A very interesting event on the microcontent front, technology publisher O’Reilly will start selling their books by the chapter in PDF format. From the press release:

Sebastopol, CA–In today’s Web 2.0 driven publishing marketplace, it takes new and creative strategies to get authors and their work noticed by web savvy readers. But even when it is noticed, today’s readers increasingly want content in new and convenient ways that suit their digital lifestyles. Along with traditional print formats, they want content they can read on computers, PDAs, and cell phones. For this reason O’Reilly Media–the pioneering publishing company that coined the

Tired of getting your news in the same old way. For a break, try the Fontself Newsmaker. You get to choose from 11 traditional news sources — BBC, Le Monde, El Pais etc. — and from five hand-drawn fonts in which to read the news. You can also read a feed of your choice in the Newsmaker, as you can see below in the excerpt from the prior post on Slaw.

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There’s a handy legislation table that’s newly posted on the Queen’s University law library site. It gives you links to the statutes and regulations, bills, gazettes, Hansard, orders in council, government and legislative assembly, and courts for each of Canada’s jurisdictions.

Where you see the cockeyed spider in the chart, they’re missing a link, so let law librarian Nancy McCormack know if you can fill the gap.

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Web 3.0 — sorry about that: not my coinageDon’t know where it originated, but this page contains a good discussion of it.: but you’re going to hear the term a lot so get used to it — means to describe the movement to turn websites into web services which make their information available for developers to play with. Amazon got there a long time ago (in web time) and the snowball, getting exponentially bigger, is about to loom large enough to blot out the horizon. One factor that’s pushing the thing is the popularity of widgets, those mini programs that . . . [more]

Just a short post (since I’m on the road) but the O’Quinn Law Library has launched a site called The Anglo-American Legal Tradition which reproduces images of legal documents from Medieval and Early Modern England from the Public Records Office in London.

The site includes a useful overview essay on Legal Tradition and Legal System by Professor Robert C. Palmer.

But the site now means that we can do serious work with original documents, even if one has to learn how to read legal texts that look like this:

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Remember The Milk is a simple web application that manages your to-do lists for you. I looked at it some time ago, and decided after a bit of play that it wasn’t for me. Nothing wrong with it, but not what I needed.

But now things are looking different and I’m back experimenting with it again. What caught my eye was the recent announcement that Remember The Milk (hereinafter RTM) was making use of the new Google Gears to function offline as well as online. Add to that integration with Google Calendar, a widget for your Google homepage — . . . [more]

Check out Avvo, the recently launched website that rates (U.S.) lawyers. [hat tip: Rob Hyndman] Aimed at non-corporate consumers, Avvo rates lawyers on the basis of:

their number of years in practice, disciplinary sanctions, and professional achievements. The data comes from multiple sources, including state bar associations, court records, lawyer websites, and information lawyers provide to Avvo. We have created a mathematical model that considers this information and calculates a score on a ten-point scale.

Rob Hyndman tells us that 10 days after launch Avvo was made the defendant in a class action brought by and on . . . [more]

I’m stealing a leaf from the new NYTimes book blog Paper Cuts. On Wednesdays they feature a writer’s playlist “[b]ecause books and music, on good days, just seem to go together.” Well, I say Friday and music just seem to do the same thing, and so here’s a short playlist from me. I’ve tried to include links to samples of the music, and in some cases I can only hope you’ve got iTunes on you machine to make the iTunes sample work.

Let’s have your playlists, with or without samples. I’m always trying to broaden my musical tastes and . . . [more]

The U.S. Library of Congress has put a lesson on the web called “Taking the Mystery Out of Copyright.” Aimed at kids of about ten, I’d say, there is a series of animated movies retailing the party line. In one lesson the history of copyright is set out in such a way as to suggest, to my eye, at least, that things in Europe were in a bad way and then America began to invent copyright and tighten it more and more and more over the years, all as a matter of progress. Not a word about Creative Commons or, . . . [more]

Google has now enabled us to create “custom search engines on the fly.” You tell Google the URL of the page you want the ability to search — e.g. your own blog main page — embed the resuting code in your page, and then when a search term is entered into the Google search box on your page results will appear from all of the sites linked from your page.

This would, in effect, create a search engine out of all of the sites on your blogroll, which, if your blog focus was sufficiently tight and your blogroll . . . [more]

Far be it from me, to suggest whom the cylons are in Battlestar Atlantica, but as this has been prominent in the news this week, at least in this part of the country, I thought I would go find the text that has been the subject of so much ink and hot air.

From Nova Scotia:

From the Federal Department of Finance:

Newfoundland and Labrador

From the Federal Department of Finance

Human Computation

Google TechTalks July 26, 2006 – with Luis von Ahn, assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University

From the abstract:

Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This talk introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to solving such problems focus on improving software. I advocate a novel approach: constructively channel human brainpower using computer games.

This video runs about 52 minutes but is fascinating; I started watching and couldn’t look away. . . . [more]