Google is always releasing new features or apps. Here’s a rundown of some released recently that may have relevance for lawyers…

Google Wave

wave.google.com/ – Permalink – Similar

This is a new feature for the Google Toolbar, available for IE and Firefox browsers, that lets you put annotations about a website in a sidebar, so that others who have Sidewiki can see them upon visiting the annotated site. As a publisher of a website, I dislike this idea; I do not want uncontrolled content popping up in intimate connection with Slaw, even it it’s clear to anyone with half a . . . [more]

I recently wrote that email lists still exist. But perhaps when it comes to living relics the true coelacanth as far as the internet is concerned is Usenet. Begun in 1979, Usenet was a collection of discussion groups — or, newsgroups, as they were known — that, as Wikipedia says, “can be superficially regarded as a hybrid between e-mail and web forums” but possessing considerable technological sophistication.

Yes, Usenet lives — after a fashion. In 2001 Google acquired the 700 million posts in order to preserve the archive. Trouble was, it couldn’t be searched properly. Until today, that is. . . . [more]

Google Street View has finally gone live in Canada. According to the CBC story, Street View is available now in “much of the Greater Toronto Area and in Vancouver and the surrounding area, north to Whistler and east to Chilliwack, B.C. . . . Hamilton, Ont., Kitchener and Waterloo, Ont., Ottawa, Windsor, Calgary, Canmore, Banff and Lake Louise, Montreal and the surrounding area, Quebec City, and Halifax.”

Let the privacy complaints begin! . . . [more]

I’ve learned from Hughes-Jehan Vibert that his JurisPedia project has recently won the 2009 Dieter Meurer Prize for Legal Informatics [in German]. We talked about JurisPedia a couple of years ago here on Slaw. And last year Simon Chester posted about the 2008 winner, Case Matrix.

JurisPedia’s new front page operates as a search engine, using Google’s Custom Search, with filters available that let you focus your search on any one of 70 jurisdictions around the world. You can, as well, search the wiki that is the growing JurisPedia encyclopedia.

Hughes-Jehan, who studied at UQAM and is now a . . . [more]

Google honours Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on his birthday by giving him pride of place at the front of their name today:

Mahatma (“Great Soul”) Gandhi was a lawyer, we should remember. I find that an encouraging thought. . . . [more]

Today’s the day the new United Kingdom Supreme Court, the replacement for the House of Lords, begins operation. (What’s with the brown? Ugh.) And, because this is the age it is, the new institution’s familiar, the blog, is born along with it.

The UKSCblog (I’m not liking uk-suk as the way to say the new court) is designed frankly as a “mirror” of the American SCOTUS blog.

I’ve taken a quick look and like what I see — with the exception that, curiously, the URL remains fixed as www.ukscblog.com whether you’re on the “home,” “about,” “archive” or, . . . [more]

A couple of weeks ago Google Labs released Fast Flip, a way of browsing news stories from mainly print media. About 40 newspapers and magazines have partnered with Google, which then provides you with images of their news stories. (The images are in PNG format, so you can’t copy the text as you might with some PDFs.) Thumbnail images of pages are presented in four rows, which filter, respectively, for “recent,” “sources,” “sections,” or “topics.” Helpfully, there’s a headline below each image to let you decide where you’d like to jump into the stream. Once . . . [more]

There’s something of a buzz in the blawgs about a recent decision from the California Northern District Court in which the court ordered Google to close the email account of a non-party. According to Online Daily Media, in Rocky Mountain Bank -v- Google, Inc. the bank explained that it had sent a file containing a wealth of sensitive information about clients by email to the wrong Gmail address. The bank tried to contact the addressee but received no response. It then got in touch with Google, which said that it would reveal the account information for the addressee if . . . [more]

Although SEO specialists have long denied that metatags matter, there have been lawsuits over them for a number of reasons, including trademark infringement, attempt to divert business, and even defamation.

Dany Sullivan of Search Engine Watch outlines some of the major American suits over metatags.

Google’s Matt Cutt publicly confirmed yesterday for the first time that their search algorithm does ignore metatags. See the video here.

Eric Goldman of Santa Clara Law says,

Although occasionally judges have gotten it right (see, e.g., Standard Process v. Banks). most courts still treat the presence of a third party trademark in

A new site launched less than a month ago was brought to my attention recently. Persuasive Authorities is a blog by faculty at various American law schools. But it was the Canadian contributors that I’ve encountered previously that really caught my attention.

I know Richard Albert of Boston College through political activities in Canada. With an impressive resume that includes law degrees from Yale, Harvard, and Oxford, he also clerked in the Supreme Court of Canada. His latest post on the site is about his first class at Harvard, where Duncan Kennedy described how law travelled around the world.

Comparative . . . [more]

Google today announced its partnership with On Demand Books, developers of the Espresso Book Machine, which can “perfect bind” a copy of a book printed on an attached copier in about three minutes, at a cost of one cent per page. (The press release [PDF] from On Demand Books is somewhat more detailed.)

This video shows the machine in action:

. . . [more]

Colleague Katharine Thompson has shown me how to add “refinements” to my Custom Google Search of Canadian Law Firms.

A search on “wallace” (admittedly not a very sophisticated search if looking for law firm bulletin case comments on Wallace v. United Grain Growers Ltd., [1997] 3 S.C.R. 701) results in a number of hits on the bio’s of lawyers named Wallace.

However, with the prior search results on “wallace”, if you click on the new “Bulletins” refinement button we have added, you generate much better search results of mainly law firm bulletins on the S.C.C. decision in question . . . [more]