This month the spotlight is on newspapers and the RSS feeds that they offer.  RSS is a great way to receive information from newspapers since RSS feeds are headlines from sources you choose.  Newspapers have broken down their feed offerings so you can receive updates on very specific topics from numerous outlets around the country.

Chicago Tribune

Houston Chronicle

Los Angeles Times

New York Times

San Francisco Chronicle

Washington Post

Rollyo is a Web 2.0 tool that allows registered users to "roll your own" search engine. The premise behind this tool is that sometimes you may only want to search across certain sites. Rollyo allows users to take up to 25 URLs and create a "searchroll". The search is powered by Yahoo!, and thus uses Yahoo!'s index. For instance, you may want to quickly search across sites about information from the US Supreme Court. You could add Oyez, the Supreme Court website, the SCOTUS blog, the ABA Supreme Court Preview, and any other Supreme Court related websites you wish. Then, simply run a search to see results from only those sites. 

As with other Web 2.0 applications, searchrolls are to be shared with friends and colleagues by inviting specific people to view the searchroll or by marking it public. The searchrolls can also be tagged, similar to del.icio.us. Users can also create a searchroll and add that search to your own blog or website, add a searchroll to your Firefox toolbar, create searchrolls from your bookmarks/favorites, and more.

The current drawback to Rollyo is that it does not search specific directories within a domain, such as limiting a search to www.abanet.org/tech/ltrc rather than www.abanet.org . The search also does not discover "deep web" or database driven content any better than Yahoo! does, as the content is effectively hidden from the search engine.  That said, Rollyo is still in BETA and has a promising future.  

LTRC staff has added content from articles and presentations from the past few months to the LTRC website. Be sure to also see new and updated FYIs on the site.

- Technology Tips, Tricks, and Trends
What's hot in today's law offices? What are the practical applications of the buzzing acronyms - KM, CMS, RSS, CRM, OCR? This presentation given to the Wisconsin chapter of the Association of Legal Administrators will help identify the latest technology tools, and provide quantitative data on who is using what. Find out how mobile and wireless technologies are affecting the practice of law, including security issues. How has the Internet changed and challenged communications? 
 - Personal Computing 
Whether you are in-house counsel, a law professor, or a solo practitioner, there are some common elements in how you interact with technology to get your job done. This presentation for the East Central Illinois Women Attorneys Association focuses on technological tips and best practices for the end user to apply to such tasks as organizing information, communicating with clients and colleagues, managing time, and producing documents and reports.
 - Legal Technology Tips and Gadgets 
Presentation for the Chicago Bar Association Technology Conference offering fifteen tips, tricks, and techniques for law office computing, including productivity, collaboration, and research.

Do you write yourself notes on tiny pieces of paper, and then have to frantically search through the stack to find what you need?  Cast your little pieces of paper aside:  Evernote is a note-taking application that can help you stay organized.  You store notes, web clippings, links, etc. on a single page (Evernote calls it "an endless roll of digital paper").  Instead of keeping notes in separate files, everything is in one place, and you can search for it in multiple ways: through categories, automatic labeling, by time and date stamps, and with keywords .  You assign categories manually or automatically, and there are over 50 icons you can also assign to organize yourself visually.  An icon is installed in your toolbar; you use this to cut content from the internet and paste it into your Evernote page -- a full link is provided along with the content.   Evernote comes in two versions:  the free version has most functionality; the pay version also offers handwriting recognition, something called Advanced Note Recognition, and Ink-Note search.  So continue jotting down those notes-- just do it digitally with Evernote!