October 18, 2010 was election day for municipalites in Alberta. My husband made his choice in the afternoon at our polling station, with one person in line in front of him. I made my selection for a Division 1 Councillor for Lac Ste. Anne County around 6:10 p.m., on my way home, with no one in front of me in line to vote.

There were news reports for city election results, and some blog activity in larger centres, but in rural Alberta election news, and results, and even platforms were mostly silent. Especially on the web.

Prior to the election, . . . [more]

A couple of years ago I posted about Ubiquity, a Firefox add-on that let you summon up and execute a variety of useful browser commands with simple shortcuts. For various reasons I never did make the use of the feature that it deserved, and then I switched away from Firefox because I found it slow.

Now the idea is back again, this time in a cross-browser way that’s going to make it more useful. The application, if that’s what it is — perhaps “feature” or “set of commands” would be a better description — is called Quix, and . . . [more]

Last week Nicole Garton Jones, a BC-based lawyer and fellow Slaw contributor, provided some thought-provoking commentary on the position of the Law Society of British Columbia on the topic of Virtual Law Firms, as discussed in the latest edition of the organization’s Bencher’s Bulletin. In the bulletin, and subsequent response to Ms. Garton-Jones’ post, the LSBC identifies several key concerns relating to cloud computing for BC-based law firms, namely:

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The last couple of years I have been living vicariously through Twitter, doing my best to follow the discussions at the Internet Librarian International (ILI) conference that takes place in the UK each October. When people who are attending start emailing me things they have learned (as happened this year), I really know I am missing something!

Some highlights from ILI2010

Dr. Hazel Hall, Director of the Centre for Social Informatics at Edinburgh Napier University, spoke about “relevance of social tools for information professionals” in her talk Getting Real About Social Media. Owen Stephens has a nice blog . . . [more]

Here’s an interesting paper outlining what looks to be a very interesting research tool currently being developed for Google: A “research trail” generator as a browser feature.

We propose the concept of research trails to help web users create and reestablish context across fragmented research processes without requiring them to explicitly structure and organize the material. A research trail is an ordered sequence of web pages that were accessed as part of a larger investigation; they are automatically constructed by filtering and organizing users’ activity history, using a combination of semantic and activity based criteria for grouping similar visited web

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When it comes to word processors lawyers will almost universally use either MS Word or WordPerfect. These giant applications contain hundreds of features that are capable of meeting just about any imaginable need when it comes to document creation (except proper typesetting). And, in the case of Word, it integrates more or less smoothly with the rest of the Office suite of applications. Powerful stuff.

This muscularity comes with a price, though. There’s the literal price, of course. Then there’s the need to have a decent-sized pack animal around to port the app along with you on your travels. As . . . [more]

With a hat-tip to my young colleague, Michael Ladanyi:

While the decision is not yet posted online, according to the Federal Court website, Amazon.com’s appeal of the Commissioner’s Decision denying Amazon.com a patent for its 1-click purchasing was granted today. The status update giving notice that the appeal was granted can be seen here. The application describes purchasing items over the Internet using a single-action by transmitting a client identifier associated with information about a buyer.

Here is the full text of the status update posted online today:

Reasons for Judgment and Judgment dated 14-OCT-2010 rendered by The

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The days when law students lament over whether they should “blog” are surely over when the Dean of Law has their own blog.

Lorne Sossin, Dean of Osgoode Hall, has just launched Dean Sossin’s Blog, where he “can draw your attention to topics that affect Osgoode, our students and the broader legal and academic community.” The sole post is from Monday, and provides a response to Maclean’s always contentious 2010 law school rankings.

It’s not off to a bad start, although there could be greater use of the hyperlinking function. There also appears to be a significant . . . [more]

Dan wrote yesterday about what to do if hackers steal your online accounts. As a companion to that, Yahoo!Canada has an article from Real Simple magazine entitled Scams Even you Could Fall For – And How to Avoid Them. 

It talks about things like phony gift card offers, mails that look like they come from your bank, sellers of fake items like event tickets, and fake charities. It also suggests some resources to use for checking to see if things are legit. Sometimes just doing a Google or Bing search will ferret out if something is a common scam. . . . [more]

Earlier today I tweeted about a great article on the New York Times tech blog What to Do If Hackers Steal Your Online Accounts.

In hindsight, I think the advice in the article is very practical and relevant to just about everyone, thus making it worth sharing via a SLAW post with a far wider audience than just those that follow me on Twitter.

Over the years I have received more than few panicked calls from lawyers that have had their email accounts hacked, and more recently, from a lawyer that lost control of his Facebook page. Email and . . . [more]

Groups against anti-piracy companies and law firms who allege heavy-handed tactics have launched Denial of Service Attacks against law firms and their clients.

The Khan Academy represents a new way to learn. It’s a YouTube-based video library consisting of over 1,800 videos on topics ranging from math, science, the humanities and other topics. Sal Khan, an MIT graduate, Harvard MBA and ex-hedge fund manager, singlehandedly delivers each of the lessons. His videos have more than 22 million views and are viewed more than 70,000 times per day – more than the combined courseware provided by both MIT and Stanford. For an idea of what a typical lesson looks like, take a look at Khan’s lessons on DNA or solving linear equations.

His . . . [more]