Over at The Common Scold, Monica Bay has added a nifty little sidebar, called Blog Bytes. (And yes, that deranged-looking guy is me.) She also sent along some references to setting up a sideblog in TypePad or using the service Sideblog. For someone who just started blogging in November, Monica has hit…

A flushable toilet brush that warns users, “Do not use for personal hygiene,” is the nation’s wackiest warning label, according to the annual Wacky Warning Labels contest conducted by Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch. M-LAW created the contest eight years ago to show how concern about lawsuits has created a need for common sense warnings…

The Law Professor Blogs network continues to grow with the addition of Joseph A. Hodnicki’s Law Librarian Blog. Joe is Web services coordinator for the University of Cincinnati Law Library and editor of the Securities Lawyer’s Deskbook. Joe also serves as Web producer for Law Professor Blogs.

A great link…

Preston Gates & Ellis is putting the finishing touches on its new Electronic Discovery Law blog, which will report on legal issues, news and best practices relating to the discovery of electronically stored information. The blog is live, but still being readied for its formal launch Monday, when it will include a searchable…

Hidden metadata in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files can be bad news for a lawyer. This add-in from Microsoft lets you permanently remove hidden data as well as collaboration data, such as change tracking and comments.…

The folks who developed askSam, a free-form database tool, have imported the complete legislative text of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act into a searchable askSam database file and made it available as a free download on their Web site. To use it, you will also need the free askSam viewer.…

Thanks to Rick Klau for his pointer to this tweak for speeding up the Firefox browser.…

Seekport is a new Internet search engine optimized for users in the United Kingdom. Through customized ranking algorithms and a British indexing team, it aims to provide high-quality searching with much less spam and far fewer hits from the United States. The company also provides country-specific search indexing for France and Germany,…

GuruNet Corporation today announced that it will no longer charge subscription fees for its Web site-and-software combination reference service, Answers.com. GuruNet will sell ad placements and sponsored links alongside topic entries rather than charge subscription fees. Answers.com claims to include information on more than a million topics, drawn from a database of more than…

From MARS in my last post, I jump to space law. Thanks to Tom Mighell’s Inter Alia, I learned about the blast-off of New York lawyer and journalist Jesse Londin’s new blog, Space Law Probe, companion to her space law portal, Spacelawstation.com. I have been a fan of Jesse’s writing since her…

By way of beSpacific comes a pointer to a listing of the best free reference Web sites of 2004, compiled by MARS — the American Library Association’s Machine-Assisted Reference Section.…

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that California consumers racing to make the deadline for claiming benefits from a $1.1 billion Microsoft court settlement are hitting a virtual wall — the Web site containing the claim form they need gives them gobbledygook or aborts their request. Curious, I gave it a try. I had…