The first paragraph of some spam that appeared again in my spam folder – I expect some of you have received variations of it – reproduced exactly:

FORGIVE MY INDIGNATION IF THIS MESSAGE COMES TO YOU AS A SURPRISE AND MAY OFFEND YOUR PERSONALITY FOR CONTACTING YOU WITHOUT YOUR PRIOR CONSENT AND WRITING THROUGH THIS CHANNEL.I GOT YOUR CONTACT FROM A PROFESSIONAL DATABASE FOUND ON THE INTERNET WHILE SEARCHING FOR A RELIABLE AND HONEST PERSON THAT WILL ASSIST ME TO SAFE GUARDAO UND INTO AN ACCOUNT OVERSEA. I WAS DIVINE LYINSPIRED TO PICK YOUR NAME AMONG ALL OTHER NAMES FOUND

. . . [more]

♬ ‘Cause I’ve been searching, oh yeah, searching,
My goodness, searching every which a-way. Yeah. Yeah.
But I’m like the Northwest Mounties,
You know I’ll bring her in some day. ♪♪
[The Coasters, Searchin’ by Jerry Lieber & Mike Stoller]

A blog post this morning about a new feature on Google got me thinking about spelling and searching. Google’s Suggest will now offer searchers different suggestions depending upon their locations within the U.S. Thus, to use their example, someone in San Francisco who searches for “bart” will be taken to be searching for the Bay Area Rapid Transit rather than . . . [more]

Educause is an interesting organization, with relevance for anyone working in or near a law school:

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. EDUCAUSE helps those who lead, manage, and use information resources to shape strategic decisions at every level.

Educause Review always contains interesting articles, and the new edition is no exception. Richard N. Katz’s Scholars, Scholarship, and the Scholarly Enterprise in the Digital Age looks informative. Also in this issue: Lawrence Lessig on Copyright (I thought he quit that beat), and Larry Sanger on knowledge . . . [more]

As Simon detailed recently the issue of online comments and the identities of those who make them is a going concern and the concern in question arose here in Nova Scotia this week.

A recent story about issues within the firefighting department in a local weekly publication The Coast, elicited various comments in the online version of the paper. People who were targeted by those comments took exception to the comments and went to Nova Scotia Supreme Court to request an order for the Coast and Google to reveal the names and IP addresses of the commenters, neither the . . . [more]

The news today tells of hundreds — nay, thousands — of flight cancellations because of the volcanic ash still spreading through the atmosphere from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull. Just in case you’re numbered among the disappointed vacationers, or if you’re disappointed because you didn’t even have a vacation planned that could be cancelled, this fillip’s for you. Thanks to the wonders of the internet and the (still wonderful) older miracle of photography, you can do an armchair tour of all sorts of places well under the level at which the ash is spreading.

The particular vehicle I recommend today is 360Cities.net, . . . [more]

Colleague and fellow blogger Patrick DiDomenico has started a blog called iPad4Legal that is further whetting my appetite for an iPad. He describes his new blog in these terms:

iPad4Legal is a blog about iPads as they pertain to lawyers, law firms, and the legal profession. We may occasionally stray and discuss iPhones or other Apple products since the technologies often overlap.

Another colleague described iPad as good for content consumers (which I am) but perhaps less so for content creators (which would be perhaps disappointing but something I suspect Apple would improve upon). The obvious interest will be in . . . [more]

A couple of waves aligned in my universe today:

• I followed a link to “Watching the Digital Detectives: The Arrival of Next-Generation Legal Skills” written for the ABA Law Practice Today by Ernie Svenson of Ernie The Attorney
• The Alberta Government introduced Bill 16 Traffic Safety (Distracted Driving) Amendment Act, 2010

Ernie’s article (I will address him by first name since frequently reading his good stuff makes me feel like we are close friends) mentioned his experience with a class of law students he was presenting information to:

Almost all of them had a laptop in front of

. . . [more]

There is an interesting case being heard right now in the Ontario Superior Court (reported in the Financial Post on April 7), which claims that the province’s marijuana prohibition violates the freedom of religion protections in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Yesterday the OpenParliament site for Canadians, today an open data site for us. Like its parliamentary cousin, though, DataDotGc.ca is not, alas, a government initiative; rather, it’s the work of a group of private citizens led by David Eaves, a B.C. activist and public policy wonk. As they say on the site:

Unlike the United States (data.gov) and Britain (data.gov.uk), Canada has no open data strategy. This must change. Canadians paid for the information gathered about our country, ourselves and our government. Free access to it could help stimulate our economy and enhance our democracy. In pursuit of this

. . . [more]

That’s the motto (or slogan for those who prefer the Gaelic) of the University of Texas at Austin, which today announced a new three-year joint degree programme combining a Master of Science and Information Studies and Doctor of Jurisprudence (MSIS/JD).

The new programme “responds to an increased need for specialist trained to help address legal issues arising from the increasingly complex and changing world of information use, retrieval and storage in the 21st century.”

For those interested, eligibility is set out here.

For all the hype, the sample course selection here is fairly ho-hum, just plain vanilla . . . [more]

The issue of archiving Tweets has come up before. But now Google has an even better suggestion through a Twitter archive.

Google suggest using the tool to identify how the news broke, or see what people were saying about a specific popular issue. Anyone watching the Guergis/Jaffer affair last week would probably want to check out #bustyhookers (I’m not just being gratuitous, there’s a really interesting story behind it for those who weren’t following).

I can see it being used for public relations metric purposes, but also discovery for future online defamation cases. Some have expressed concerns about the . . . [more]

Just announced (by Tweet naturally) is that every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total in the last four years numbering in the billions.

The announcement is timed to coincide with the Twitter developers conference in California.

One wonders just how future researchers will grapple with all of this content. . . . [more]