January 2005 Archives

Let me just preface this by saying that Amazon is one of my favorite ecommerce sites, and has been for many years. I remember the early days when they even sent me Christmas presents to thank me for my business. Those days are gone, but that's okay because I still have several Amazon travel mugs in fairly good condition, and, after all, how many travel mugs do you really need?

But once or twice I felt the need to contact someone at Amazon, that is, a real person, via that old, yet still quite effective technology, the telephone. And Amazon doesn't make it easy. If you're persistent, and click around the site enough, you may eventually find the phone number, though I couldn't tell you now where. But that's a lot of aggravation at a time when you may already be a bit peeved with an incorrect shipment, etc. So let me make it easy for you. This web site contains contact information for Amazon Customer Service, and even their legal counsel. For good measure, the Ebay and Paypal numbers are included as well.

Here's another tip. If you find yourself needing to call Amazon, but you've misplaced this particular web site address, and can't remember where you read it, just Google "Amazon Customer Service". You'll find a number of people (including Genie Tyburski at the Virtual Chase) have published the number in their own efforts to point Amazon customers in the right direction.

When it comes to evaluating search engines, most of us don't know how and why they work the way they do, we just know what we like. And we like relevant search results. Unfortunately, that doesn't quite cut it if you are charged with choosing a search engine for your organization. Kim Guenther lists the important capabilities and features that you should look for in a search engine in her article "Choosing a Search Engine" in the Jan./Feb. issue of Online.

(Note to Reader: Online articles typically appear on Looksmart's FindArticles a few months after publication.)

The name dtSearch certainly sounds familiar, but I can't remember where I've heard it. I don't know anyone who has used it at their firm or library, so that can't be it. Maybe I've seen it mentioned in PC Magazine? Perhaps it runs a database product I've used?

This lack of visibility in the library community is exactly what irritates Ernest Perez. In his Online article, "dtSearch: The Little Search Engine That Could," he points out that "Despite all the success of this database application product in the software general marketplace, it appears to me that the proefssional library community seems to have pretty much ignored it."

If you're wondering what its capabilities are, you definitely need to read this article. It sounds quite powerful, and yet is relatively inexpensive and it runs on Windows and Linux.

Is anyone out there using it as an intranet search engine? For other purposes? If so, let us know! And you probably should let Ernest Perez know, too. It might make him feel better.

(Note to Reader: Online articles typically appear on Looksmart's FindArticles a few months after publication.)

During the early days of the web, when I was just starting to work with html, I remember thinking about how web pages could be used internally in an organization. I was, naturally, mainly thinking of library-related information, and in fact, wrote my library procedures manual in html with the thought that someday it could be stored in a central location where my entire staff could access it.

Apparently that wasn't a unique idea because intranets came along soon thereafter and rapidly gained in popularity. Is there any AmLaw 100 firm without an intranet? Probably, but you get my drift.

Now the talk is all about whether blogs are useful corporate/business communication tools. I think the same principle that applies to intranets, applies to blog tools. It's all about content. Blog software offers an easy, and in some contexts, primitive, "content management system" which allows users to provide updated content without the need to know html. The success of a blog tool (or intranet) depends upon the willingness of someone in the organization to share and update information on a regular basis. Some will succeed, some will fail, and often it won't be a function of the tool itself, though certainly cumbersome and difficult to use software will have a chilling effect. But the tools are a mode of communication; given the tool, someone still has to take the time to take advantage of the opportunity.

There, I'm glad I got that out of my system. Now to the main point. Laurel A. Clyde recently wrote an article, Enterprise Blogging, which details many of the ways a blog can be used in an organization. She also offers a variety of web resources, including a list of blogs about enterprise blogging, and a nice bibliography of related articles, so if you're looking for ideas on how to use a blog in your firm, or just want to be able to justify blogs to management, you should take a look.

I recently saw a demo of Adobe Acrobat 7.0, and I'm happy to announce that it now creates bookmarks automatically based on the file name when you combine files. Yey! This new feature was high on my wish list, and will meet what I expect is a very common need.

In 6.0, if you wanted to append all of the citing cases to a brief or other document, you had no choice but to create each bookmark manually by finding the first page of each case, then adding the bookmark. With a large number of documents this process is tedious and time-consuming. But if you're using version 7.0, bookmarks for each case will be automatically created. If you've had the foresight to name your files well, your work will be done. If not, it's fairly easy to click on each bookmark, and rename them appropriately. That's much easier than starting from scratch!

I still can't see any option to print or otherwise save bookmarks, though! I guess we can't have everything.

By the way, the Lawyer's Guide to Adobe Acrobat is now out and available. I haven't read it yet, but it comes highly recommended from a number of reliable sources.

Librarians typically come across new information, web sites and resources on almost a daily basis. But can you recall that new source or research tip the next time it's needed, months or even years later? I can often remember questions from months ago, but not necessarily the answers, or more importantly, how I went about finding them. In addition, in a multi-librarian firm, it's also very important to share information among the library staff.

It's clear that attorneys aren't the only ones that need knowledge management! The old 3 x 5 index card reference file really doesn't cut it anymore.

In a recent article in the "California LegalPro" supplement to the Recorder (Fall 2004), "Blog-On!", Diahann Munoz, a reference librarian in the DC office of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, talks about how the library staff at Morgan set up a private blog on Blogger.com to save such tidbits as "new database information and passwords, answers to difficult questions..information regarding vendor or professional meetings, links to articles of interest..and new discoveries about products and services.."

Since blogs are full-text searchable, and allow categorization by topic, blog software/services can be a great way to create a shared, reference database, without those old 3 x 5 cards!

