Zotero, the cross-platform Firefox note-taking and biblio plugin, now “does” legal research. That is, there’s a format for logging cases and statutes; and the site works “automatically” with CanLII and Lexis/Nexis. So, for example, if I go to the CanLII report of the Johnson v. Johnson case from the Alberta Court of Appeal –

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For those of you interested in the debate around old media vs. new media, this is very interesting: Statistics Canada released data demonstrating Canadians spent less time listening to radio in 2006 than in previous years. The data shows that much of the decline occurred among teens aged 12 to 17 and young adults aged 18 to 24. Statistics Canada also goes on to say that the popularity of digital music players and online music services have the biggest impact on this decline.

Surprise, surprise. . . . [more]

Creative Commons Canada published its Podcasting Legal Guide for Canada: Northern Rules For The Revolution this past weekend.

The document was released at the Podcasters Across Borders 2007 conference in Kingston, Ontario.

“The Canadian podcasting community is emerging as an important voice in Canada that deserves broad support and attention. While accessible and easy-to-use technology has removed many technological barriers for would-be podcasters, the legal challenges can be daunting. Podcasting touches on several legal areas, including copyright, trade-mark, and personality rights, each of which brings its own complexities and uncertainties. Conventional broadcasters typically enjoy the benefit of internal legal resources,

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This is a post of a few parts, and one that is probably so far off topic for Slaw that I wouldn’t have written it if the material it’s about weren’t so incredibly interesting — and important. I don’t gush often — at least, I think I don’t. But I’m gushing about this content.

1. I subscribe to the TED Blog feed and, so, received an entry about a presentation by Hans Rosling. It’s a 20 minute talk on the development of nations along a number of axes, which makes it sound truly dull. It is, in fact, one of . . . [more]

Read/Write web has a great post showing some of the Top Web Apps in Canada. Cool not just because it shows some great Canadian web companies like Mike McDerment’s Freshbooks, which I’d previously discovered via Rob Hyndman, but also for that nice preamble on Canadian Internet usage. Something that should be said more often:

Canadians use the Internet more than anyone in the world. According to comScore, Canadians spend on average 39.6 hours per month on the Internet, followed by Israel at 37.4 and South Korea at 34, while the USA is in 8th position with 29.4. Canada

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I maybe should save this for Friday, but I found out about this link through the Canadian Association of Research Libraries listserv. Its from a May 18th posting on Facebook:

A Fair(y) Use Tale
YouTube, May 18, 2007

Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University provides this humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms . . . [more]

Xerox is touting it’s new semantic search development, Fact Spotter.

The “smart” search engine can comb through almost any document regardless of the language, location, format or type; take advantage of the way humans think, speak and ask questions; and discriminate the results highlighting just a handful of relevant answers instead of returning thousands of unrelated responses.

“Our advanced search engine goes beyond today’s typical ‘keyword’ search or current data-mining programs, which typically end up searching only 40 percent of all the documents that are relevant because the keywords are too limiting,” said Frédérique Segond, manager of parsing and semantics

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Information overload remains a serious issue for many (information) professionals. At a recent knowledge management (KM) conference in New York sponsored by WestKM and Recommind, I presented a paper on the topic of information overload. I discussed three main aspects:

1) The History of Information Overload

2) The Negative Impact of Information Overload

3) KM Tips and Techniques to Combat Information Overload . . . [more]

Connie’s Friday Fillip of a while back included a link to this amazing paper, Magic Ink, which reconceptualizes computer programming as information design and graphical design. Combined with this startling presentation from TED of what Microsoft is doing with SeaDragon, which allows endless zooming in and out, I think the end of the HTML website is nigh. Imagine a Google Earth of your entire collection, only you design the landscape. Time to learn more about the graphical representation of information. . . . [more]

SearchCrystal is probably search engine number sixteen million, and like anything nearly out of sight down the long tail it has to be different to attract attention (or is it that you’re near the tip of the tail because you’re different?). In the case of SearchCrystal the difference is visual, which makes it somewhat hard to describe and also somewhat hard to figure out at first.

For one thing, Crystal searches five indexes: Ask, MSN, Yahoo, Google, and ExaleadNew to me. Obviously search engine number 15,999,999, at http://www.exalead.com/search, allowing you to see the top ten of the results from . . . [more]

The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (which might have been better as the Centre for Study of Crime and Justice, but nevermind) has released a report, “Law-abiding majority? The everyday crimes of the middle classes” [PDF], by Professor Susanne Karstedt and Dr Stephen Farrall, that shows that 61% of the English and Welsh middle class have committed a crime “of every day life.” The data are as follows:

offence % Paid cash in hand to avoid taxation 34 Kept the money when ‘over-changed’ 32 Taken something from work 18 Avoided paying TV licence 11 Wrongly used identity . . . [more]

Like many in the blogosphere, I took a look at Yahoo Pipes back in February when it launched, and then I dropped it. In my case this was because it wasn’t “easy peasy” to make it do nifty things. But I’ve gone back again and am more determined this time to make it sing and dance. Among other things I need to learn how JSON works, because it lets you put Pipes content directly into a web page without the need for it to pass through any other processor, as it would have to as an RSS feed. I need . . . [more]