School

As I Posted about last week, I attended Mashup Camp at the Computer History Museum this week. It has been a packed couple of days. I mentioned before I was not really considering entering the Speedgeeking Contest that occurs at each Mashup Camp.

Last week I attended the MacWorld Conference and Expo 2008 in San Francisco as I did last year. The reason I did not write a post on my blog for the event however is because I'm pleased to announce that I have written an article reviewing MacWorld for the distinguished e-zine, LLRX (The Law Librarian Resource Exchange). I've always had an itch to get into journalism and the publication of my first article in a respected online magazine is a very exciting announcement for me.

We at the Justia team have been working hard on improving the already fantastic service by adding in some great new features. We have already made it easy to browse through the case filings and find cases filed by court, but now we have added in a new feature, once you are on a court page, you can get a list of Judges and browse down a level further to get all of the cases seen by that particular judge. Like the court pages you can subscribe to an RSS feed of all of the cases with that judge, or filter the results more by picking a type of lawsuit and showing only particular types of cases.

The bigger upgrade however is that we have now taken the cases back further and instead of just showing cases filed since 2006, we have gone all the way back to the beginning of 2004. The reason we have added 2 additional years of cases into our system is so that we can also add in even more information about cases then ever before. We have retrieved from the Federal courts, thousands of written opinions, orders, and decisions by Judges and made them available for downloading. Cases that have written opinions are signified on Justia Federal Court filings and Dockets with a Gavel Icon (), while featured cases where we have retrieved all documents filed in the case are signified with a Star icon ().

I personally have never owned a TiVo box, primarily because I knew there were a number of DVRs on the market that did not require a monthly subscription and I didn't see the benefit to paying $12/month for something I thought I could get for a one time fee.

TiVo and Amazon have signed a deal recently that actually made me think twice about this policy however. As most people know, Amazon unveiled their Amazon Unbox program earlier this year to not much applause. After all iTunes has had video downloads for a while now, and it just didn't seem to make sense to buy movies from Amazon when I already had iTunes. Add to that the fact that Amazon Unbox does not work on a mac as their video drm is PC Only and I didn't give Amazon a second thought when it came to purchasing single episodes of TV shows or directly downloading movies. Similar to the reasons I previously mentioned why I didn't give TiVo a second thought, why would I get something that would require it's own monthly service when I could buy a cable box with DVR built in, or better yet, build a MythTV (though that requires lots of effort and is buggy).

But then TiVo and Amazon signed a deal that I believe is mutually smart for both companies. Amazon Unbox now can be linked with your TiVo account, which means that as you are browsing the web from anywhere, (even away from home) you can purchase a movie or episode on Amazon, or even Rent a movie (something you can't do on iTunes) and then when you come home (or turn on your TV if you already were home) you'll find that in your Now Playing List on your TiVo, the episode or movie is already there, ready for you to watch on your TV or (in our case) Projector.

I decided to take the plunge and find out. I purchased a TiVo and linked my TiVo account with my Amazon account, and now I've learned what I've been missing with Both services.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of this year's MacWorld Conference and Expo, which my wife and I got to attend, was not the announcement of the iPhone, but the lack of the phrase "And now, one more thing" which has been Steve Jobs' catch phrase at his keynotes for quite some time now. Since Jobs didn't use it this year, I'm going to shamelessly steal the phrase for the day and say "And Now, one more thing from Justia". I mentioned previously, that I was already working on the next project after Dockets and that Justia would be announcing it soon. My boss announced it today on a legal mailing list, so now I can finally talk about Justia Regulation Tracker at RegulationTracker.com!