What is the British and Irish Legal Information Institute? No idea, but it is doing a good job of supplying legal information to the Internet. If you can't find what you want on the Court Service's page (which is quite likely), take a look at BAILLI.
UK Government onlineOn my Reference page I recommend the British government's www.open.gov.uk site and warn against the irritating and patronising www.ukonline.gov.uk.
Since then, the online "envoy" has held a month-long, online, register-before-you-speak "consultation" on his plans to subsume the former into the latter. Those consulted were largely opposed. So naturally the merger has gone ahead. Now you will find yourself redirected to the new site, like it or not. I don't.
Meanwhile, one useful government site belongs to the Court Service. Quite tricky to use, but well worth exploring.
I must say I'm in two minds about The End of Free.com, a site dedicated to tracking the way previously free web resources have started asking for subscriptions or offering pay-as-you-go access. Haven't these people heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Business people have a herd mentality, as the whole dotcom-big-bang-boom-bust scenario showed in the first place. If an organisation thinks other people are succeeding in charging for content, it will surely feel obliged to do the same. No-one will wait to see whether the operation costs more than it actually earns, as is often the case.
And on a more partisan note, a lot of these information providers are selling content that they don't own. Under British law, certainly, freelancers own everything unless they formally sign it away. Most are made to do that now if they want to keep working, but it doesn't apply retrospectively. I have articles all over the lexis-nexis site, for instance. I don't believe more than a handful of them are being legally sold by that organisation. So far, content creators (us) have tended to go along with the content sellers, on the grounds that they weren't making money. That could change. (And to add insult to injury, a service like lexis-nexis is too expensive for an individual freelance to use.)
Here's yesterday's (slightly less than global) Agreement on Climate Change, in an unedited, hot-off-the-presses version. Warning:it's an Acrobat "pdf" document, so it will start to download as soon as you click the link. If you want to read more about the Kyoto agreement in general, look here. I searched the White House site, and found a big white space waiting for press secretary Ari Fleischer to make a statement. Which is a statement in itself. There is a transcript of a press conference mentioning the Kyoto protocol in March, when it emerged that President George W Bush is against the treaty, though he hasn't read it. (He knows what it's about, though.)
Anyone watching the events in Genoa this last week might like to see what they can find out about Ya Basta (roughly translated: Enough Already). Most of it is in Spanish, strangely enough, but here's a British site with some (hardly impartial) information about the self-styled anarchist organisation (if that's not an oxymoron). Did you know that the nerve centre of British anarchism used to be the home subs' bench at the Daily Telegraph? Perhaps it still is...
Under Your SpellBeing an irascible old git who remembers the days when stories were constructed using ink-impregnated ribbon, carbon paper and little bits of yellowish paper, I naturally disapprove of spell-checkers.
For normal people, however, SpellonLine might be quite useful. You can ask it to check any document you find on the Internet as well as any you might be generating yourself. And yes, it does know that we write about the "colour" of the "Labour" party logo. (Beige, isn't it?)
Today www.journolist.com moved to its own host, so you won't get all that ntlworld.com stuff when you arrive.
Meanwhile, everyone is convinced that the free stuff on the web is coming to an end. Not this free stuff, though, nor the BBC's: and there's a lot more of that. I notice that the corporation is thinking about charging for "content", but won't be able to until 2005 (I think) when its charter ends. And if The Times thinks people are going to cough up £10 a year for its crossword, as has been widely reported, it may be mistaken.
More interesting is Ralph Nader's action against eight big search engines for failing to reveal the extent to which their selections are motivated by commercial considerations. Internet Payola, some have called it. Details from Nader's Commercial Alert organisation.
I was doing a course this week with some people from the MoD press office, who needed to monitor a number of webpages (to quell rumours spread by people like us). There are all sorts of ways of doing that (Mind-it, Spyonit, etc) but one of the most straightforward is to use QuickBrowse, which lets you turn lots of little webpages into one big one that you just scroll through.
Naturally, it's a very big slow page, but you can make it quicker by using the versions of the original pages without graphics (there's a link on the page somewhere). But you can set up a page with BBC, ITN, Ananova, Telegraph, Guardian, what have you, and there's a neat bundle of news any time you need it, for as long as want. The site explains how to do it in more detail.
Meanwhile, on a literary note, I was amused to read in the Standard this quote from Claire Armistead, literary editor of the Guardian. Apparently she knowingly prints celebrity recommendations for summer books when she knows the celebrities haven't actually read them. "Our lists are always advertising-led. It's a commercial decision before it's a service to readers. Having said that, I'm always interested to read what people say they are taking on holiday -- even if they're not."
That's clear, then: "The books people are recommending this summer -- but not reading."
Further to the text-message thing, mentioned below, you'll no doubt know that the source of a lot of these little acronyms is ham radio. Here's a useful site on ham radio history . Sad, but true.
I was just writing something about the great text-message hype when I stumbled upon this rather neat acronym and abbreviation translator. It certainly knew the meaning of "RU12?"
I was just reading a rival weblog called E-Media Tidbits. It started out about the "new" media, the Internet and all that, but now it's more relevant to journalists in general.