This excellent, frequently updated list offers a wealth of information about Google products, including audience, launch date and cost. It also provides helpful links to discussion boards, help and idea pages, and official Google product blogs and Twitter accounts. According to the list, Google currently support nearly 350 products! -M [Thanks, Dan]
Since Google Scholar was announced last week, bloggers have been speculating on what effect it will have on legal research, the practice of law, and the public's access. A few noteworthy posts covering the main areas of discussion:
The Big Winners: Law Students?
From Laura Bergus' post Google Scholar Search Now Includes U.S. Case Law and Legal Journals," it sounds like the big winners will be law students who now have another legal research option, which comes with an easier to use interface that they are accustomed to using.
Will Anyone Need a Lawyer?
Jane Genova at Law and More suggests that Google Scholar will be a great legal research tool for self-represented litigants in her post Everyman a Legal Player: Google Scholar. Taking a more realistic view, Scott Greenfield in The End of the Duopoly at Simple Justice recognizes that case law is hard to understand, doubly so for the average person, whether or not it's freely available.
What About LexisNexis and West?
The greatest amount of ink has been used to analyze the impact on LexisNexis and West. Over at My Shingle, Carolyn Elefant's post Free Legal Research by Google & What It Means looks at this issue.
Is It Any Good?
Most agree that it's a good start for Google. But how does it compare? People are trying to find out, including Greg Lambert and Toby Brown at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog. They want use crowdsourcing as a part of their test and are asking for your ideas. Check out Greg's post We Need You - Ideas for Testing Google Scholar Via Crowdsourcing. - K
The BBC, Lifehacker, and many other sources are reporting that Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Comcast, and Earthlink passwords were made public. While these passwords were gathered through phishing and the incident wasn't the fault of any of the providers, to me it seems like as good of a day as any to change my passwords for these services. - K
The Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit working for a more open and accountable government, recently sponsored Apps for America 2 together with Google, O'Reilly Media, and TechWeb. These organizations wanted to demonstrate that developers will step up and make government data easier for the public to consume if the data is available.
The winners were announced at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase, and all three of the finalists, and many of the other apps, are worth a look. For example:
Additional apps have been highlighted on the Sunlight Foundation's blog.
Apps for America 2 wasn't the Sunlight Foundation's first attempt to examine how technology can make the government more open. They have also suggested a facelight for the SCOTUS website and started crowdsourcing tedious tasks. - K
Did you know that when you search the Web with Google, you are searching only about 0.2 percent of the Web. The remainder, more than 66,800 terabytes, is part of the Deep Web, or the part of the Web that search engines haven't indexed. (For reference, 1 terabyte is 50,000 trees made into paper and printed.)
So what does the Deep Web contain? According to Wikipedia,
A lot of researchers are examining how to access this invisible content. Last week, one potential contender in the race to expose the Deep Web launched, DeepDyve. This search engine is using techniques used in the field of genomics, an approach that differs significantly from Google's approach. The company behind the search engine is marketing it as a research engine. So while it works for searches that bring up movie times, hockey game scores, and so on, DeepDyve aims to help researchers do better research.
Unfortunately, I don't do a lot of scholarly research, so I turned to the first academic that I thought of--my Dad--and found that he is cited in Wikipedia. But that doesn't really tell me whether DeepDyve is better at research than Google. So I'd love to hear from some of you who do more research than I do. What do you think of DeepDyve? - K
The ability to visually represent data is an important tool for advocacy, fundraising, and reporting. Below are a few free online tools that will allow you to quickly create graphs, charts and other visualizations.
Other online tools for creating graphs and charts include Swivel, iCharts and WidGenie. Google Docs, Many Eyes and DabbleDB were also covered in the “50 Tech Tips for Tough Economic Times” session at the 2009 EJC conference. [H/T to Laura Quinn for inspiring this post.] -M
Google and Yahoo! all have keywords that let you find out who is linking to a page or site.
Google
Google uses the keyword link. For example, link:http://www.techno.la returns all of the sites that link to the page at http://www.techno.la.
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| Google link |
Yahoo!
Yahoo! uses the keywords link and linkdomain. Use link to find all of the pages that link to another page. For example, link:http://www.techno.la returns all of the pages that link to the page at http://www.techno.la.
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| Yahoo! link |
Use linkdomain to find all of the sites that link to a domain. For example, linkdomain:www.techno.la returns all of the pages that link to any page that begins with www.techno.la.
