The Florida State College of Law Research Center Blog

What the US Media Shield Bill Means for Bloggers & Citizen Journalists

From Mashable, here's an excerpt:

The Free Flow of Information Act of 2009 (also known as the Media Shield Bill) recently passed the Senate Judiciary Committee, meaning that the bill has been placed on the official calendar of business and could be considered and voted upon by the entire Senate soon. If the bill passes in the Senate, it will still need to be reconciled with a different version that passed in the House earlier this year.

What is the Media Shield Bill? It offers a “shield” to protect those who provide news from potential legal action, like subpoenas requesting access to protected sources or documents. More importantly, perhaps, the bill seeks to define the very act of journalism itself, and who can be called a journalist. This could have profound implications for bloggers and citizen journalists.

Read more here. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

How Google Wave is Changing the News

Mashable has an interesting article online about how Google Wave is changing the news.  Here's an excerpt:

Andrew Nystrom, senior producer of social media and emerging platforms at the Los Angeles Times, collaborated with social media reporter Mark Milian on the blog post “How Google Wave Could Transform Journalism” that ran on the newspaper’s web site a couple of months ago.

Among some of the ideas listed in the post were: collaborative reporting, smarter story updates, live editing, discussing while reading, and a transparent writing process. Nystrom said in an email interview they’re looking at all the potential uses that Milian posited in the blog post. In a case of “eating his own dogfood,” so to speak, Milian even embedded the post as a wave and it has since received more than 350 blips.

“That experiment was definitely an eye-opener. My understanding of Wave has always been that it’s a valuable tool for small-team collaboration. So to see it succeed as a larger-scale crowdsourcing tool was unexpected to say the least,” Milian said by email. “People quickly swarmed the wave and provided a ton of really smart insights. Things we had never thought of.”

Read more here. 

Posted by Jon Lutz 

Internet Has Never Been More Dangerous

From InformationWeek an article reporting how malware and phishing schemes are becoming more common.  Here's an excerpt:

Between January and June this year, the number of fake antivirus programs detected grew by 585%, according to a report released on Wednesday by the Anti-Phishing Working Group.

During the same period, the number of banking trojans, designed to steal account information for financial sites, increased 186%.

The number of phishing Web sites reached 49,084, the second highest number recorded since the record of 55,643 in April, 2007.

And the number of hijacked brands hit an all-time high of 310 in March and remained at a high level through June.

Read the article here. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

Crime Reports

A new crime reports mashup is available here. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

Why the White House is Hiring a Social Media Archivist

The Whitehouse is attempting to archive its social media content.  Here's an excerpt describing what they are trying to do:

“In order to comply with the Presidential Records Act, the White House New Media team is looking for a non personal service contractor to crawl and archive PRA content on all third party sites where the EOP has a presence (i.e. Facebook.com/whitehouse, Twitter.com/whitehouse). Currently, the Government team is capturing the data and content both programmatically (via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) from social networks) and manually (through daily screen shots). EOP requires a provider to ensure we automatically capture this content in a scalable, efficient and reliable manner.”

Read more here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Yahoo to Launch New Research Tool

Yahoo's Search Pad was released Tuesday July 7th.  Search Pad allows users to save and take notes on search results which they can revisit later. 

Read about Search Pad on the WSJ Blog Digits here.

Try Search Pad here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Bing searches Twitter

Microsoft Bing now searches Twitter in real time.  Twitter has become increasingly important for keeping up on breaking news.  Many corporations provide press releases via Twitter.   LegalNews is available on twitter.

Posted by Jon Lutz

 

Federal Contracts by State

Here's another great Mashup called Federal Contracts by State.  It applies Federal contract data from Fedspending to charts created by Google Chart.  You can click on any state to display data. 

Try it here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Search and Track the Federal Register

You can search and track the Federal Registry at regulations.justia.com. For Example:

And you can setup an RSS feed to have the results pushed to you. 

Try it at regulations.justia.com.

Posted by Jon Lutz

OpenSecrets

OpenSecrets is another great government mashup.  Here's more information from their website:

OpenSecrets.org is the nation’s premier independent website tracking the influence of money on U.S. politics, and how that money affects policy and citizens’ lives. The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) launched the website following the 1996 elections. Before that time, CRP, founded in 1983 by U.S. Senators Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Hugh Scott (R-Pa.), published its work tracking money in politics and its effect on elections and public policy in extensive reports and books. The first Open Secrets book, published in 1990, was a massive 1,300 pages and analyzed contributions by political action committees (PACs) in the 1988 congressional elections. Featuring contributor profiles for every member of Congress, it was an unprecedented resource that illuminated money’s role in congressional elections and policymaking. Open Secrets also profiled the spending patterns of interest groups and major industries, and included an extensive "Big Picture" section on the patterns of PAC spending and the flow of PAC dollars to each congressional committee. The second edition of Open Secrets, published in 1992, added an analysis of large individual donations—a mammoth task that had never before been attempted.
The OpenSecrets.org website not only allowed the Center to expand its reach beyond those willing to invest in its     voluminous and expensive publication, but also greatly accelerated the timing and depth of its analysis, making the     Center’s research more readily available to those making decisions about candidates, policy and the influence of money.     For the 1998 elections, the Center produced online contribution profiles for every federal candidate well before Election     Day. For the 2000 elections, the Center unveiled several new groundbreaking features on OpenSecrets.org, including     detailed contribution profiles of more than 80 industries in the U.S. economy, fund-raising breakdowns for federal     party committees, and analyses of contributions from special interests to members of specific congressional committees.

Try it at www.opensecrets.org.

Posted by Jon Lutz