April 13.—An extraordinary coincidence: Carrie had called in a woman to make some chintz covers for our drawing-room chairs and sofa to prevent the sun fading the green rep of the furniture. I saw the woman, and recognised her as a woman who used to work years ago for my old aunt at Clapham. It only shows how small the world is.

April 18.—Am in for a cold. Spent the whole day at the office sneezing. In the evening, the cold being intolerable

July 30.—The miserable cold weather is either upsetting me or Carrie, or both. We seem to break . . . [more]

For those of us who were unable to attend the 9th International conference on Law Via the Internet in Florence last year, the Vox PopuLII blog now contains a nice overview of the discussions. . . . [more]

Western Law has a new student paper, Amicus Curiae.

On page 7 of their second issue, released earlier this week, they profile some of the student bloggers in our school.

We have Legally Blogged, by Chris Crighton, who also maintains a site at Esse Quam Videri.

There’s also Dany Horovitz’s, Business Blogged, of the Financial Post Executive Blog. Dany is in the 3-year joint J.D./M.B.A. program with Ivey, the only one of its kind in Canada, and focuses more on business law. He also cross-posts to Law Is Cool.

And there’s a piece by Lawrence . . . [more]

We’ve observed a couple of Common Craft videos for new web technologies on Slaw over the years. The one that I remember most was their simplified explaination of LinkedIn that Connie posted last year. The same company has now released a 2.5-minute video about Twitter, a topic we covered a couple times last week:

For those looking to nail down a basic understanding, Jeremiah Owyang has started to craft a Twitter FAQ collection that may also be helpful. . . . [more]

Throughout this week Law Day is being celebrated in Canada. From the Ontario Law Day 2009 website:

Law Day is a national event celebrating the signing of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Originated by the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) and first held in Canada in 1983, Law Day is aimed at educating and informing the public about the role and importance of the law. Since many people have a limited knowledge about the law and how the legal system works, Law Day empowers the public at large. It provides an excellent opportunity for the profession to educate the

I picked up on a post this morning from Michelle Golden from the Marcom Writer Blog titled Pruning Deadwood from your Copy. The author Dianna Huff offers five solid tips for streamlining your content:

• Keep yourself to a specific word count
• Don’t fall in love with your copy
• Hunt down redundancies
• Print out the piece and look at it
• Consider *every* word

Knowing what an experienced group of writers we have here at Slaw, I was wondering if anyone would be willing to add to this list? Do you have a simple writing technique or strategy that trims volume . . . [more]

In a decision released earlier this month a strong panel of the Ontario Court of Appeal took a look at one aspect of the issue of what constitutes a “record,” in this case for the purposes of applying the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. M. 56. Toronto Police Services Board v. (Ontario) Information and Privacy Commissioner 2009 ONCA 20 entailed a request by a journalist for information stored in Toronto police databases in a format different from the one used by the police. The data could have been produced in the . . . [more]

The death of the billable hour has been (allegedly) imminent for at about two decades now. But by most accounts, at least until recently, the billable hour has remained as healthy as Mark Twain was when he responded with his famous quote to the rather incorrect rumours of his passing. (He actually did this twice with two slight different quotes – read more here)

I included the at least until recently above because I am seeing evidence that things are finally changing, at least in the corporate and larger firm worlds (and no doubt it will trickle down to . . . [more]

Taking off from David Canton’s post on the Economics of Spam, here’s a link to a survey from McAfee published today that has some findings that surprised me – One e-mail is like driving three feet:

An estimated worldwide total of 62 trillion spam emails were sent in 2008
Globally, annual spam energy use totals 33 billion kilowatt- hours (KWh), or 33 terawatt hours (TWh). That’s equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes in the United States, with the same GHG emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion United States gallons of gasoline
Spam filtering . . . [more]

Something with only a tangential relation to law, but squarely in the middle of our interest in online resources and libraries:

As of today all Canadians can log into the Canadian Cochrane Centre, part of “The Cochrane Collaboration,” and free of charge read abstracts in plain language of studies in medicine and health care — or, as the welcome page puts it:

…the best available evidence on which health treatments work, which ones don’t, and which may cause harm.

I have to say I’ve never encountered the Cochrane Library before and am basically ignorant about how it’s funded and . . . [more]

Here is a link to the settlement that Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum announced this morning to resolve a dispute about Matthew Bender’s subscription renewal practices. . . . [more]

Thanks to Yale’s Information Society Project, there are decent summaries available of the speakers’ and panelists’ remarks at the recent Library 2.0 Symposium, held at Yale Law School. (They’re presented something like a slide show, so you click through them a session at a time.)

This will give you some idea of what the symposium covered:

• Panel 1: The Future of the Library
• Panel 2: Ethics and Politics of Library 2.0
• Panel 3: The Challenge of Copyright
• Panel 4: Digitizing Collections

[via Law Librarian Blog] . . . [more]