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]

“You can’t do much without a brain. Decapitation is, in most instances, associated with a decline in IQ.” (my emphasis)

Hmmmm…..

Never mind.

On the other hand (so to speak)

Still, I’m going to assume that the emphasized phase shows that the writer-author of this bon mot has been in court recently. A tip of hat, so to speak. . . . [more]

KM Space, the excellent BLOG of Doug Cornelius, has a post today on the Microsoft purchase of a 1.6% interest in Facebook.

It’s easy to stop at the fact that this purchase values Facebook at $15 billion. Discussions with colleagues have yet to reveal the importance of Facebook in the business world (admittedly, I also thought that the internet would never last.) On what basis did Microsoft come to the conclusion that this investment makes sense?

Doug’s post suggests that an enterprise version of Facebook, delivered on the SharePoint platform, may be the goal. While SharePoint doesn’t have the name . . . [more]

The ICT Regulatory Decisions Clearinghouse (ICTDec) is an online resource that provides a one-stop access point to decisions originating from ICT [information and communication technology] decision making bodies such as telecommunications regulators, industry ombudsmen and specialized dispute resolution tribunals. Currently, ICTDec provides unified and simplified access to thousands of decisions available on the Web, as well as to selected decisions unavailable online.

…thanks to the World Bank and LexUM working together. . . . [more]

Some of us might find this handy:

The Canadian federal government just launched a website with information on unhealthy and unsafe food and child products. I haven’t used it yet, but the Globe and Mail says we can search for information by keyword, date, or product or company name. We can also browse product recalls going back 10 years. . . . [more]

I’m blogging from the LexUM conference Conférence Internet pour le droit / Law Via the Internet Conference, live. At the moment, Justice Bastarache is telling us that the Supreme Court of Canada is planning to make factums available online next year, at least in some measure. He is explaining all of the issues that the Court is currently considering, as it struggles to develop a workable policy concerning the electronic publication of these documents. The Court has not yet decided whether and how to “clean” the files of sensitive business or personal information; they are still consulting, but a . . . [more]

Following my jubilant post on Thanksgiving about all major English Canadian legal publishers now having new title RSS feeds, in her recent post Why Can’t We Be More Like Canada? UK librarian lo-fi librarian bemoaned that UK publishers are behind and have not equally taken up the call.

In response, legal publishing consultant Nick Holmes has now put together his own sample RSS feeds for Sweet & Maxwell and Jordans in an effort to urge the publishers on. He discussed the effort on his blog Binary Law in the blog post Feeding the five thousand (2) . lo-fi seems pleased . . . [more]

I earlier commented on the blog called Precedent-The New Rules of Law and Style, as did Jordan Furlong, here.

Well, that site has now been revamped as part of the launch of a new magazine under the same name published by Law and Style Media Inc. and edited by Melissa Kluger (she was key in getting Ultra Vires, the U of Toronto law student law school paper off the ground).

I unfortunately missed the magazine launch last night since I was not feeling well. I suspect, however, the magazine will do well since it fills a gap by . . . [more]