A Slaw 6 – It’s a Draw

Not one thing today, but six, “A Slaw Six,” a new flick of the fillip that I’ll try from time to time.

1. indexed

A blog of witty sketched graphs and Venn diagrams on 5 x 8 index cards.

2. Bob Truby’s Brand Name Pencils

“a visual encounter with the incredibly diverse world of brand name pencils”

3. JetPens

Japanese pens and stationery. (Okay, okay, and pencils too.)

4. (Online) Etch a Sketch

An oldie but a goodie. Draw, rinse, repeat.

5. Road Signs: Children’s hair-dress world-wide

Monsieur Jean – coiffeur – displays . . . [more]

Well, not by everyone, but by the efforts of thousands of people at least. That’s how the giant Oxford English Dicitionary was created, as pretty much everyone knows.

Reading The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester recently, I was struck by a few parallels between then and now — or, rather, between that and this. One thought was that this is a pretty good illustration of the wisdom of crowds, so popular nowadays. Of course, it depends on the crowd you hang with as to how wise the product will turn out to . . . [more]

The Law Society is calling for lawyers to participate in a demonstration at Downing Street about developments in Pakistan.

Supporting lawyers in Pakistan

Thursday 08 November 2007

The Law Society, the Bar Council, and the Association of Muslim Lawyers have raised strong concerns about the treatment of lawyers in Pakistan following their demonstrations in support of the rule of law. Andrew Holroyd, Law Society president said:

‘Events in Pakistan must be of concern to everyone who supports the rule of law, and they underline once again that the rule of law is nothing without lawyers. I can think of no . . . [more]

I won’t bombard Slaw readers with a weekly report, but wanted to relay my thanks after a really great first week for LegalPubs. Over the past 7 days, the website has averaged over a hundred visitors a day, and the RSS feed more than 3500 product views. See the stats graphic below:

After some tinkering, I’ve got the new product email alerts working, and have added a mobile version using the same service as Slaw. I’m not sure how many librarians are doing their collection development work on a blackberry, but it was a 15 minute addition, and certainly . . . [more]

At the top of Slaw’s home page you should see an experiment with the new Google AJAX News Bar. I’ve asked it to return news of “Pakistan” “Musharraf” or “Bhutto”, giving you the search term, the source and the title to the item. Linked news items are set to open in a new window.

I won’t leave this in place forever, but I thought it might be of interest first of all because it demonstrates a new way of displaying a news search and second because of the concern I’m sure we all have about the state of law . . . [more]

The Conference Board of Canada’s report “What Others Think of You Matters: Manage and Boost Your Corporate Reputation Using Social Media” (creating a free e-Library account is required to access the report) discusses the steps involved in creating an effective corporate social media strategy. The steps discussed include:

FIND: Begin with a reputation audit. What are consumers saying about you on Facebook, MySpace, blogs, etc?

LISTEN: Read the online conversations/comments about you.

PLAN: Make the information that you collected in the previous steps actionable. How do you want to position your company/firm? Do you want to develop relationships . . . [more]

Back in June I wrote about Powerset, a start-up aiming to become an important natural language search engine. At the time I said, “I’m probably wrong, but this one feels like it might go a mile or two.”

Since then I’ve become one of the Powerset Labs volunteers, let into the alpha test phase, and if anything my sense has strengthened that these people are on to something important and useful. Along with perhaps a couple hundred other active volunteer testers — there’s growning bench strength, and I imagine more and more will move from passive to active roles . . . [more]

The British Broadcasting Corporation has a report about a survey to choose the most bizarre and ridiculous laws still on the books in the UK.

Some 4,000 people took part in the poll by the British television channel UKTV Gold.

Among the silliest laws, according to the vox populi (or is that vox dei?):

• It is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament
• It could be regarded an act of treason to place a postage stamp bearing the British king or queen’s image upside-down
• In the UK, a pregnant woman can legally relieve herself anywhere she wants
• It is

All of you, I’m sure, are aware of Radiohead’s recent experiment in distributing its most recent album. Rather than release a CD, the band made its music available for download from its website, giving “customers” the choice of paying whatever amount they wanted for the album. The results of the experiment are of interest to both music industry executives (who can’t believe an artist would cut them out of the loop) and classical economists (who can’t believe a rational consumer would pay for something they can get for free) alike.

Early results on the experiment are coming in. A company . . . [more]

As I said I might, I did in fact “feed” IBM’s Many Eyes with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, just to see what a “tag cloud” for it would look like. You can get to it here, or by clicking on the image.

As you can see our anxieties — French, English, language — are writ large. (En anglais, il faut dire; je me demande comment la version français apparaîtrait et s’il y aurait des differences entre les versions…) I’m glad to see “law” is larger than “government.”

The site uses Java, so you’ll have to have that . . . [more]

Many law firms appear to have implemented or will be implementing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) for online network collaboration and search.

A Google Blog Search on: *sharepoint law firm* has any number of interesting and relevant posts on its applicability to a law firm environment.

From a recent post (sorry, can’t remember where from) I saw mention of a fairly recent “pedia” (or is that “wiki”?) for SharePoint called SharePointPedia that I don’t think has yet been mentioned on SLAW. They describe themselves in these terms:

SharePointPedia.com is a web site where people discover and

Speaking of visualizing legal information, as I was just a post ago, here’s the Brazilian 1988 Constitution done as a “tag” cloud. It’s one of the Visualizations on Many Eyes, an IBM experimental particpatory sandbox. The graphic is linked to the site, and you’ll need Java on to see it. You can search for terms (in Portuguese, naturally) and the cloud display will give results that reflect your search term as it changes letter by letter.

I can’t say that this is ideally what I’d do to a legal document but it does at least give a different perspective. . . . [more]