted results and matching up with your pre-defined criteria." Thanks, Jonathan!
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It's a Floor Wax AND a Dessert Topping
Okay, maybe RSS isn't Shimmer, but it's certainly versatile. In fact, here are fifteen things you can do with RSS that I'll bet you didn't know you could do. Some cool uses of the technology here -- check them out.
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Blawg of the Day
Jim Milles is the Associate Dean for Legal Information Services, Director of the Law Library, and an Associate Professor of Law at the University at Buffalo Law School, and he's blogging about law libraries, legal education, and careers in law librarianship at the JD-MLS Blog.
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Your one-stop security shop — Microsoft?
Too busy to take care of your computer's security needs? Just don't have the technical experience necessary to properly keep your computer free of viruses, adware, and other nasties? Microsoft feels your pain, and wants to shoulder the burden -- for a fee, probably. Windows OneCare Live will provide you with antivirus, firewall, PC maintenance, and data backup services. Best of all, these services work transparently in the background, and are instantly updated whenever a new version is available.
Given the average computer user's inability or dislike for keeping his or her computer secure, this could be a big deal for Microsoft. It really depends on how MS decides to market this once it's out of beta testing.
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Yahoo Groks!
Way back in December 2003, I posted about Grokker, a search engine that displays its results in an interesting visual way. Grokker used to charge $49 for its product, but it's now offering its service free of charge, using the Yahoo! platform. A very cool way to look at search results.
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Blawg of the Day
Kevin Heller has a blog on the side from TechLawAdvisor -- it's the Legal Jobs Blog, featuring "job ads, related articles and links concerning the legal job market."
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Copernic Rated Best in Study
The University of Wisconsin E-Business Institute conducted a benchmark study of desktop search tools, and found that Copernic Desktop Search topped the list. The report (in PDF format) goes into great detail about several of the products, so you can make up your own mind.
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Blawg of the Day
The New England School of Law OUTLaws features "news and information of interest for the New England School of Law OUTLaws, and other members and supporters of the GLBT law school community at large."
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Blawg of the Day
The Temporary Lawyer is an anonymous blog chronicling the life of a temporary lawyer, "a life sentence to confinement in a 10 by 10 cube."
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Blawg of the Day
Ross Kunkel is writing his second blog (in addition to his Employment Law Blog) -- the Arbitration Blog covers employment and labor law arbitration.
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Update on Google Web Accelerator
Since I reported on the new Google Web Accelerator, several privacy issues have been raised, including the concern that it can allow users access to the password-protected content of others. Google is working on a fix for that right now, but in the meantime, it has suspended downloads of the new tool, stating "We have currently reached our maximum capacity of users and are actively working to increase the number of users we can support."
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Thank Goodness I don't Like Coffee
Verisign conducted a "lighthearted, unscientific" study, and discovered that 85% of the respondents gave up their password information for a $3 Starbucks gift card. I agree with Dan Gillmor, though -- how do we know that the participants didn't give a phony password just to get the gift card?
Even if it's accurate, I'm not surprised by this statistic. After all, probably most of those people have their passwords written on a post-it attached to their computer monitor right now...
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Blawg of the Day
The Shigley Law Firm of Atlanta, Georgia has a brand new lexBlog blog, and they are writing about personal injury matters at the Atlanta Injury Law Blog.
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Keylogging on the Rise
It appears that those dastardly phisherpeople have turned to a new device to infect your computer: keyloggers. These programs can be downloaded and installed on your computer merely by opening an e-mail, downloading programs online, or just by visiting a web site. Make sure you're running an anti-spyware program like Microsoft Anti-Spyware to catch keylogging and other nasty programs.
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Brush Up Your PC Skills
Believe it or not, there are only 30 steps to transform yourself from a novice to an experienced computer user. Just check out the tips and skills at 30 Must-Have PC Skills, Part 1 and Part 2 -- master these skills, and you'll be a much more efficient computer user. (Thanks to Law Dawg Blawg for the tip)
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Blawg of the Day
The folks at the University of Washington Law School are blogging about trial advocacy at Trial Ad Notes. Although it's intended to support the students and faculty of the school's trial advocacy program and it has a focus on Washington State, there's news here for anyone with an interest in the art of the trial.
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A Hidden but Valuable Tool at MSN Search
Most of the major search engines offer an "Advanced Search" option, but you usually have to click a link and access a separate page to take advantage of its features. MSN Search makes its advanced search tools available on its home page. Just click the "Search Builder" link, and you'll get a set of option that enable you to focus your search. One of the options is "Results Ranking," which allows you to alter the ranking of the search results based on your preferences. Here's a post from the MSN Search blog that illustrates how it works.
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A New Way To Remember Passwords
Here's a nifty way to generate tough-to-break passwords without remembering them: use this Password Generator. All you have to do is remember one password. Here's how it works: whenever you visit a site that requires a password, just head to the password generator, type in your master password and the URL of the site you're trying to access. It generates a strong password designed specifically for that site. The next time you visit the site, you only have to go back to the password generator, type in the name of the site, and your password automatically appears.
