The New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen the word ‘unfriend’ as its 2009 Word of the Year:

“unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook. ”

“As in, ‘I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight’.”

” ‘It has both currency and potential longevity,’ notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. ‘In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year’.”

While the BBC reported this weekend on Pods and Blogs on the extraordinary growth of Tweetminster, the place where real life and politics tweet, in Ottawa it’s a different story. NDP member Charlie Angus wants Canadian MPs to declare Twitter off-limits, because of some personal abuse in the House last night. Here’s the Globe’s commentary and yesterday’s story.

As someone who has sat through enough late night House sittings, at which not all Honourable Members were entirely sober, I can report that abuse that doesn’t quite get reported in Hansard is not unknown within Canadian democracy. I’m not . . . [more]

♫ To face the friends of Mr. Cairo
..
From Chicago to Hong Kong
Via Istanbul the Talking Tong

Dirty rats thru’ prohibition
Money flowed thru gangsterism

Or Edward ‘G’ and all those guys
Who always shoot between the eyes
Between the eyes
Between the eyes…♫

Music by Vangelis, lyrics by Jon Anderson, “The Friends of Mr. Cairo”.

Bradford Bleier, unit chief with the FBI’s cyber division along with other ‘cyber-officials’ stated at an American Bar Association conference on Friday that:

“Hackers are increasingly targeting law firms and public relations companies with a sophisticated e-mail scheme that breaks into their . . . [more]

I gained lots of insight from Day 1 at the LawTech Canada conference earlier this week.

Deloitte, one of the sponsors, had two good sessions on enterprise content management and on preventing information leakage. On the topic of enterprise content management, I realized that my paper on “The 7 Faces of Legal Knowledge Management” (here in PDF) was, in part, discussing enterprise content management without using that phrase (to the extent that most knowledge managers in the legal environment manage a wide variety of information across the organization).

There are, however, I think 2 main reasons knowledge managers . . . [more]

Ian Blue, a partner at Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP, has issued a challenge to the constitutionality of legislation that forbids importation of liquor into a province unless it is sold to the local liquor board or commission. The legislation is, curiously, federal, as we noted in a post last September.

Section 3(1) of the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act (IILA), passed in 1928, forbids the interprovincial movement of alcohol (and, presumably, other “intoxicating liquors”) except as part of a transaction involving a provincial agency. Yet, Blue argues, this provision is at odds with s.121 of the Constitution Act, . . . [more]

An announcement early today from Google Distinguished Engineer Anurag Acharya that Google Scholar now features major cases, as well as an ability to search in legal periodicals for case citations.

I thought initially it was just American, but searching on the following names brought interesting results:

Donoghue v. Stevenson 2380 hits
R. Drybones 849 hits
Delgamuukw 956 hits
Mabo v. Queensland 2770 hits

Google hat-tips “several pioneers, who have worked on making it possible for an average citizen to educate herself about the laws of the land: Tom Bruce (Cornell LII), Jerry Dupont (LLMC), Graham Greenleaf and Andrew Mowbray (AustLII), . . . [more]

Are you a librarian/archivist who also happens to be a Grateful Dead fan? Your dream job awaits.

The University of California in Santa Cruz is looking for an archivist to maintain the band’s archive (consisting of fan letters, photos, tour schedules, posters, recordings, and personal correspondence). The position is an academic appointment, it offers a salary of up to $68, 892, and it becomes available March 2010.

More information on this opportunity:

• Job posting
• The Grateful Dead Archive, University Library – Special Collections & Archives, University of California in Santa Cruz
• National Post article “Like, hey man, no running in

Take the newest search engine on the block for a spin. Launched today, Factery is not your father’s search engine: it doesn’t just throw up a raft of links. Instead it searches through a set of links to extract facts relevant to your query from the pages the links point to. At the moment, which is the alpha, experimental moment, Factery is pointed at those links that appear in Twitter and Yahoo Boss search results.

This is the kind of value added search functionality promised by semantic search engines — those that aim to understand syntax enough to recognize, in . . . [more]

From time to time here we’ve added to your information on information overload, a problem that seems particularly to bedevil lawyers — but then, when time is money, attention is costly and, so, to be jealously guarded. (One “pays attention,” after all.) Too, lawyers are by a professional deformation attached to the old ways, and therefore it may happen that their stare decisis becomes a stare inventiis. But lawyers aren’t the only ones, of course, who shake their heads (briskly) at all this newfangled twittering away of our lives; and some worriers step back a metaphorical league or two . . . [more]

While I bounced back and forth between Toronto and New York this week, a lot of other things were bouncing around in the world of biotech:

The U.S. stimulus funding to promote adoption of electronic medical records bounced across the border to Ontario, where a new program was implemented through the Ontario Medical Association. The Ontario program provides an amount of cash per physician comparable to the U.S. funding, plus it offers consulting help and provides funding for upgrades.

Novartis bounced $1 billion of its R&D efforts to China, and in the same breath called India’s upcoming decision on a . . . [more]

Not sure if YouTube is your thing? Alabama trial attorney Lew Garrison has created a YouTube-like site for law-related video, called LegalTube. According to Law.com, the site was launched on September 1st after four months of development. It is billed as a video directory for finding lawyers, but in addition to advertising video, there is legal humour, courtroom stories, and a “webisode reality series” called Law After Dark. The site also has a news alert video series on drug recalls and class action lawsuits.

And in case you were wondering, LegalTube has its own channel on . . . [more]

Although tweeting from a courtroom remains controversial, tweeting the content of a live webcast should be rather conventional, but is still a useful enterprise.

I was in the middle of a take-home midterm when I realized that the Omar Khadr hearing at the Supreme Court of Canada was on CPAC. After a few searches on Twitter, I realized that although people had posted that it was occurring, nobody in the legal community was covering the contents live (or almost live – a Senate broadcast delayed it).

I gave it a go, although the proceedings were well under . . . [more]