As I take a moment from battening down the hatches here on the East Coast today, I simply want to ask a question of Slaw-ers out there. What is the Quota of your institutional or company email account?

Not your gmail, hotmail, yahoo or whatever interweb service, but the email account supplied to you by your employer or institution. Here at Dalhousie I have a 97.66mb limit and after being on a little hiatus recently, I had to fight to get my inbox under control but also to stay under the quota. So I’m just curious as to what the . . . [more]

The current issue of the New Yorker has an article by Anthony Grafton called “Digitization and Its Discontents” that discusses the ongoing “tension” between the traditional print library model versus the Google Book projects of the world. The article is well written and provides an excellent general overview of the issues. . . . [more]

Joel Alleyne’s Extreme KM column this past week on Everything is Miscellaneous – A Must-Read Book enouraged me to move forward my plan to read the book. I read it last night and agree with Joel that it is “must reading.”

As Joel mentions, David Weinberger’s central premise in the book is that the “power of the miscellaneous comes directly from the fact that in the third order [note: what the author of the book means as our current era of digital information], everything is connected and therefore everything is metadata” (p. 105).

My initial cynical reaction to the book . . . [more]

The NY Times Technology section has been revamped, principally by bringing the Blogrunner technology stories into the page and giving it central place — literally in the middle. Blogrunner is the aggregator that the Times bought last year and that culls material from various blogs on a wide range of topics. This is the first time that the Times has incorporated stories from outside sources directly into its publication.

The Times Technology section cum Blogrunner, unlike TechMeme, doesn’t rely soley on an algorithm to choose pieces automatically, but rather on a combination of machine and human decision-making.

Relevant links are: . . . [more]

Steve Matthews, Slawyer and the person behind Stem Legal Web Enterprises, has once again shown his technical chops. Now that the Canadian legal publishers have finally come into this decade by putting out RSS feeds, thanks in large measure to his and Connie Crosby’s chivvying and chiding, ((See, e.g., Canadian Legal Publishers – RSS Feed Update)), there’s some interesting publisher data to work with.

Steve has taken advantage of the various tools that are out there now on the web to mix and to gather the feeds into one place, LegalPubs.ca.

There you’ll find an aggregation of . . . [more]

Today’s Bar Talk in The Globe & Mail suggests that the Canadian Lawyer Magazine is soon to formally launch its new magazine aimed at Associates (and to be called by the same name?). So far, there only appears to be “blog-like” postings on the website and it is not clear to me when the formal magazine launch will take place. Since most of the large Toronto law firms are doing student recruitment interviews next week, I thought the posting on the “Google Effect” by Donalee Moulton was timely – as per one of the persons quoted in that . . . [more]

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is pleased to announce the creation of the Humanities Research Network (HRN). HRN will provide a world-wide, online community for research in all areas of Humanities, following the model of the other subject matter networks within SSRN (http://www.ssrn.com).

We expect HRN to become a comprehensive online resource for research in humanities, providing scholars with access to current work in their field and facilitating research and scholarship.

At the outset HRN will have networks for classics, English & American literature, and philosophy. Naturally, in each of these subnets there’s a place for law:

• Classics

Wikipedia has been both celebrated and panned on these pages. Its strength is that anyone can edit it, meaning there are thousands of people out there to improve every article. Its weakness, of course, is that anyone can edit it.

A new site called Veropedia has recently launched. Its goal is to collect the best that Wikipedia has to offer and save it in a stable, quality-controlled version that can no longer be edited by anyone except Veropedia staff. Articles about which there no longer appears to be any controversy on Wikipedia (that is, they’re no longer marked for . . . [more]

Last week I was fortunate to attend the international conference Law Via the Internet held in Montreal, hosted by the good folks at LexUM who bring us our CanLII system.

Law Via the Internet coincides with the annual meeting of the Legal Information Institutes (or LIIs) from around the world.

Here are some of my take-away thoughts from the conference:

• free public access to law is key to helping developing countries eliminate poverty. Simply put, making the law accessible allows lawyers in a country do their job representing people, helping fight for people’s rights. Furthermore, organizations wanting to financially support

Today’s Glasgow Herald reports on a new service called CaseCheck, which is built on an open source blog platform. The service sprang from an innovative on-line dispute resolution service.

CaseCheck is a free online archive of decisions by the Scottish courts and industrial appeals tribunals launched on October 1. What makes it unique is the ability of readers to annotate the summary report of each decision, commenting on utility and coherence ((Family lawyers in Canada will remember that this was the service that the late J.G. MacLeod of UWO performed as he edited the RFLs)).

The next step is

David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined (2002) ((Weinberger, D. (2002). Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing.)) and one of the four contributors to the Cluetrain Manifesto (Levine, Locke, Searls, & Weinberger, 2000) ((Levine, R., Locke, C., Searls, D., & Weinberger, D. (2000). The Cluetrain Manifesto : The End of Business As Usual. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books.)), published a new book this year: Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (2007). ((New York: Times Books.)) The central argument for the book is that a new order in organizing . . . [more]

In trying to get into the Halloween spirit, I have conducted a small search for ghouly related material in various Canadian legal fields. However; the only mention of Halloween in Canadian Legislation is in the Proclamation Declaring October 31st of each year to be “National UNICEF Day”. Vampires do get mentioned in the Wild Animal and Plant Trade Regulations but there is no mention of werewolves, zombies, mummies,or dracula. Mummy’s do get mentioned quite often in caselaw but that is a different type of mummy than what is associated with Halloween. Some of the other ghoulies mentioned previously come . . . [more]