Google TV brings the internet to the box. Surely work will follow.

Today is the day The Times disappears behind a paywall. The formerly free online presence of the “Thunderer,” the TimesOnline, is now dark and has been replaced by two new websites: thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk. Visitors to those sites will be greeted with an invitation to register for a free preview for the month of June and then to subscribe for a fee.

The Times new online presence [click to enlarge]

Those who want free online news from the U.K. might now visit The Guardian, which seems to have embraced the opposite approach to the difficulties posed by the . . . [more]

Since I’m just back from France I thought it might be fun to point to one of the few government sponsored videos (entitled Crepes) that actually uses humour to get across a point about the necessity for interjurisdictional co-operation in the handling of accident benefits.

It comes from an excellent French blog, Precisement.org.

Les différentes voies de la communication juridique de l’Union européenne
Une histoire de crêpes
Ou la nécessité de coordination des sécurités sociales en Europe exposée en vidéo

It’s all about the need to carry your social security card on holiday. The EU Video . . . [more]

A ramble on law firm names.

Facebook's founder says we're all to have one identity now. There is legal danger here & moral wrongheadedness.

. . . [more]

1L – an accepted acronym in some areas for a first-year law student. Some prefer other labels with more letters.

3L – a label for a 3rd year law student, some of whom will soon be foisted on the deserving public.

2L – where many Maple Laff fans figure they’re bound for now, 0r in, now that it’s between the Laffs and the Cubbies, and the odds are the Cubbies will exit first. Is there a Mr. Applegate and a Joe Hardy in the Laff future?

Stanley’s Cup -without the apostrophe, something for which the NHL planned to move the . . . [more]

Here it is only Thursday and Google’s offering us some fool-around fun. Spreading slowly across the Googlesphere is the ability to change the background image on the iconic search page. See, for example, my partial illustration below, using the image of a blooming cactus from my garden, chosen for no better reason than that it happened to be in an accessible Picassa albumn. (Click on it to see the full glory.)

You can choose from among the glitzy photos or solid colours (try white) provided by Google, or you can upload pics of your own, which will be inserted into . . . [more]

CNA releases 2009-2010 FOI Audit. Federal government not doing well. Exceptional Valedictory address.

If a picture’s worth a thousand words ( — who coined that, anyway? perhaps one Fred R. Barnard, who, I hope, with a name like that learned to draw — ), a well designed logo is worth millions. Words and money.

Seems paradoxical, perhaps, that an image so lean, so simple should be that powerful. In part the power that these commercial glyphs have comes from the fact that they’re repeated endlessly, presumably because of some marketing equation that runs “cognition = recognition = approval = purchase”. But ubiquity is only a part of it: there’s the small matter . . . [more]

or why some people suggest there was an even better reason for Sidney Carton meeting the fate he met.

 2010 ONCA 230 and 2010 ONCA 400. 

There are court proceedings whose existence is explicable (to me) only on the assumption that the client found a lawyer who would represent the client for a fee that the client was prepared to pay and the lawyer prepared to accept. 

It’s my view – I know others disagree – that in this country lawyers who practice civil litigation are not ethically required to accept a brief just because it’s in their area . . . [more]

In the last couple of days there’s been quite a buzz among bloggers about Nicholas Carr’s proposal that web content creators experiment with taking hyperlinks out of their texts and gathering them instead at the end. He calls it delinkification. Now that the thoughtful Jason Wilson, who is, among other things, a columnist here at Slaw, has joined the experiment, I thought it might be interesting to bring it to the attention of our readers to see what they think about it.

Carr’s basic concern about visible links within the text has to do with his claim that they distract . . . [more]