Two completely different spheres have my thoughts overlapping like a Venn diagram. A recent interview with Arianna Huffington in the Financial Post and links from the Law Librarian Blog (among many other sources) showing an Inside Look at the WestlawNext and “New Lexis” Platforms.

Both these articles touch on monetization of web delivered services and how content producers may reap the rewards of their labours.

The Huffington Post model:

The Huffington Post is committed to the link economy and our business model is advertising-supported. The Greek philosopher Herodotus … said you cannot enter into the same river twice, and

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Yesterday, two members of Slaw were given an in-depth look at the most profound re-engineering of a legal research system since the migration to the Web. In Thomson Reuters’ impressive Eagan facility we had a briefing on the new Westlaw – to be launched at New York LegalTech next Monday under the name WestlawNext.

WestlawNext is the culmination of five years of research and development and a massive amount of customer research into how legal research is actually carried out. . . . [more]

Are there any concerns from a risk management / liability perspective over the following warning/error message on the e-Laws website I noticed just now:

NOTICE OF ERROR
From December 18, 2009 to December 29, 2009, the e-Laws currency date should have been December 14, 2009.

See the screenshot here:

Do you review all of your legislative research from December 2009 within this time period?

Part of me says “no” since the Legislative Assembly adjourned on December 10, 2009, (to resume on February 16, 2010) and there appears to have been only 2 proclamations gazetted during the time period in question. . . . [more]

Plastic grenades alarm clients. That’s one of the examples in this interesting Dallas lawyer’s blog about some (U.S.) law firm marketing campaigns that pushed the envelope, perhaps a bit too far… . . . [more]

Rise Up. Creating your own stable financial future

My column this month is dedicated to personal finances. I greeted the New Year like so many other people I know – with a financial hangover that no aspirin was going to cure. Instead of the doctor I called my new neighbor on Salt Spring Island, financial planning guru Karin Mizgala, MBA, CFP, to share her best tips on how to put money woes to rest for good. Karin co-founded the Women’s Financial Learning Centre and has a financial planning column with the Financial Post.

The foundation to a stable financial future

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I realize we are not likely supposed to promote products here on SLAW but I really, really like both IrfanView and the Microsoft Snipping Tool as revolutionizing the ability to visually explain things in an HTML email (and I realize I am likely behind the curve on this one).

I am a visual learner and like to see things in a picture. Since there is often insufficient time for in-person training, it helps to be able to visually explain to someone in an email where to click on a program or what words to input into the database. Both of . . . [more]

I learned recently that the University of Alberta has been digitizing microfilm or microfiche from the collection of Canadiana.org and placing the scans on the Internet Archive. (There’s a PowerPoint presentation online that will give you some sense of U of A’s digitization projects.) At present a search for [contributor:(canadiana.org)] turns up over 22,000 items. Of these, just under 800 are tagged “law” in some respect.

There is no attempt to catalog these items in any useful way, which means a researcher must rely on searching — not the easiest thing on the Internet Archive. (For example, . . . [more]

While doing my monthly domain name shopping, I stumbled upon what might be an interesting blog: http://www.ontariorulesofcivilprocedure.com/ It was created only 3 days ago and has no content, except the logo of the law firm behind it: Fraser Milsner Casgrain. Can someone tell me what is the big red square on top of their logo?

The Hollywood Reporter writes: Facebook is back in the Canadian Privacy Commissioner’s doghouse. According to the Privacy Commissioner’s news release of January 27, 2010, another investigation of Facebook has been launched in response to a new complaint – filed over changes made by Facebook in mid-December 2009, which required users to review their privacy settings. (See my previous posts part I, II and III looking at these changes.)

The complainant alleges that the new default settings would have made his information more readily available than the settings he had previously put in place. . . . [more]

The most recent issue of The Lawyers Weekly provides a snapshot of the quantative output of the justices of the Supreme Court of Canada in 2009:

“Looking at the opinions the individual judges wrote last year (as distinct from judgments they simply signed on to without comment) Chief Justice McLachlin and Justice Charron were the most solid majoritarians in the sense that they did the least concurring and dissenting, both wrote a total of nine majority or unanimous opinions, and Justice Charron wrote more unanimous judgments than anyone else — five.”

“Justice Charron and Justice Morris Fish spoke most

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Simon beat me to the punch mentioning the iPad. I’ve been watching a live-blog of the event. These are my first impressions.

It’s meant for things like “Browsing the web. Doing email. Enjoying and sharing pics. Watching videos. Enjoying music. Playing games. Reading ebooks”. Jobs says it has to be better than either a phone or a laptop at these,or its not worthwhile.

It certainly looks good in his demo — works like the iPhone — indeed, iPhone apps work on it.

Pricing: $499 for 16GB. 32GB is $599, 64GB is $799. 3G models cost an extra $130. $629, 729, . . . [more]

“You hold the whole web in your hands”.

“What this device does is extraordinary. It is the best browsing experience you have ever had”

It has a 9.7-inch multi-touch display and a battery life of 10 hours. For those who care, here is the liveblog feed. . . . [more]