Captain Copyright is no more. Challenged by just about everyone, especially the Canadian Library Association, the Canadian super-hero for children thinking about copy-theft has been taken offline and replaced by a statement by an unnamed person or group that finishes with the wish:

We truly hope that there will come a time when the copyright community – including educators, librarians and copyright collectives – can work together to provide a unbiased teaching tool that provides teachers and students with a balanced view of copyright.

There’s a move afoot to get rid of the www that graces the front of almost all web URLs on the very sensible ground that it’s unneccesary (the nifty word for which in geek speak is “cruft”). no-www.org, which, you’ll note, itself lacks the sextuple-u prefix, is encouraging folks to arrange things such that their sites take traffic on the bare domain name — which Slaw does, by the way. I almost always find it best, when giving out this blog’s URL to say simply slaw.ca; and the CBC does it without fail.

Try it yourself when entering a . . . [more]

It would seem that Google is about to launch a presentation creator service to compete with Microsoft’s PowerPoint. The buzz is that this new app is to be called Presently, which is cute and about which a bit more, well, presently. I gather that this was discovered by some resolute geeks who are able to mine the Google Docs server — and let that be a warning to you that nothing online is secure. The hackers say that with Presently you’ll be able to convert documents into presentations, which can have themes, and the whole will have a zoom capability. . . . [more]

Because it’s Friday (and thus a duly licensed day of silliness on Slaw) and because it’s Munro Day, here is a quite extraordinary experiment that Penguin Books are carrying out.

Can a crowd – a very large crowd – write a piece of creative fiction?

To see how the experiment is going visit the experiment’s website. The experiment is being monitored – and blogged about – and is now getting ten hits a second. Looking at the history of the last two days, it looks as if very many fingers have been over the prose.

A team of editors . . . [more]

Because I hate to feel left out of anything, and love how blogs, podcasts and photos via the web allow us to feel almost like we’ve been there, I’ve found a few more links regarding LegalTech that took place in New York this week:

• Thomson West podcast – this week with Monica Bay, editor-in-chief of Law Technology News from American Lawyer Media, talks about LegalTech (also check out Dennis Kennedy’s predictions for law tech in 2007);
• Monica Bay also covers LegalTech in her blog The Common Scold;
• PureC, communications blog, had a bit of coverage: Interview with Monica Bay

Munro Day in Nova Scotia it may be. But it’s also Groundhog Day. Here in Ontario the good news is that Wiarton Willie, depicted above (yes, the image is “shadowed”), didn’t see his shadow; and in Nova Scotia Shubenacadie Sam, a resident of the eponymous town, also failed in the same way.

The rodents in question (properly Marmota monax, cousin to squirrels, rats, marmots and the like) are featured along with their U.S. cousin Punxsutawney Phil on a brief CBC news video.

This is indeed good news, but a little nuts, no? Well, there’s a history of sorts . . . [more]

Happy Munro Day everybody! I’m home today owing to the pre-cursor to Harlequin novels. And speaking of stories with painful plots, I thought it would be appropriate to share the story of the Halifax Regional School Board, which is currently a board of one. For many months, back in the fall, it seemed that the HRM school board could barely agree on a seating arrangement for their meetings, forget about substantial business. So after some time the NS Minister of Education dissolved the school board in December, citing the powers granted the minister in section 68 of the . . . [more]

An email announcement today from Cornell Law Library for a new Legal Research Engine

According to Julie Jones from Cornell,.”this specialized search engine helps users easily find authoritative online legal research guides on every subject. It searches approximately 20 different web sites that either prolifically publish guides, or index and link to guides. The number of web sites searched was deliberately kept small to keep search results manageable and focused. You can also add it to your Google home page”

I’ve done a preliminary run through the site, and it looks well constructed, although still very print and text oriented. . . . [more]

Bill Maes, the Chair of Canadian Intiative Digital Libraries (CIDL) announced the dissolution of CIDL effective 31st March 2007 and endorsed Alouette Canada as the logical successor to develop Canada’s digital collections. I’m optimistic that this will mean that Alouette Canada will take over the Inventory of Canadian Digital Initiatives. . . . [more]

There’s been considerable updating to the Ontario Bar Association’s Canadian E-Discovery Case Law Digest. . . . [more]

Those of you who prefer RSS feeds to email list might like to know that The Court, which I’m managing at the moment, has taken an email subscription to each of the Supreme Court services — Bulletin and New Judgments (via LexUM) , and News Releases — and turned them into RSS feeds. You can subscribe by clicking on the appropriate feedicons, or by going to The Court and checking the sidebar.

You may be interested in how we did it: We created a blog in Blogger for each of the email lists; we then activated the ability . . . [more]

A blidget is a widget that will take your blog content and make it into a widget that can be used anywhere to display your sites content.

Simply enter your site’s url, give your blidget some style with the layout, theme color and title etc and then publish your Blidget. If you aren’t already registered with widgetbox, you’ll be asked to register before your Blidget will be published. Once published, you can promote your blidget on your site with a button or just leave it at widgetbox for people to grab.

Check it out at Widgetbox.

Here’s what a . . . [more]