Tribunals
An astonishing number of issues in the UK are now decided by tribunals, conducted with varying levels of formality. The reliable Freepint Newletter has just produced a useful guide to the tribunals and their websites. Well worth adding to your bookmarks.
Chicago Crime Map
Bored with the Internet? Want to see something wonderful? Take a look at Chicago crime database | chicagocrime.org.
You can find crimes by location, time, type, type of location, etc, etc, which is very impressive. Best of all, you can see all these dodgy activities on a map of the city.
If only someone would do this for London, or Manchester, or Glasgow … or Cheltenham. But what chance is there of the right information being publically available here? Answers on a postcard to Number 10 Downing Street.
Corporate Websites
An interesting article on analysing corporate websites to find interesting material, from the excellent FreePint newsletter. Nothing earth-shattering here, but solid advice about checking the ownership of domain names and so on.
UK Law (Not LA Law) Online
Thousands of UK legal judgements and law reports are coming online for the first time, free, thanks to a new initiative by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute). They call it Unleashing the full force of the law, although that somehow sounds more Judge Dread than Rumpole Of The Bailey.
Online News On The March
According to a the Newspaper Association of America, nearly one web user in three now reads online newspapers.
Good news or bad? Hard to say.
Sources– Who Needs 'Em?
An orgy of recrimination and breast-beating in the States, where various technology publications have discovered that a freelance reporter called Michelle Delio has been in the habit of making up unnamed sources.
That such a thing could happen, in the home of journalistic sanctimoniousness! It all reminds me why I always tell reporters, news editors, editors and everyone else who comes to me for training that unnamed sources are a refuge of last resort and not a routine part of reporting.
Most newspapers here banned them until they crept in via the parliamentary lobby system. They should have stayed banned, except in those rare cases where a story with a genuine public interest at its heart could not be told otherwise.