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Thursday, January 23, 2003
Ernie the Attorney pursues paperless practice Louisiana lawyer Ernest E. Svenson, better known in the blogosphere as Ernie the Attorney, today launched a second blog, PDF for Lawyers, where he will offer tips and share information on using Adobe Acrobat in a litigation practice. Regulations.gov launches today The U.S. today launched Regulations.gov, a Web site intended to make it easier for the public to participate in federal rulemaking. The site allows users to search for, review and comment on proposed rules that have been published in the Federal Register. Users can search for proposed regulations by keyword or by agency name. Regulations can be viewed in either HTML or PDF format. Once having read the proposal, a user can submit a comment using the provided form. Should lawyers steer clear of wireless keyboards? Another report of errant transmissions from wireless keyboards raises the question of whether lawyers dealing with confidential information should ever use them. Gleason Sackmann's Net-Happenings mailing list relays a report from Norway's Aftenposten that a rampant cordless keyboard has struck again. According to the report, Hewlett-Packard Norway will no longer guarantee the security of their cordless keyboards after several incidents in which keyboards beamed their information to other people's computers. In the latest incident, an Oslo man discovered the letter he was typing had shown up on his neighbor's computer. Last autumn, the report says, two Stavanger men realized they were connected when a neighbor recognized a letter mysteriously appearing on his machine to be emanating from his boss a few doors away. "If you want to be completely sure that no one can see what you are writing," an HP spokesman said, "then you should use a keyboard with a cord." Tuesday, January 21, 2003
Secure in its home on the Web I note that Homeland Security is now The Department of Homeland Security, with a Web page all its own. Site helps find resident agents online To serve process upon a company, you first must identify its resident agent -- the entity it has designated as its representative in the state. Most states now have Web sites where you can search for resident agents, but finding these sites can be a chore in itself. Resident Agent Information, from Maryland lawyer Terry A. Berger, is a no-nonsense guide to finding this information online, covering all U.S. states, territories and possessions. Search engine upstart Teoma releases version 2.0 If I had a mantra of Internet legal research, it would be that a good search engine is a lawyer's most useful Internet tool. While Google reigns supreme, I wrote last May about several upstarts challenging its dominance, most notably Teoma, launched April 2, 2002. Today, Teoma launches its version 2.0, adding new search tools and advanced functionality and promising improved relevance. Teoma's aim is to deliver a higher degree of relevance in its search results than other search engines. Like Google, it ranks the relevance of pages through a sort of Web popularity contest. But while Google draws votes from all the Web, Teoma takes each page to a jury of its peers. That is, it first identifies other sites on the same topic, then analyzes how often those sites link to the page. Teoma calls this "Subject-Specific Popularity." The idea is this: If you want to know the best Web sites for auto enthusiasts, you will do better by polling the sites of other auto enthusiasts than you will do by polling the Internet at large. This makes sense for lawyers. Of all the law-related sites on the Web, the best ones for lawyers are likely to be the ones that lawyers as a group most often link to, as opposed to those that non-lawyers find useful. Teoma, which is owned by Ask Jeeves Inc., touts two other features: "Refine" and "Resources," both of which appear onscreen to the right of the search results. The Refine feature organizes query results into what Teoma calls "naturally occurring communities." Search "Labor Relations," for example, and Teoma will suggest the following categories by which you can refine the search results: Industrial Relations, Employment Relations, University Labor, Labor Law, Labor New, Labor Relations Board, Management Relations and Supreme Court Collections. The Resources feature provides jumping off points to link collections elsewhere on the Web having to do with the query topic. Teoma's version 2.0 promises: -- Improved relevance. -- Better communities. Teoma's developers say this allows it to generate more finely tuned search results. -- Spell check. Teoma identifies query misspellings and offers corrections that help improve the relevance and precision of search results. -- Dynamic descriptions. Shows the context of search terms as they actually appear on the referenced Web pages. -- Advanced search tools. Searchers can now refine a query using specific criteria such as by exact phrase, page location, geographic region, domain and site, date, search within results and word filter. -- Language searching. Users can now search using ten Western languages, including Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. -- Expanded index. Over the past year, Teoma has expanded its index by more than 500 percent. With the release of Teoma 2.0, Teoma has crawled more than one billion Web pages and indexed more than 500 million URLs. Teoma claims that although its index is smaller than those of other search engines, it has taken steps to eliminate spam and duplication, making it more precise. |
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