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| Yahoo! linkdomain |
linkdomain would return pages that link to http://www.techno.la as well as http://www.techno.la/2009/04/articles/softwareappstools/pbwiki-launches-legal-edition.
In addition to satisfying your curiousity, you can use this tool to evaluate how well your outreach has worked or to find out if an organization thinks your site is helpful.
NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network, has several upcoming free webinars. Two are part of their ongoing Ask the Expert series, which are free for NTEN members.
Additionally, twelve sessions from the sold-out Nonprofit Technology Conference are being made available live and are free for everyone. (Check out more ways to participate in the NTC without leaving your office.)
Monday, April 27
1:30 pm Eastern/10:30 am Pacific
4:30 pm Eastern/1:30 pm Pacific
6:30 pm Eastern/3:30 pm Pacific
Tuesday, April 28
1:30 pm Eastern/10:30 am Pacific
4:30 pm Eastern/1:30 pm Pacific
6:30 pm Eastern/3:30 pm Pacific
Enjoy! - K
Thanks to Periscope Gadget, you can now integrate Basecamp with your iGoogle homepage. More background on their blog here and a few screencasts here. -M
I've just discovered Alefo, a fairly new (pre-beta) "startpage" solution that's similar in function to iGoogle and Netvibes, but allows you to essentially "cut and paste" portions of websites that you want to include on your startpage and updates the content dynamically. No more hunting down RSS feeds and widgets (although you can add those too) or browsing multiple sites for content each day. With Alefo, you can just "drag and drop" your way to a truly custom start page, complete with tabs for different topics. -M
Creating a quality website with little or no knowledge of HTML or other programming languages is no longer the challenge that it once was. With the evolution of blogging platforms, wikis and other web-based content management systems, you can now build a web presence for your organization or projects with little more than some extra time on your hands. Here are a few free hosted solutions that will put you on your way to a website without having to write a lick of code:
Also be sure to check out the recent webinar by LSNTAP and Pro Bono Net on building program websites. In addition to great suggestions on finding the right platform and host, it provides helpful tips and resources on layout, design and incorporating multimedia. Also, for those states using the LawHelp template, ask your Circuit Rider about program sites, which are free to legal aid and public interest organizations. -M
From Brian Lawlor, Regional Counsel at LSNC:
Legal Services of Northern California has launched the Findability Project, a TIG-funded initiative to demonstrate how a Google Search Appliance, integrated with a SharePoint Server, can be used as a core technology for implementing enterprise-level search, and as the basic building block of an organization-wide knowledge-content system.
To keep up-to-date with the project be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed here. For more background, go here. We'll be following this project closely, and look forward to hearing from others who are implementing internal knowledge management and content sharing platforms at their organizations. (For example, using a wiki to share documents with a funder prior to a site visit.) -M
On Tuesday Google launched Lively, a free virtual world that can be embedded in websites and integrated into social networking sites like Facebook. Here's the announcement on Google's blog. For more on the intersection of virtual worlds and the law, check out these pasts posts. -M
So last week, we pointed out something that might have brought a few of you pain. But this week, I promise you, we've got something pleasant for the long summer days -- free books.
And if the sites listed above don't have that book that one special book that you need, perhaps one of these will.
Happy reading! - K
That's right, it's Free Friday, a new Technola feature that highlights free - as in free beer - tech tools and resources. This week, a few free web-based project management tools to help keep those milestones in check:
Google presented at the NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) and came with the expected information about Google's projects and priorities. But unexpectedly, they also announced a benefit for NTEN members - expedited review of Google Grant applications. You can read all about it on the NTEN site.
And a personal "woot, woot" to Joyce Raby and Liz Keith who live tweeted the NTC for those of us who couldn't attend. It was great getting live news from the sessions you attended. -K
Google has launched a new portal for nonprofits, which includes a list of relevant Google Apps (with helpful "Get started" guides) and Google Grants. There's also a subscription box available for news about Google's nonprofit offerings. -M
I spent about 20 minutes playing with the recently launched Google Sites (fka JotSpot) this morning. Like most Google Apps, the interface is intuitive and there's lots of flexibility. It was easy to integrate into our organization's domain (we use Google's non-profit/education edition for email) and allows you to add calendars, presentations, attachments, etc. to a dashboard as well as create file directories and custom pages. You can also share it for viewing or editing with a defined group, your organization, or publicly. Overall, I like it better than many other online collaboration tools that I've used, both for the ease of integration with other Google Apps and its simple access and interface controls. -M
Enter keywords:
