And how are we feeling today?

A feeling might be the most private thing — experience — we have. It seems to happen deeper inside us than our heady thoughts. But very very often, what inside will out. And nowadays that outing of our feelings takes place on the internet, thanks to the facilities of Twitter, Facebook, Buzz and all the usual suspects.

What if someone collected all of those expressions of emotion and made them available to the curious? If someone did that it would look like We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. These guys build . . . [more]

Last night UWO Law hosted a presentation by law and undergraduate students of the trial scene from Merchant of Venice. Following the play, an appeal was heard to the Western Law Moot Court, featuring an all-star line-up.

Shylock’s sentence was appealed by Earl Cherniak, QC, and the Attorney General of Ontario Chris Bentley represented Antonio.

The bench in the appeal consisted of Justice Ian Binnie of the Supreme Court of Canada, Justice Eileen Gillese of the Court of Appeal for Ontario, Antoni Cimolino, General Director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Professor James Purkis from the Department of . . . [more]

We’ve all heard the saying “there is no such thing as bad publicity” – but of course we don’t take that literally. 

Apparently, though, research has shown that when it comes to online reviews, negative reviews can result in more sales than positive reviews.

That was one of the points made by Mitch Joel during his keynote address on Monday at Fanshawe College’s eMarketing conference. (I spoke at one of the breakout sessions on “Digital Law”.)

He says there are two reasons for that. First, people tend to trust the business more as they feel the business is being open . . . [more]

I’ve been a faithful follower of Cryptome for quite some time. Cryptome has been posting very interesting and controversial content on the internet since 1996. It was the first WikiLeaks. Recent readers would note some publications that are very interesting for those who are interested a look at the level of cooperation of between internet service providers and law enforcement. Some of the reaction has been overblown, in my view. Nobody should be surprised that service providers hand over customer information in response to warrants and subpoenaes. Where the law requires it, banks do it, pharmacies do it, libraries . . . [more]

Slaw contributor Ivan Mokanov, Deputy Director of LexUM, has an interesting and informative post this morning on VoxPopuLII entitled Environmentally-Friendly Citations. He discusses Canada’s neutral citation, its history and structure, and the extent to which it has been embraced by practitioners, the judiciary, and other tribunals. He also discusses CanLII and the mechanics of RefLex, CanLII’s citator. Cheers to Rob Richards, editor in chief of VoxPopuLII, for the heads up. . . . [more]

♫There’s a Long, Long trail a winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing
And a white moon beams.
There’s a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true;
Till the day when I’ll be going down
That long, long trail with you…♫

Lyrics by Stoddard King, Music by Zo Elliott, “There’s a Long, Long Trail” (WWI song).

This is a co-operative Canadian weblog on things legal. I thought that, as a Canadian who is observing firsthand an interesting event taking place here in Vancouver, I would take a moment and blog about . . . [more]

The 140 character limit on Twitter may be a constraint for some, but it lets others go retro.

On February 20, an antique Commodore VIC-20 (circa 1981) at the Personal Computer Museum in Brantford, Ontario was used to send a tweet. There was a CBC report on YouTube the day before, and the event itself was recorded for posterity here.

The program had to be loaded into memory from a cassette tape. Talk about constraints! . . . [more]

It’s a big freebie today, a big filmic freebie: HotDocs, the great Canadian documentary film festival, has opened its online library to us all. I count 171 movies for you to choose from, some as short as 6 minutes, others a full hour-and-a-half.

The basic site lets you browse the films sorted by title or by year (1951-2009). And there’s an alternative version of the site done in Flash that lets you filter by subject, time, date and language, or a combination of these facets. As well on the Flash site you can create your own playlists.

What do . . . [more]

Here’s a niche for the eager young lawyer: equine law (or might we say “equiny” — emphasis on the ‘whinny’ ). Makes sense, of course. There’s “a law” of pretty much anything of value in our culture. Horses, though their general use preceded the death of the buggy whip by a bit, are still with us, or some of us, that is, and are bought, sold, trained, treated, and, sadly, mistreated, all events that can have legal ramifications.

I happened across Equine Law and Horsemanship Safety, A resource for horsemen, lawyers and law students, a site at the University . . . [more]

Simon has mentioned the challenges of writing for the screen, and the prospects for tomorrow’s texts.

An announcement from Macmillan describes an ambitious model for moving popular student texts to a web platform with the ability to have dynamic linking and enriched content. Textbooks will no longer be flat. The new service is called Dynamicbooks.

So far, the texts chosen appear to be in the hard sciences, where presumably knowledge is more stable than it is in the human sciences, and is universal. No sign of anything similar on the legal front, where markets are much more fragmented . . . [more]

From the PEW Internet and American Life Project: The Future of the Internet IV.

From the website:

A survey of nearly 900 Internet stakeholders reveals fascinating new perspectives on the way the Internet is affecting human intelligence and the ways that information is being shared and rendered.

The web-based survey gathered opinions from prominent scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology developers. It is the fourth in a series of Internet expert studies conducted by the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. In this report, we cover experts’

Cartooning is an art, and caricature is art with a cutting edge. No one was better at it than David Levine (1926-2009). His inked, crosshatched marvels graced the pages of the New York Review of Books for over forty years, during which Levine captured the essence-in-time of three-and-a-half thousand subjects. The New York Review has put all of these online, a brilliant gallery of the second half of the last century. Here’s Nixon, Updike, Albee, and Scalia. And here, too, are greats from history, such as Chaplain, Velásquez, Einstein . . .

But let me get out of the way . . . [more]