Some time back I subscribed to the Canadian law blogs that Slawyer and Vancouver Law Librarian Steven Matthews so helpfully listed on his VLL site. Of the 60 or so, many have fallen by the wayside. My feed reader let’s me find “dinosaurs” — those blawgs that haven’t kept up with developments in whatever period of time I choose. Here’s my list of those that haven’t had a post within the last 30 days or more:

A few others are on my watch list; for me, it has to be an extraordinarily good blog for me to hang in there . . . [more]

A new Punjabi search engine, Aflatoon, launched a few days ago. It clearly aims to tap into a regional market, and, according to interviews given to the papers, particularly that involving cell-phone users seeking quick, locally useful information. Its limited scope and teething pains (it doesn’t seem able to handle more than one word in the search box, and when it finds nothing you simply get… nothing) mean it likely won’t be useful in our work — however it might be something you’d use as a last check to see if you’ve missed some Indian reference you wanted. Still, . . . [more]

Which is how the Educational Testing Service makes its money — though no profit. And the big test hereabouts is the LSAT, of course. Some of you won’t want to go within ten feet of the LSAT again, and I understand completely; but others of you may never have seen the beast and, so, may be interested in discovering what all the fuss is about. You can do that by examining an online version — a test of the test, so to speak — that contains the kinds of questions the answers to which can make or break a . . . [more]

I’m sure some/many Slaw-ers have seen this, but for those you who have not, I think this is a great summary (especially for those of you who are visual learners) of Web 2.0 (in about 4.5 minutes).

The Machine is Us/ing Us…

Credits at the end of the clip. . . . [more]

My day to praise websites. And while I could colour The New Yorker website with a vaguely lawyerly hue, this one is definitely something else altogether: Rouxbe is a brand new Canadian “how-to” cooking website. With food the new porn, there is a plethora of cooking sites out there, most of them okay and a lot of them very much sub par. Rouxbe (pronounced “ruby” I imagine) is simply excellent in almost every respect.

You’re presented with a list of recipes on video; you can watch a brief preview or the full recipe. The full recipe takes you step by . . . [more]

Up near the top of my list of journals and magazines you’ll find The New Yorker. The articles and fiction are first rate, the cartoons without peer, and the overall wash of general and current knowledge truly valuable in my effort to stay au fait — at least at what I think of as the “well-informed lawyer” level (I could never hope to achieve the general knowledge of a librarian!). It’s always been a print thing for me: I would only go to their website to grab a URL for an article I’d read in the mag so I . . . [more]

Not one of our usual subjects, but because it’s going to be a hot topic – this just from the SCC

  . . . [more]

A First Announcement has gone out that IFLA, the International Federal of Library Associations and Institutions, will be holding its 74th general conference and council in Quebec City, August 10-15, 2008. The conference theme sounds, hmm, vaguely familiar: “Libraries without borders: Navigating towards global understanding”. More details to follow. Oh, if you are part of the masses signing up for Facebook this month, check out their Facebook page.

On a related note, this year’s conference is being held in Durban, South Africa. 2009 will be in Milan, Italy.

The Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations and . . . [more]

LexisNexis has announced the results of a survey examining how information professionals are adding value to their organizations through the use of Web 2.0 technologies and knowledge management. Some key findings:
-Most info pros are using intranets for managing and distributing information. They also regard collaborative workspaces, wireless and portals as important to the future distribution of information.
-While many info pros use blogs and wikis to access information, not alot of use is being made of audio and video podcasts.
-Training, IP services and quality control procedures are just a few of the responses given by info pros when . . . [more]

When you change a post to a blog you’ll likely send out a repeat of the original feed for that item with your changes. In most RSS readers, that will show up as a duplication, I think. But in mine, at least, I have the option of making the edits visible in the original entry. So, it’s fun to see what an excerpt from a BBC news feed originally looked like (in red) and what the editor ultimately chose as replacement phrases (in blue). I wonder if it’s summer intern time at the Beeb.

US accused over ‘ghost detainees’
BBC

Simon Archer directs us to a Sydney Morning Herald piece from a couple of weeks ago reporting the public offering of shares in a law firm, Slater & Gordon Ltd., pretty much a first in the common law world. As Simon A. points out, Australia changed its laws to allow such public participation. The prime concern about letting law firms adopt this corporate financing model has to do with a potential conflict between a company’s duty to its shareholders to profit and lawyers’ duties to the client and the administration of justice. The SMH piece says that Slater & . . . [more]

I use an offline RSS newsreader — NetNewsWire (for Mac), syncing via the online reader, NewsGator — and find that having my feeds available all the time is a help when I travel. Now for Mac and Windows users alike Google Reader is available offline once you install Google Gears, their new RIA framework I blogged about last week. This makes an ever improving news reader just that bit better. . . . [more]