If you need a more visual description of how this works, check out this screencast.
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Blawg of the Day
The InsideJustice.com blog features postings on both U.S. as well as international law, brought to you by Renee Dopplick, a first-year lawyer.
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Blawgs of the Day
Here's a niche blawg: Hawaii Condo Law is about Hawaii Condominiums, planned communities, co-ops and the laws that govern them, from Honolulu lawyer Richard Ekimoto. He's also blogging at the related Fair Housing Law.
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Blawg of the Day
What's this? Another Inter Alia? It's true -- this one is published by the anonymous J.D., "concerned citizen," an "about-to-be-graduated 3L's take on law and politics." Well, there are only so many latin legal phrases to go around....
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Blawg of the Day
Francis Pileggi is a Delaware lawyer, and he's blogging about it at the Delaware Corporate and Commercial Litigation Blog. It's a great new resource on Delaware legal issues. And it's a lexBlog blog, too.
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Yahoo! Coming Closer to Customizable RSS Searches
It's not immediately apparent when you search on Yahoo!, but all of your searches can now be turned into RSS feeds. If you're using FeedDemon, just take the URL of your search results and use the Auto-Discover feature -- it will find the corresponding RSS feed. If you use the Firefox browser's Live Bookmarks feature, that will also pick up the feed. Works with the "Subscribe with Bloglines" bookmarklet, too.
This will make the second major search engine to offer the ability to create customized search feeds (MSN Search was the first). Where art thou, Google?
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Search Faster With Google
Yesterday Google unveiled a new product -- the Google Web Accelerator (GWA). It's designed to speed up the surfing experience of the broadband Internet user. The product works by "prefetching" material, as well as temporarily caching of web pages on its own servers.
The fact that Google will be storing, even temporarily, pages that you visit on its own servers may cause some privacy concerns (not to mention the privacy concerns of the Google Desktop Search and My Search History products). To be fair, Google warns of these issues up front, and provides a method by which you can prevent GWA from accelerating certain sites. Search Engine Watch has more here.
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An all-in-one page for Google
Tired of going to different Google pages to conduct your searches. Xtra Google can help with that. Just enter your search terms, and click on the button of the service you want to search. Nifty page!
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Blawg of the Day
Dan Hunter and Greg Lastowka are professors (at the Wharton School and Rutgers Law, respectively), and they have started blogging at Open Access Law "to share information, resource, ideas, and commentary about open access to law review articles." Since I'm all about finding free information on the Internet, I'll be paying attention to this blawg.
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Blawg of the Day
The Wisconsin Student Bar Association is blogging about activities at the University of Wisconsin Law School -- great idea!
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When clustering and job search collide
Here's what happens when a job search engine (Indeed.com) and a clustering meta-search tool (Clusty) collaborate: Jobs.Clusty.com. On the main page you can see the job listings per state (well over a million listings), or you can enter your own keywords with the applicable city, state or zip.
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New Perks at Yahoo! Search
It's the little things that count, right? Well, Yahoo! has been adding little things to its Yahoo! Search page, and they make it a more useful place to be. You can now access your Yahoo! mail from there, read a few news headlines, or find pages you have saved using the new My Web feature.
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Estate Planning on the Web
I wrote a quick article on estate planning links for the May issue of the Texas Bar Journal. You can access the article here -- it's a PDF file.
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New Stuff in your Feed
I have been playing around with the terrific FeedBurner service the past few days. One of the great options offered by FeedBurner is the ability to display links from del.icio.us in your feed. I've been using the social bookmarking service for awhile now, and am having fun with it. So if you subscribe to my feed, you'll automatically receive my new research links of interest, each day.
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Blawg of the Day
Joel Seachrist is the Small Town Lawyer, providing notes of interest to town officials in New York State. He's a partner in Beckman and Seachrist, a firm that represents several towns in Chautauqua County, New York.
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If only he had a newsreader
Here's a story that should give us all pause: in I Link, Therefore I Am, a man was "found dead at his computer apparently the victim of trying to keep up with too many professional forums." He was following 48 forums, and he also contributed to over 375 weblogs! I need to watch out...the number of weblogs I track on a daily basis is inching towards that number.
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Good 'Net Resources Reviewed
Mary Ellen Bates has a nice article up over at The Virtual Chase. Finding Authoritative Sources reviews two of my favorite sites, Wikipedia and Answers.com.
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Blawg of the Day
Barry Bayer has been discussing new technology with attorneys since 1997, and now he's blogging about it at Law Tech Review.
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Watch that K Key
Those dastardly phishers have found a new way to get your personal information and/or download stuff on your computer: misspelling Google. Users who accidentally typed in googkle.com were taken to another site, where two pop-ups will try to download Trojan programs to your PC.
Google has purchased the domain names for most of the misspelled versions of the word -- guess they missed one. Whatever you do, don't visit this site, just to see what it's all about.
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Blawg of the Day
What? Another blog from the Law Professor Blogs Network? Yup -- it's the Tech Law Prof Blog, hosted by Jonathan Ezor and Michelle Zakarin, both of the Touro Law Center.
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