Internet Legal Research Weekly -- July 27, 2008

Welcome to Issue #306 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!

Blawgs of the Week
Here are a few of the interesting law-related weblogs I features this past week on Inter Alia:

Are you using the Firefox browser yet? If not, what's keeping you? The Firefox browser is a great alternative to Internet Explorer, originally because it had fewer security flaws. IE7 is a much more secure product, but I still prefer Firefox, because it's so customizable -- I can use some fantastic add-ins that make the browser so much more powerful. The next few weeks I'm going to feature some great tips to get the most out of Firefox.

This week, let's talk about your tabs. Like IE7, Firefox displays multiple pages in separate tabs, so you don't have to open multiple windows. Rather than clicking through windows or an icon to create a new tab, just press CTRL+T -- a new tab will appear with the cursor automatically ready in the address bar.

If you're browsing a page and want to open a link in a new tab, just right-click on the link and select Open Link in New Tab.

Moving between tabs is pretty easy -- just press CTRL+TAB to move to the right, or CTRL+SHIFT+TAB to move to the left.

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

Dermatology Online Journal
Unlike many medical journals, Dermatology Online Journal offers all of its contents for free. The site isn't very sophisticated, but it doesn't need to be. It provides full-text access to articles and other documents, all the way back to 1995. Most of the articles deal with particular dermatological conditions, their diagnosis and treatment.

FindSounds
One of the best things about the Internet is that there's a search engine for just about anything. FindSounds is one of those examples -- it's a search engine for sound effects and musical instrument samples. Just do a search, and you'll get a listing of files in AIFF, AU, MP3 and Wave format. You can download the sound, or refine your search further by searching for similar sounds.

RecallWarnings
I can't tell if this site is a Justia site, but they sure have provided a lots of the bells and whistles here. RecallWarnings is devoted to providing information about product recalls, in categories ranging from infants & children to music, arts & hobbies, consisting primarily of press releases from the Consumer Products Safety Commission. The site also has an Auto Recall Center where you can track recalls for particular models by subscribing to an RSS feed.

A Guide to Legal Research in Russia
Here's another of the great Globalex legal research guides, this one covering the Russian legal system. It's authored by Arina Popova and Lev Solovyev, two Russian lawyers. Most of the information provided here is in print format, although if you can read Russian you'll find links to Russian Federation codes.

Disease Outbreak News
A service of the World Health Organization, this site provides news on recent disease outbreaks around the world. For example, the most recent occurred on July 10, which is a case of Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever imported into the Netherlands from Uganda. You'll get a brief news story of the outbreak, as well as an archive listing disease outbreaks by year, by disease, or by country. And there's an RSS feed that will provide updates from this site, too.

Finally, a few fun and useful sites to start out the week:

Knol is Google's new effort to take on Wikipedia -- a "knol" is a unit of knowledge, and here you'll find articles on a number of different topics, from migraines to buttermilk pancakes.

Ramps is a simple but very addicting game, where all you have to do is arrange the ramps so the ball will fall into the basket. It's not as easy as it looks!

Well, that’s it for Issue #306 – 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

Now available: The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell

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.

Archives: Miss an issue? You can read previous issues of the Internet Legal Research Weekly in the Archives.

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