What Matters is an outstanding new website from McKinsey & Company. From the site:

We began last summer by asking researchers, academics, journalists, policy makers and executives to address ten big questions, whose answers will shape our collective future. In each case, we asked our essayists to take a long view and tackle tomorrow’s trends rather than today’s headlines.

We published those essays in a print collection, also titled What Matters. But our goal was always to translate that vision to the Web, to create a place where we could continue to frame the important questions and gather a

On behalf of trees everywhere I have made an initial inquiry with the powers that be asking why the weekly paper part of the Ontario Reports is not distributed only in digital format.

Although this issue may of less interest to those outside of Ontario, it does raise questions that are regularly discussed on SLAW.

Background: Members of the Law Society of Upper Canada receive a weekly paper part of the Ontario Reports as part of their membership fees. It contains (in this order): a Table of Contents with brief details of typically 5 to 7 cases per weekly . . . [more]

The Australian Communications and Media Authority plays a role somewhat similar to our Canadian Radio and Television Commission. Recently there’s been a kerfuffle over a list on Wikileaks purporting to be the ACMA website blacklist. The ACMA says that under Australian legislation it is required:

to take action if as a result of an investigation it locates content that is prohibited content or potential prohibited content. In the case of content that is hosted in or provided from Australia, ACMA must issue a take-down notice to the person hosting the content. ACMA has no power to direct the removal of

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]

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,

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!

The CanLII blog announced that their new legislation system is now live. It is not a Friday.

The main improvements introduced by this new approach are:

* Versions of statutes and regulations reflect real changes;
* Legislative updates are carried out on a weekly basis;
* Versions’ dates correspond to legislative changes, such as entry into force, amendment or repeal;
* You can search a legislative text as it was legally binding on a particular date in the past. Historical coverage is approximately five years;
* You can compare two different versions of a particular document;
* You can

Looks like CLB Media is pulling the plug on their Canadian Lawyer Associates magazine. This from an email I received yesterday:

“The Spring edition of Canadian Lawyer Associates magazine, now in circulation and available digitally at www.canadianlawyermag.com/associates, will be the last printed version of the publication. Market conditions have prevented this very well-received publication from gaining the advertising traction it needed to sustain its publishing schedule.

We wish to thank all those in the legal community who supported the publication through advertising and by supplying story ideas and editorial content which allowed us to publish and distribute five excellent issues

The vogue for several years in the major commercial legal publishing houses has been to offer data through “global platforms” that give the customer a single point of access to all of their proprietary and licensed content. A global platform enables the publisher to “leverage” its proprietary content from one country by selling it in another. In addition to expanding the scope of the product offering, a global platform offers an opportunity for online revenue growth by transactional and subscription sales of international content in the various domestic markets.

It all sounds like a great idea, especially in the boardrooms . . . [more]

Yesterday’s New York Times article Copyright Challenge for Sites that Excerpt by Brian Stelter explores the boundaries as to what is acceptable with regard to excerpting from news stories by other websites, and what is causing news publishers to become uncomfortable. When is it acceptable to quote the majority of an article in a blog post? Is it okay to take a whole RSS feed from a news source (which they are freely supplying), and republish it on a website with additional advertising?

It seems that it all depends on who is doing the republishing. Prominent free news aggregator Google . . . [more]

Thanks to a number of helpful suggestions from Slawyers, I’ve made some changes to LawTop — the Canadian law-related news aggregator I blogged about on Tuesday.

Most important, I’ve added another layer of manipulation, using Yahoo! Pipes to filter for Canadian content. Canadian news sources report on law-related stories from around the globe, but my true aim was to keep the focus as much as possible on Canadian events or stories directly related to Canada. This isn’t simply possible, given the lack of a sophisticated context identifier (Google’s “location” filter in the advanced news search isn’t really useful in this . . . [more]

The CanLII user group tour came to Calgary last night. It was a great opportunity for us westerners to see what is coming down the pike from the innovators at LexUM. Simon live blogged from the TO meeting and of course CanLII is often discussed here at Slaw, but I want to revisit one part of the new services currently in beta – CanLEX.

CanLEX is a a website which hosts some open APIs (application programming interface) that give tools for, among other things, automating links to the CanLII Reflex citator within a users documents. . . . [more]