Tara Calishain is the co-author of Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research, 2nd Edition, and author or co-author of four other books. She is the owner of CopperSky Writing & Research.
In This Issue:
Daypop Now Indexing RSS Headlines from NewsIsFree
LLRXBu zz Tour of 50 State Web Sites
LLRXBu zz Archives : April 3, 2000 – Present
The Latest on Legal Research
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eLexPortal.com (http://www.elexportal.com/) is a source for information about European eCommerce. Its Regulatory Enquiry Service provides information about how eCommerce regulatory issues relate to business processes. It focuses on background rationale, legislation status and implementation guidelines. It also covers the rights and obligations of each Member State.
The site is divided into several sections: regulatory enquiries, news and information (remember the dates here are in European format, so 1/12/2001 isn’t January 12, but December 1), Online Community, eLearning (there
are spaces for both links to relevant online tutorials and tutorials hosted by this site, but there don’t appear to be any tutorials hosted by this site yet), and Help & Support.
Services will be free from the site in 2002, but registration will be required for interactive servicessuch as Directory Services and an Interactive Forum with eLexPortal experts. Membership services will also include interest-specific e-mail alerts. Future plans include a charge for services in 2003.
Montana’s Website is featuring a new licensee lookup service you might be interested in. You can access it from the state’s home page at
http://www.discoveringmontana.com/. The direct URL is
http://app.discoveringmontana.com/bsdinq/.
You can search this database in two ways. Simply enter the license number and select from the drop-down list of licensing boards (from Alternative Health Care to Veterinary Medicine.) The other option requires the licensee last name and type of license with a first name and city, county or zip code.
Search results include name, city, state, profession, license type, specialty (if any), license number, status, and expiration date. The name is hyperlinked.
Click on it and you’ll get a little additional information, including the original issue date. There’s a space for disciplinary information, but that feature doesn’t appear to be active.
text-e, at http://www.text-e.org/index.cfm?switchLang=Eng&, is a virtual symposium exploring the Internet’s effect on reading and writing along with the distribution of knowledge. This symposium runs from October 2001
through March 2002, and is in three languages: English, French and Italian. The list of featured speakers is on the homepage.
Of course, registration is required to participate in the discussions. Click on Participants to see who text-e invited to discuss the topics. Additional
information about the participants is available by clicking on each name.
There are some interesting topics covered here such as What the Internet tells us about the Real Nature of the Book and The New Architecture of Information. A new subject is covered every two weeks, and continues through the holidays. Latecomers can view earlier discussions. The symposium also offers each speaker’s text in downloadable format.
Everyone can use a lesson on Consumer Web Law and this site at http://www.consumerprivacyguide.org/ is just the place to get it. Consumer Privacy Guide offers how-to guides for reading privacy policies and financial
services information. It even provides privacy-smart information for kids.
This site features a section on things to do to protect your privacy while using the Internet. It gives instructions for clearing a computer’s memory and how
to be certain an online form is secure. It offers advice on entering contests, what to do with cookies, how to encrypt your email and more.
Additional options on this site includes Frequently Asked Questions and an extensive list of addition resources. There’s a glossary of related terms and a
section on how your privacy is protected under the law. A very informative site!
The U.S. Department of Justice has a page of crime and justice statistics at http://149.101.22.40/dataonline/. Types of information that can be searched on this site include crime trends, homicide trends and law enforcement statistics. Search tables include state- by-state or national trends, trends in one variable and a single year of data. You can also elect to receive numbers reported from local agencies or from states. Search results are in an Excel spreadsheet that is downloadable onto your desktop.
Daypop Now Indexing RSS Headlines from NewsIsFree
Daypop (http://www.daypop.com) now indexes headlines from NewsIsFree. To search headlines only, put your query in the box and choose “headlines” from the drop-down list to the right. You can get more news on this implementation at http://www.danchan.com/weblog/daypop/6224. (And it leads me to a question — NewsIsFree and Weblogs.com both produce Changes.xml files. Does anybody else? And are any other sites besides Daypop and a few other ones using them?)