There have been so many desktop search products released in the last few months, it's hard to keep track of which one does what. So the Goebel Group has put together a Desktop Search Matrix that compares the features of the free, and the not-so-free, options.

By the way, Copernic recently announced support for Firefox files and Ask Jeeves has released their desktop search utility.

For more information on several of the free offerings, see PC Magazine's recent reviews. You can also find some excellent and fairly detailed reviews in the WOW (Woody's Office Watch) Archives. The site isn't pretty, but the content is good.

I recently gave a Powerpoint presentation that included annotated screen shots of an intranet application. Someone in the audience thought I was highlighting the screenshots live, as I was giving the presentation, and asked how I'd done it. That got me to thinking....shouldn't there be a tool out there that WOULD let you highlight, circle or otherwise annotate anything that appears on the screen, whether it's Powerpoint or the Intranet? I looked around a bit, and learned that yes, in fact, there is a utility that will do this called WinPointer.

It's a nice little easy-to-use utility and could be very handy for live presentations. You can also easily create annotated screenshots that can then be inserted into a Powerpoint presentation. I'm glad someone thought of it!

Wikis are an excellent way to collect unstructured information and collaborate with others. As you can imagine, this means that wikis have quite a bit of potential in a business environment. According to PC Magazine ("Wikis at Work"), that's what they've learned at Dickson Allan, an IT consulting firm, where the information technology consultants use wikis to collaborate and communicate information about Dickson Allan clients.

Dickson Allan uses a tool called "Jotspot", which provides a ready-to-go wiki at a reasonable per month, per user charge. Jotspot makes it easy to get started with a number of pre-built templates to choose from. Every page you create has an email address, and you can simply send email to a Jotspot wiki page in order to add content. Of course, you can also use their WYSIWYG editing tool.

A tool like Jotspot, which hosts the software and data for you, may be the easiest way yet to get a wiki going at work.

Genie Tyburski has updated her Law Office Computing article, Feeding the News Junkie's Habit, discussing how lawyers can use RSS newsfeeds for delivering relevant and timely news.

Spotted on the TVC Alert, Gigablast lets you create a custom topic search of just the sites you select. You can use it for your own research, or include it on your web site. This is just the kind of thing I was looking for!

For example, when I'm researching computer products, I often search PC World and PC Magazine. I'm been researching multifunction printers, and also found some interesting info at ZDNet.com. And, of course, Eopinions can offer some good user feedback. So now I can create my own search box that will search these 4 sites in one search. Like so:

If you want your results clustered by site, just change the sc parameter from 0 to 1.

At work, I've created a custom topic search of the top legal research sites including Virtual Chase and Zimmerman's Research Guide on our intranet. This should be very handy for finding resources quickly when I'm working on the reference desk.

What topic are you interested in? If you have a list of favorite sites that you go back to again and again, maybe you, too, would like to create a Gigablast custom search. It takes a very minimal knowledge of html. Just grab the code from Gigablast, make the few substitutions as instructed, and you're set.

I guess it had to happen. A security hole was discovered in Adobe Acrobat Reader that could potentially "allow an attacker to execute malicious code on a user's system via a PDF file distributed via e-mail." The bug effects version 6.0.2, and possibly earlier versions of the Reader.

The problem can be avoided by installing an updated version of Adobe Reader, and it just so happens that version 7.0 is available. Among the enhancements in Adobe Reader 7.0 (note that it's no longer called "Adobe Acrobat Reader") are:

- faster loading time, something I'm sure we'll all appreciate.
- ability to fill in interactive forms
- commenting capability can be offered on documents created in Adobe Acrobat 7.0
- improved searching

If you'd rather stick with version 6, then at least update to 6.0.3 to avoid any unpleasantness.

Regardless of how you dispose of an old computer, whether you give it to a friend, or take it to a local drop-off center, you need to make sure that the information on your hard drive isn't used for nefarious purposes, such as identity theft. The last time I got rid of a computer, I removed the hard drive, and still have the silly thing in my closet. Luckily, it doesn't take up much space

There are better ways. According to PC Magazine (Pipeline, Dec. 28, 2004), EraseYourHardDrive uses "the same technology employed by the Department of Defense to remove all data from a hard drive."

If you want to avoid spyware, you might want to consider switching to Firefox. According to a PC Magazine Pipeline item, "Make Way for Mozilla," the increase in Firefox users may be partially attributable to the fact that it "does not allow ActiveX programs to run or let so-called trusted sites circumvent security settings," and so avoids the spyware problems that Internet Explorer users experience.

Tom Mighell, on inter alia, notes that Webroot has recently identified CoolWebSearch browser hijacker as one of the top spyware threats. Watch out for this one, and in general avoid downloading toolbars or other browser utilities from unknown web sites. After all, aren't the zillions of toolbars from reliable, well-regarded sources enough for you?

Several articles in the past few weeks have noted that the downloading of music, especially via file sharing services such as Kazaa, is very risky behavior. Reports of spyware contained in illegally copied music files are becoming common and spyware spread in this manner seems particularly resistant to removal. If you want to download music, pay for the privilege via music sites such as iTunes and Musicmatch. (For more information, see the PC World article, "Risk Your PC's Health for a Song?") and "Terminating Spyware with Extreme Prejudice" from the New York Times.)

One more item on the spyware front. Someday soon spyware protection may be built into Windows or Internet Explorer. On December 16th, Microsoft announced the purchase of Giant Company Software of New York, which produces a spyware removal product called Giant AntiSpyware.