It may be nothing more than idle speculation at this point, but some observers are suggesting that a legal battle may be brewing over ad-blocking software for internet browsers (CNet News and NY Times). The most popular of these, Ad Block for Firefox, allows users to subscribe to a list of items that won’t be downloaded when visiting a website.

I use Ad Block and love it. While I have nothing against text ads, or even static banners, I’ve been driven to distraction one too many times by ads flashing, blinking, beeping or speaking when I open . . . [more]

Last week, Microsoft announced that it would be offering its Ultimate version of Office 2007 to any college or university students for 60 bucks (or $64 Canadian). In a nod to the reasons underlying their decision, they call their offer “The Ultimate Steal“.

Many students commenting over at digg.com suggested they had already perpetrated the ultimate steal and wouldn’t even be interested in paying the low price of $60 for a properly licenced version. Others wrote that Microsoft already had deals with their schools to provide low-price or free access to Office (of course, they typically pay hefty . . . [more]

How do you tell when there is a really old elephant in the room – maybe so old that people tend to forget it is there? Here is one way: if someone writes you an open letter notifying you. In the case of open source ILSs, maybe the ILS Customer Bill of Rights was a missed wake-up call. Maybe these were also missed:

• http://www.vufind.org,
• http://open-ils.org,
• http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/11133,
• http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/endeca,
• http://about.scriblio.net,
• http://www.extensiblecatalog.info/?page_id=2, and
• library thing and aquabrowser.

There’s a good article in the Economist on the new scheme, Peer to Patent, recently adopted for a trial by the U.S. Patent Office and also placed under evaluation by Britain’s Intellectual Property Office and the European Patent Office. Devised by New York Law School faculty member Beth Simone Noveck (let’s hear it for law profs!), the process has the patent office submitting about 250 applications in various computer fields to the scrutiny of the public, the thought being that the relevant communities will know more than the patent examiners about such critical matters as “prior art.”

The relevant page . . . [more]

Yahoo! have just started a new social networking tool called Mash. Thus far it is calmer and simpler than Facebook, MySpace and the lesser-known Ning.

From the Mash Blog:

We just started inviting our friends outside Yahoo! to join us in testing Mash: a new approach to online profiles. If you’ve used other online profiles before you’ll feel at home in Mash. But there are some new twists that make things a little interesting and, we think, a lot of fun.

1. You can make starter profiles for your friends. Think: “first round’s on me.”
2.

That too, sometimes, maybe, but not today.

Today’s subject is obliquely about something that will enrapture the heart of every litigator with deep-pocket clients: e-mail management and the fees associated with litigation that has extensive e-mail discovery.

Today’s message is also an opportunity to let others do my thinking for me.

I’m going to quote from a recent study by a US vendor [MessageOne, Inc.] which is generally applicable to Canada, too, titled “Critical Email Management Problems“. The study is available on-line here, although you might have to join ZDNet (it’s free – it’s worth . . . [more]

About eight years ago, I toured the country with a number of seminars conducted by the Delphi Group on corporate portals. Portals were quickly becoming an option for corporations (including law firms) and the market was raging with a number of portal vendors. Most of these are not around today as consolidation and evolution of the concept saw mergers in the industry, and many early entrants didn’t make it through the first few laps. But I was impressed then, and still am today, with the basic concept Delphi had developed and with their framework for thinking about and building portals. . . . [more]

Nothing remotely serious today. Which means a game.

Bloxorz is a game for those who like spatial puzzles. Essentially, you move a block around with the arrow keys until, by the right combination of flips and flops, you cause it to drop down the target hole. Make a mistake and your block falls off the edge of the universe. In case this all sounds way too simple for you, let me tell you that there are 35 stages you can be led through, involving hard bridges, soft bridges… But never fear, there are also highly detailed instructions — which some . . . [more]

On Thursday, August 16, the Chancellor of the University of California at Irvine offered Duke University constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky the job of dean at UC-Irvine’s brand new law school. Less than a week later he called Chemerinsky to withdraw the offer. It seems that the short-term dean’s politics were too left for the regents of the university, something they seem to have discovered only after the reaction by some conservative elements (donors?) to an op-ed piece by Chemerinsky in the Los Angeles Times criticizing the Bush administration.The Washington Post has the story.

Who of any scholarly merit . . . [more]

We learn from Technaute that Praized, a Quebec web2.0 startup, just got an 1M$ investment from the canadian branch of Garage Technology Venture, the venture capital company behind Pandora. Knowing that Pandora is now unaccessible to canadians, lets hope the same will not happen to Praized… It should not be the case due to the type of application they are developping. Here is a quote from their website:

Praized Media is a startup company working on a web-based application that will enable you to find and discover local places and merchants with help from people you can

According to a new study released in Statistics Canada’s Rural and Small Town Canada Analysis Bulletin, people living in rural and small town Canada have lower rates of Internet use than those people living in urban areas.

Highlights of the study:

• In 2005, only 58% of people living in rural areas and small towns used the Internet, well below the national average.
• The odds of a person living in a city using the Internet for personal, non-business reasons are about one-and-a-half times those of someone from a rural area or small town.
• Geographic location has an independent influence on

You may have noticed that the Google Custom Search box is gone and a new search funtion is in its place. Searching in WordPress blogs has always been a problem, for some reason, and while Google Custom Search was better than the built-in WordPress search function, it had its serious limitations: it would show comments as XML, and it threw up a great many duplicates and category pages full of irrelevant posts.

I’m trying a plugin, Search Unleashed, that would seem to offer pretty much all we might want. It searches titles, post content, comments and authors of these. . . . [more]