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:
Northern Light Still Leaving the Light On
Finding Photography Archives On the Web
LLRXBu zz Tour of 50 State Web Sites
LLRXBu zz Archives : April 3, 2000 – Present
The Latest on Legal Research
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Got Microsoft Windows XP? TweakXP.com, at http://www.tweakxp.com/tweakxp/, offers over 300 XP tweaks under such categories as User Interface, System Performance, Hardware and Software Program.
From the front page, select one of the categories in the left column and view the list of available tweaks beginning with the most recently added. Additional information provides the date the tweak went online, whether it will benefit the XP professional or home user and how many times it has been viewed.
Some of these tweaks have been viewed as many as 15 to 25 thousand times, or more. The ones I viewed for the home user were clear enough for a non-computer person to understand and execute. Some of the tweaks are more
like tips (how to easily change text size in IE) and others are fixes (something to try if IE 6.0 has slowed to a crawl.) Only a few of the ones I saw required installing software, and I didn’t see anything that involved messing in the registry (something you should NOT do unless you absolutely know what you’re doing.) Searching the site does find a few registry hacks, but not many.
Also available on the site are a brief FAQ, a chat area and (very busy) message forum, tweak software, and some news on the front page. New XP users could browse through here for hours. (Back up your stuff first!) Worth a look.
Antitrust Web Resources
Washington, DC-based American Antitrust Institute has a portal of resources online at http://www.antitrustinstitute.org/links.cfm. It’s a straight-shooting text site with no slow-loading graphics and information up front about the three ways in which it can be searched.
The “Help Me Find” section has resources grouped by topics such as Federal Agencies, Court Decisions or Antitrust Guidelines. (Even Antitrust humor!) Each topic opens to a Main Page of briefly-described (but well-described) resources. Site editors have provided additional information in bold type. On one of the pages I viewed the text size suddenly jumped, but the whole page was pretty easy to read.
You can also browse a detailed Table of Contents of Internet resources. Clicking on any entry will again take you to the topic’s Main Page. The final way to search is by keyword or phrase in AAI’s archives. Search results are ranked by date in reverse- chronological order. Good site.
Need information about food-borne illnesses? The Marler Clark law firm Web site, at http://www.marlerclark.com/main.html, is a good place to start looking.
The site’s front page has recent news about food illnesses around the country. More news is available by clicking on “Notable News.” Notable News has a keyword or phrase search engine to more quickly locate information.
The site page on Resources (which was a dickens to find; you can get to it at
http://www.marlerclark.com/resources.htm?resources-index.htm) also has a search engine. The resources start with Web sites dedicated to certain diseases such as About- Ecoli, About-Listeria or About-Salmonella. Next, there is an extensive list of additional Internet resources with in-depth descriptions. This is a long page load, so go get a properly-refrigerated, bug-free sandwich while you wait.
The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) sponsors a list of major media companies and what they own at http://www.cjr.org/owners/. The guide ranges from Advance to Yahoo! and includes Bertelsmann, Disney, Dow-Jones along with many others.
I selected Knight Ridder and opened to a page beginning with the company’s URL, the name of its CEO and where the company stock is traded including the stock symbol. Then we get down to the nitty-gritty with a list of all the company’s daily newspapers followed by all its suburban newspapers. Next on the list is Other Subsidiaries including partially owned companies with a
percentage of ownership. Some of these listings are huge — check out AOL Time Warner.
Also listed on the front page of the site page are featured articles from the periodical’s most recent issues. The only problem I can see is that it stops
with the September/October 2001 issue.
Northern Light Still Leaving the Light On
Since shortly after Northern Light shut off its Web search, I’ve been getting regular e-mails from bemused readers, asking why Northern Light web search was still available at http://www.nlresearch.com.
Other readers pointed out that Northern Light searching was still available via Dmoz.org search results, the meta-search engine qbSearch (http://www.qbsearch.com/) and the meta-search engine metor
(http://www.metor.com/). A couple of readers mentioned that Northern Light was still searchable via the Internet Explorer tool bar, but I can’t confirm that.
I asked Northern Light about this Friday, and a representative told me that “Search of the Web is available at our site for our clients, NLResearch.com.
This site is going to become password-only in the near future, but we will include a subscription alternative.”
So I guess the bottom line is do your Northern Light searches now but don’t expect them to be available long.
Finding Photography Archives On the Web
If you’re looking for photography on the Web, check out
http://www.photographiclibraries.com/. Just don’t do it in Opera — the design didn’t go well when I tried it with Opera. It worked fine with Mozilla.
The front page of the site provides several categories of photograph collections, including archive collections, clip art, and media services. A couple of the categories expand into subcategories when you click on them; most do not. Click on a category and you’ll get two columns of resources from all over the world.
The annotation on this site is good and for the most part I like it. However, I think the resources would be better presented if they were assembled in a single column and spaced out a bit more.