Internet Legal Research Weekly -- October 26, 2008

Welcome to Issue #315 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!

For the longer news stories this week, see "Caught in the 'Net" below. Otherwise, we've got the.....

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

One of my favorite Word printing features is the ability to shrink a document by one page -- the Shrink to Fit option is easy to find in Word 2003, but what if you're using Word 2007? Is it gone? Nope, it's still there -- it just takes a little digging to find it. Two ways to go about that:

If you use the Shrink to Fit option infrequently, all you need to do is click the round Office button at the top left, then hover your mouse over the Print option -- additional options will appear to the right. Select Print Preview. When that appears, you'll see the Shrink One Page button in the Preview area.

If you are a heavy Shrink to Fit user, why not place a button on your Quick Access Toolbar? To do that, click again on the round Office button, then select the Word Options button. Choose Customize, and select Print Preview Tab from the drop-down list. Find Shrink One Page in the list and double click it. Now that button will always appear in your Quick Access Toolbar.

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!

Caught in the 'Net

Yotify -- Alert Nirvana?

Although RSS is still my tool of choice for delivering the latest news to me, there's one thing it doesn't do all that well -- alert me when the new stories on certain topics appear on the Internet. Sure, some search engines will generate an RSS feed for your search terms (and I hear Google is working on it as we speak), but I find that the results are often repeated over and over -- I still get RSS search results for sites that appeared years ago.

That's why I love Google Alerts -- just plug in your search terms, and get an email whenever those terms appear on the Internet. It's like most of Google's other products -- it just works.

But now I may have found a notifier service to lure me away from Google. Yotify is a notification site on steroids, giving you the ability to create alerts for more than 20 types of searches or sites. Yotify calls its alerts "Scouts," which have been created in the following areas: Shopping, Fun, Travel, Classifieds, News & Blogs, and Friends. You can track job postings, sales, housing, concert tickets, news stories, auctions, resumes, your name, and a whole bunch more. I'm particularly intrigued by the LinkedIn Scout, which allows you to track someone's public profile on the professional networking site.

I've sent out a few scouts to see what they bring back -- I'll try to let you know how I like it in a couple of months.

Vyew and the Hazards of Web 2.0

In our collaboration tools wiki, we mention dozens of new and interesting sites and utilities that make it easy for people to work with each other online. Although we don't use all of these tools, we've tried a lot of them, and Vyew is one of the tools I really wanted to like. After all, it's one of the few online meeting services that offers free meetings for up to 20 participants.

Two weeks ago, I wanted to use Vyew to give a presentation and demo to my co-workers, so I set up my Vyew meeting room -- it allowed me to personalize the room name, which was great. It also had all the features I needed for my meeting. The morning of the presentation, I tried to log in to Vyew to make sure everything was ready for the meeting -- only to find that I couldn't get in. For some reason, Vyew had suddenly realized that I had a firewall, and wouldn't grant access to my meeting room.

No big deal -- when you're working with Web 2.0 tools issues like these happen from time to time. Usually they are easily resolved. So I emailed Vyew support and asked for some help with my problem. Because my meeting was only a couple of hours away, I was not completely surprised that I did not hear from Vyew before the meeting started. However, it has been nearly two weeks since the meeting, and I still haven't heard from Vyew. Needless to say, I was forced to use another meeting service, which turned out to be much more reliable. Now, I was using Vyew's free service, so at least I wasn't out any money -- but what if I had purchased a Plus or Professional plan? Would I get the same level of support?

The lesson here: Web 2.0 tools are being developed every day, and the infrastructure of each will vary depending on how much funding/staff they have. Before you invest your time or money in one of these tools for your mission-critical work activities, make sure you can rely on the service to work as advertised. In Vyew's case, the technology worked pretty well -- it was the support that was sorely absent. Frankly, some of the Web 2.0 tools we mention in the wiki are not ready for prime time. Make sure you know what you're getting into before using a tool for something really important.

This Week at Fios

Most every week, my employer Fios offers great webcasts on e-discovery issues, all for free. Here's what's up this week:

On Tuesday, October 28, Fios will present Discovery Readiness: Know Where You Are, Where You're Going and How to Get There. This webcast is offered in collaboration with the Association of Corporate Counsel, and it will provide a roadmap of the steps organizations must take to become "discovery-ready" in the age of e-discovery. Cynthia Bateman and Peter McLaughlin will be your presenters. To register, just click here:

Then on Thursday, October 30, we'll present ESI Content Mapping for Financial Services Litigation. This is Part 5 in our current series of webcasts for the financial services industry. The webcast, which will be presented by Vikas Pall and yours truly, will discuss how developing a content map of electronically stored information can help lawyers know where data is stored so that they can more effectively respond to e-discovery requests. To register, click here:

Legally Relevant – Sites on the Internet

American Association of Neuroscience Nurses
Here's another association page, so much of the information here will be available only to members. But if you non-members dig you can definitely find useful information -- clinical guidelines for certification of neuroscience nurses, a free e-newsletter regarding care of the neuroscience patient, and more.

American Society of International Law
I have probably discussed this site in the past, but it contains so much valuable information it's worth another mention. ASIL's mission is to foster the study of international law and promote the establishment of international relations on the basis of law and justice. You can read about various ASIL programs, learn about the different issues members are studying, and subscribe to electronic publications (many of which are free to nonmembers), among other things. But perhaps the best place to look is the Electronic Resources page, which provides access to EISIL (a database of international treaties), the ASIL Guide (to assist you in conducting online research), i.lex (a public online database of select US court cases and legal materials), ASILEX, a database of ASIL publications, and JSTOR, a digital archive of the American Journal of International Law. Membership to the Society is $180/year, for which you get free access to everything on the site.

Bankers Almanac ($$)
BankersAlmanac.com is a British publication that dates back to 1845, when it was simply a hard copy directory of banking information. Now, the site aims to be a source of intelligent reference data for payments, compliance and risk assessment. There are a number of services offered here, including solutions regarding payments, due diligence, risk assessment, tracking banking activities, financial research, database solutions, advertising, supplier searching, and more. A subscription costs 2,210 British Pounds per year.

Federal Bureau of Prisons
If you want to learn more about our federal prison system, this is the place to start. In addition to information about the history of the U.S. prison system, the site provides an Inmate Locator, information on all prison facilities, and a number of pages on issues affecting inmates. The Policies/Forms area offers access to all Bureau policies, program statements, and the most frequently-requested prison-related forms.

Coders' Rights Project
Here's an interesting niche area of the law. The Project is a service of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and it's designed to protect programmers and developers engaged in cutting-edge exploration of technology from challenges under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act, and other laws. This page offers some frequently asked questions on the project, information about related cases, and the latest news regarding the topic.

Finally, some fun and useful sites to help start off your week:

I hate keeping all the user manuals for the products I purchase, and keeping track of them is a pain. With Diplodocs, I have the option of viewing them online. You can find thousands of user manuals here -- appliances, tv & audio, phones, computers, cars, digital cameras, and video games, to name a few.

I *love* Desktop Tower Defense, a game I mentioned here awhile back. Now they've come out with something similar -- Whiteboard Tower Defense has the same premise, but with a different feel.

Well, that’s it for Issue #315 – 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

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