The Google Reader blog recently published the following graph that shows their growth of accounts over the past five years:

Online pundits have been calling RSS a dying technology for a while now. If you’ve read Slaw for any period of time, you’ll probably recognize what a huge fan I am of the technology. It’s still part of my daily routine, and I continue to find incredible value in a properly tuned personal RSS reader.

Many thanks to Andy Beal for his post: If RSS is Dead, Someone Please Explain This Chart to Me! I agree completely. . . . [more]

This weekend I was in Montreal for PodCamp Montreal, an event bringing together people interested in social media. Most sessions (at least, the ones I attended) took the format of presentation and then Q & A. Sunday morning, however, the session Is Social Media Really a Social Media? brought out the true spirit of podcamp conversation with a contentious discussion that delved into the semantics of the term. Pier-Luc Pettitclerc, IT Director at Commun, brought in his boss Martin Ouellette, a traditional ad agency owner, to battle out the question. . . . [more]

We all run into design-related questions when creating a web page. Questions like “Should this button be red or green?” or “What would the most effective headline for this paragraph be?”. While these decisions may have a dramatic impact on the overall effectiveness of a website, they are often the product of subjective judgement calls by an individual, or worse, a committee.

What if, instead, we could approach such design decisions scientifically? A/B testing makes this possible by treating a web page design instance as an “experiment” where multiple variations of a webpage are randomly presented to page visitors; data . . . [more]

I’d forgotten about pastebins until recently, when someone I was following on Twitter linked me over to some text he’d parked on one of them. For those who don’t know, a pastebin is a web location that lets you put up some text on an ad hoc basis so that others can read it. That’s all there is to the thing. Sometimes a pastebin will let you password protect your text; other times not, relying on someone’s having to know the URL to offer a degree of privacy.

Why would you use a pastebin? Because you’ve got some text you . . . [more]

We’ve talked a whole lot on Slaw over the years about translation, as befits a law blog in a country rich with immigration and with two official languages:

[related-posts]

And while the computer translation services such as Google Translate are miracles, they don’t always get it right — and sometimes get it comically wrong. A couple of the tough nuts in translation are idiom and professional jargon. A new online service, Linguee, may help here. Linguee, as it says, uses “the web as a dictionary,” allowing you to search for a word or a phrase and find its . . . [more]

One letter away from the good life in America. Attaboy, Google.

I usually don’t pay attention to when Paris Hilton gets arrested.

Last Friday she was charged with a felony drug possession for 0.8 grams of cocaine when pulled over while her boyfried Cy Waits was driving. The Las Vegas Law Review Journal claims that Waits’ attorney Richard Schonfeld is challenging the legality of the stop.

Of course she claimed the drugs wasn’t hers, nor was the purse in which it was found, even though she acknowledged ownership of her asthma medication, credit cards and $1,300 in cash also found inside the purse. According to Hilton, she was carrying the bag . . . [more]

The Open Net Initiative has new internet censorship maps up identifying which popular social media sites are blocked and partially censored around the world. I did not know, for instance, That Mexico censors Flickr and Youtube.

This complements their more general map, which tracks a number of broad categories of censorship.

About the ONI:

The OpenNet Initiative is a collaborative partnership of three institutions: the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto; the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; and the SecDev Group (Ottawa).

Our aim is to investigate, expose and

. . . [more]

This post concludes a series of post on the subject topic:

• Presentation of the CCCT IntellAction Working Group on Court Web Site Guidelines (21 Jan 2010)
• Presentation of the Working Group selection of principles included in the subject guidelines; principles 1, 2 and 3 explained (The Right Information for Specific Audiences, Empowerment, Timeliness – 17 Aug 2010)
• Presentation of Principles 4, 5 and 6 (Notification, Content, Security – 20 Aug 2010)
• Presentation of Principles 7, 8 and 9 (Bilinguism, Accessibility, Interactivity – 25 Aug 2010)

As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome. . . . [more]

Yesterday the Twitter was awash with messages about this revolutionary new Gmail Priority Inbox. The beta version just arrived in my email, and have to say that I am already in love with it. Essentially what it does is bring new, unopened, important messages to the top, then lists those messages that are “starred” (which I have flagged with a star), and then lists everything else. It learns which are important messages over time depending on which are opened and which are responded to. In other words, its accuracy gets better over time.

This entertaining little video explains it . . . [more]

For those lawyers or small business owners just starting out, setting down roots online can be a daunting process. Not everyone has the budget to hire out a new website construction project, and on the other side, there are numerous sources that will encourage you to DIY – “do it yourself”. What frequently happens though, is the new entrepreneur gets stuck. Do you cobble it together? Or, do you bite the bullet and find the budget?

The following advice won’t be for everyone, but for the soon-to-be business owner, or anyone who’s jumped into business over the past five years, . . . [more]

Google has just released a new search page dedicated to real-time results — those posts that come in typically from Twitter. They’re rolling it out, as they do with all innovations. But if you’re keen, you can get to it via http://www.google.com/realtime?esrch=RealtimeLaunch::Experiment. When it’s otherwise available to you, it will be reachable at http://www.google.com/realtime.

One nice feature is the ability to restrict your results by geography. Thus, for example, I was able to see what people in Canada were saying about the floods in Pakistan. And, as Google suggests, it might be handy to find out what’s going on . . . [more]