Rasterbator is a free tool that turns any image into a huge poster. While you can have fun with pictures of family, friends or your pets, or monsters in your living room window for Halloween, for work purposes you could also use this app create a sign or to blow-up a chart or graph.

Rasterbator gives you two ways to blow-up images: You can upload an image to the Rasterbator site or you can download a Rasterbator app to your computer.

Rasterbator gives you a blown-up image that you can print on multiple sheets of paper. Assemble these sheets in . . . [more]

Take a look at the article by that title on the Canoe Tech page.

It questions whether the tendency for people to put reply messages on emails that they are on vacation, or talk about their vacation plans or current locations on Facebook and Twitter is setting themselves up for breakins. Most people would not have a home voice-mail saying they are away, or let newspapers pile up on their doorstep while they are away – so is letting the world know about it by one’s web 2.0 tools any different?.

Take a look at the article and feel . . . [more]

If you haven’t yet had your fill of reading about the sea change that’s running through the legal profession, you should read “A Study in Why Major Law Firms Are Shrinking” by Alan Feuer, published in the June 5 edition of the NY Times. Among the myriad points of interest within the article — I won’t attempt a summary — are references to blogs, where the aftermath of the lay-offs got dealt with, particularly abovethelaw.com and what the Times describes as “the wildly popular” lawshucks.com (what a great name).

From everything I’ve read, firms in Canada are laying . . . [more]

The impetus for the upcoming project on electronic medical records, to be carried out by Professor Pina D’Agostino, in assocation with the Law Commission of Ontario, was not all the notoriety around consulting contracts at eHealth Ontario, but all the talk in the news and Ontario legislature about the agency has motivated me to talk about the medical e-records project. . . . [more]

June’s issue of Canadian Lawyer just came out, with a great article by Glenn Kauth on using web tactics for client development.

There’s a few familiar faces (including yours truly), and some familiar platforms.

But what’s interesting about the piece is the rationale provided for why more big firms are not jumping into it. As a cost-effective strategy, some of these firms indicate that most of their clients are not heavily utilizing social media.

In my opinion, this misses the point slightly. Not only do bigger firms have the ability to produce more comprehensive and polished approaches to social media, . . . [more]

Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, a graduate student and an assistant professor, respectively, at the Harvard Business School, studied 300,000 plus Twitter users to see… well, to see what use it is. They presented their results last week in a catchily titled piece, “New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets” on one of the HBS blogs, which has subsequently been picked up by various news media. (See today’s BBC story, for example.)

Here are some of their findings, presented in point form:

• People understand how Twitter works: 80% of users had at least one follower

The 2009 Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing awarded to Slaw.ca is well deserved recognition of the innovative and substantive contribution that Slaw is making to Canadian legal literature. Wendy Reynold’s comment that “A Blog winning a legal publishing award shows that this model is mainstream now” is very telling.

Online legal research was pioneered by Hugh Lawford who not only launched one of the first online legal research services anywhere, but also built a commercial enterprise from a university research project that dominated the Canadian online market for two decades. Through his genius, drive and determination, Hugh . . . [more]

Spring was still in the air this week as Ontario’s Ministry of Research and Innovation sought a special someone to help it evaluate co-investors and investment applications for its Emerging Technologies Fund.

MaRS Innovation and its new CEO Rafi Hofstein were a match, with Hofstein bringing expertise from his previous gigs as President and CEO of Hadasit Ltd., the technology transfer company of the Hadassah Medical Organization in Jerusalem, Chair of Hadasit BioHolding Ltd., and Vice President Business Development for Ecogen, Inc., among other accomplishments.

Birds do it, bees do it, and now companies are doing it in all . . . [more]

Peg Duncan on Twitter points to an article on Law.com by an English academic, Adam Wyner, “Legal Ontologies Spin a Semantic Web.” (By the way, if you’re not following Peg on Twitter, you should be.) I was curious because of my interest in legal research and because of the the flirtation with the semantic web that Google Squared and Wolfram/Alpha seem to represent.

Obviously — to me, at least — if computers are going to be able to respond in a sophisticated, i.e. more helpful, way to our queries about law, there needs to be an agreed-upon set . . . [more]

Are you sick of us talking about Twitter yet? It seems the possibilities are only just starting to be explored. Lawyers Weekly reporter Luigi Benetton recently interviewed a few of us (including Michael Geist and Darryl Cruz of McCarthy Tétrault LLP in Toronto) for his article “Twitter in the courtroom: a fad, or here to stay?” (June 12, 2009 edition).

Some of the points discussed:

• this area is evolving quickly
• reporters “tweeting” from a trial is akin to reporters taking notes on behalf of the public
• messages on Twitter (or “tweets”) may not adequately characterize the full shape

To follow on from Carol Lynn Schafer’s post, “Do TOS Have the Final Word on our Fundamental Rights and Freedoms?“, readers might like to know that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched TOSBAck, a site that tracks the terms of service of 44 significant websites and notes when changes occur. Of course, there’s an RSS feed, which might be the most sensible way to keep track of what’s happening on the site. . . . [more]

The legal profession is on the verge of an extremely serious problem. If you want to see what it looks like, check out what Chicago-based firm Mayer Brown has just done. According to the Chicago Tribune, the firm has offered its new associates a deal: take a $100,000 pay cut (to $60,000) and go work in-house for one of the firm’s large clients like Kraft or United Airlines. The job is guaranteed for one year and not a day more — after that, if the company doesn’t keep the associate, she’s on her own.

It tells you something about . . . [more]