This has been making the Internet rounds: Microsoft may be investing $300-$500 million in Facebook. In exchange for the money, it would receive up to a five percent stake in the popular social networking site.

Also, according to the LinkedIn blog, LinkedIn members will soon be able to add a photo to their profile. . . . [more]

According to today’s Vancouver Sun and the Globe and Mail Davis & Co has just opened its latest office:

In a cobbled street in Zurich across from a newsstand and conveniently located near a rapid transit line, although most visitors would likely teleport in rather than take transit.

Up the slate-looking steps, the door opens onto a large lobby with a large round reception desk and the requisite office ferns. A notecard on the desk welcomes the visitor: “Davis LLP is an international full-service law firm”.

The lawyers involved include Dani Lemon, colleagues Sarah Dale-Harris, known as BarristerSolicitor Underwood . . . [more]

About a month ago, Agnes Caruso posted some thoughts about potential uses of facebook at work. A few days ago, I came across a story with another novel use: public health. The Globe and Mail reported that Toronto Public Health officials used Facebook to locate a woman who had been bitten by a rabid bat. Apparently the phone book, the police, and the media had failed. Even Google, whose “mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” couldn’t find her. But Facebook came through.

In an amusing twist, the article notes: “Employees of the . . . [more]

This morning, Simon complained about the NY Times having changed the Freakonomics blog feed to send only excerpts to your RSS reader. I was irked by that myself a few weeks ago, but have since solved the problem.

The solution is available here. You can simply enter the address of the partial feed, and it will pump out a url for a full feed of the same blog. Just cut and paste the new feed into your RSS reader. . . . [more]

Regular Slaw readers will recall that whenever we’ve talked about the outsourcing phenomenon, we’ve directed people to an extraordinary blog by our friend Ron Friedmann in DC.

Today Integreon, the global BPO operation, has announced Ron’s appointment as Senior V-P.

Integreon is already asking North American law students whether they want to work abroad as an intern.

Offshore internships for US, South American, European and Chinese law school and business school graduates

The Integreon Offshore Internship provides exposure for recent graduates of US, South American, European and Chinese law schools and business schools to business intelligence, research and

It started with the new laptop – the one with the network analyst who started telling me every time I lost my internet connection. I knew I had an issue with “dropped connections” but I did my best to ignore the issue. Once I started to count the number of pop-ups from the network analyst, however, it became clear it was time for action.

The first few calls to tech support were not helpful. They assured me that, at the moment we were speaking, I had a good connection – so it became a battle to see if I could . . . [more]

In requiem:

Monday Monday, can’t trust that day,
Monday Monday, sometimes it just turns out that way.
Mamas & Papas, Monday, Monday (c) John Phillips

I read, somewhere, recently, some figures about the number of blogs that start and die. Perhaps it was here. Perhaps it was elsewhere. No matter. The figures aren’t the point. Some blogs are still born. Some survive. Some, star-like, nova brightly and then fade in quiesence, perhaps to be reborn in the next cycle.

We all have other blogs we visit, and read, for any number of purposes. Today, I mention and rue the passing, . . . [more]

The fillip’s a little earnest today, inasmuch as it actually involves the word insasmuch and, more to the point, deals with a research tool.

But it’s kind of a fun one. Felix Nyffenegger has created a mind map way of approaching topics in Wikipedia. WikiMindMap works via a simple search function: you enter the term you would like dealt with in Wikipedia (in any of a number of languages) and get a set of topic heads linked visually to your search term. Based on the browser that drives Freemind, this tool shows you which topics are expandable and which lead . . . [more]

TIFF, the word was all over the Canadian media a week or so ago. For those of us that are technically inclined we might have wondered; at first glance, why our media of choice suddenly got so interested in a computer image format. Once we removed the indents of our keyboards from our fingers, we realized that the ubiquitous TIFF, was the Toronto International Film Festival. Alas, TIFF is not the only “FF” around, in these parts TIFF is merely the signal that the Atlantic Film Festival is about to start(AFF?). So with all the FF talk around . . . [more]

IBM has entered the office suite software fray in a big way with Lotus Symphony, their brand new suite of free apps, which includes a word processor, a presentation program and a spread sheet program. Symphony is based on the Open Document Format standard, and will read and export to Microsoft formats, as well as exporting documents as Adobe PDF files. Currently it’s available for Windows and Linux operating systems, with Mac to follow.

This cost free alternative to MS Office has got to interest firms, large or small, that will now be paying significant dollars each year for . . . [more]

Nebraska state senator sues God: read all about it, here. According to the report, the Deity “is accused of causing untold death and horror and threatening to cause more still.”

Let’s assume God can afford suitable counsel or will be able to find someone prepared to work pro bono for a “good cause”. This lawyer could take the brief even if concurrently working as a Devil’s Advocate, at least so long as there is no conflict. I think it is safe to assume God wouldn’t need to resort to the cab rank rule (if it applies in Ontario). Under . . . [more]

It may be nothing more than idle speculation at this point, but some observers are suggesting that a legal battle may be brewing over ad-blocking software for internet browsers (CNet News and NY Times). The most popular of these, Ad Block for Firefox, allows users to subscribe to a list of items that won’t be downloaded when visiting a website.

I use Ad Block and love it. While I have nothing against text ads, or even static banners, I’ve been driven to distraction one too many times by ads flashing, blinking, beeping or speaking when I open . . . [more]