The folks over at CERN, the home of the World Wide Web, are celebrating today. It was 20 years ago that Tim Berners-Lee came up with the idea. From info.cern.ch:

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is where it all began in March 1989. A physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, wrote a proposal for information management showing how information could be transferred easily over the Internet by using hypertext, the now familiar point-and-click system of navigating through information. The following year, Robert Cailliau, a systems engineer, joined in and soon became its number one advocate.

The idea was to connect

A tip of the hat to Gerry Blackwell at Canadian Lawyer magazine for his writings on technology. More specifically, in this month’s issue (unfortunately not available through a link) he discusses the progress that colleague Elizabeth Ellis has made at her firm with SharePoint 2007. Last month, he also managed to take my rambling comments and convert them into an article on knowledge-sharing.

I enjoy Gerry’s writing and he was very interested and approachable in discussing technology issues. To his credit, he balanced my comments on the use of technology with the importance of the “people” factor in knowedge sharing, . . . [more]

I have spent the last week deciding between whether to buy a netbook or a laptop.

A netbook was tempting for both the low price ($300 to $400 range) and as an experiment with Linux and OpenOffice (for some netbooks). However, a large number of online reviews pointed out the limitations of netbooks: smaller keyboard, not much memory, and sluggishness, especially those using Windows XP or Vista.

Ultimately, the advice from a colleague helped me decide in favour of a laptop. His advice? Is it for travel or is it for work? Since I wanted to use it for work, . . . [more]

Three items here.

When I was in Newcastle-upon-Tyne last month I met an old friend Councillor Ron Beadle, who told me of the ways in which English politicians are using Facebook as ways of keeping in touch with constituents and supporters. I’m more likely to get responses from English politicians that way. Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta’s new book Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom has much on how the Obama campaign deployed Web 2.0 technologies.

But let’s come closer to Canada.

In last week’s NDP leadership convention in Toronto, Peter Tabuns had more money. But there is a fascinating . . . [more]

In 2006, the United Nations General Assembly called on the Secretary-General of the organization to establish a database on the nature and consequences of violence against women, and on the impact and effectiveness of policies and programmes to combat it.

The database was launched last week.

There are a number of ways to search the data:

• Country pages
• Advanced search (type of government or policy measure; form of violence; country/region; year; and keyword)
• Good practices

Sources for the information include:

• States parties’ reports to human rights treaty bodies
• Information provided by Member States in follow-up to the Fourth World

Started in January, the Kluwer Arbitration Blog is from Kluwer Law International. They have pulled together a range of contributors from practice, academia and legal publishing for this focused cooperative blog. From one of their first posts:

The international arbitration world is a unique epistemic community. We come from every corner of the globe and yet we all deeply care about the same issues. We number in the thousands and yet there is a remarkable degree of collegiality among our members. The arbitration world is marked by an astonishing variety of individuals who share the common attributes of cosmopolitanism,

An item in yesterday’s Bits (“Better Search Doesn’t Mean Beating Google” NY Times – Technology) talked about a search engine that promises to do things differently. Wolfram|Alpha, the creation of mathematician Stephen Wolfram due out in May of this year, has been much ballyhooed as using “a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation” ((Wolfram Blog)) to provide answers to your questions, rather than lists of websites that relate in some fashion to your search terms.

Apparently, Wolfram has been making strong claims for the novelty and ingenuity . . . [more]

Here is a link to a thoughtful article in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology by Hofstra Professor Katrina Fischer Kuh entitled Electronically Manufactured Law – Why the shift to electronic research merits attention.

It seeks to understand how present and future changes in the communication of law, including electronic legal research, influence the legal profession and legal practice. It explores how the shift to electronic research is likely shaping the law in little-noticed, but nonetheless significant, ways. . . . [more]

A year ago, we mentioned that the Law Foundation of Ontario had launched a project on access to legal information and legal services by linguistic minorities and persons living in rural or remote areas. It focussed on access to two components (legal information and legal services) by two groups who can face isolation in our communities (linguistic minorities and persons in rural or remote areas). We should have updated that report to note George Thomson’s report issued in January, and the creation of a website on the topic.

It discusses the digital divide in terms of rural access . . . [more]

I just received this message via Facebook:

Hi Creative Commons Cause,
As you have probably heard, Facebook has been revising their terms of service.

This has spawned a grassroots movement inside Facebook to encourage the platform to adopt Creative Commons licenses, similar to Flickr or blip.tv‘s implementation.

The group has gained momentum and already has almost 2,000 members, so we thought we would point it out to you, our supporters.

Check it out if you’re interested in organizing for this feature and see some of the mockups of what CC-in-Facebook might look like:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=55178542061

Thanks for your continued support!

This year’s Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference will be taking place in Halifax, NS May 24-27, 2009 with business meetings on Sunday, May 23rd and sightseeing tours and a pre-conference workshop on Saturday, May 22nd. . . . [more]

A contentious policy week on both sides of the border:

• In Canada, a meeting this week between the Canadian Association of University Teachers and Gary Goodyear, Canada’s Minister of Science and Technology descended into a shouting match over cuts to research funding announced in Canada’s 2009 federal budget.
• In the U.S., old controversies were stirred by the introduction of the Patent Reform Act of 2009(high-tech vs. biotech); by the Supreme Court’s ruling, in Wyeth v. Levine, that drug makers are not exempt from state tort liability (tort reform vs. plaintiffs’ bar); and by the nomination of Kathleen Sibelius to