This week was for introductions:

• At the Cross-Border Biotech Blog, we introduced a new science writer! Richard Chan started off with his first Friday Science Review and he covered a lot of ground, from obesity to toucans to sushi.
• Direct-to-consumer genetic testing was introduced to Canada this week  and we’ll continue to follow the trend worldwide, all the way to Gattaca if neccesary.
• The Globe and Mail introduced its readers to Canada’s longest-running biotech takeover battle, the JLL-Patheon bid, which has been constant fodder for the blog’s Monday Deal Review since January.
• The Ministry of Research and Innovation

Congratulations to Natalie Gauthier, the doyenne and pioneer of Canadian law blogging: her blog, Le pub et le droit, is five years old today. You can also follow Ms Gauthier on Twitter at twitter.com/nggauthier in English and in French. . . . [more]

Many of us think of Google merely as your friendly, neighbourhood search engine. But Google is more than just a home page. Questions are increasingly being raised about Google’s dominance in several areas including on-line advertising, privacy and, more recently, copyright (read: “Google Books”). Google is now coming out swinging even on telecommunications policy matters, having appeared at the CRTC’s recent hearing on ISP Internet tariff management practices (ITMPs). Konrad von Finckenstein, the Chairman of the CRTC, was pleased that Google “as one of the large players on the Internet”, was actively participating in the process. In asking “Is . . . [more]

Well Google has been the subject of many Slaw comments, but it’s on the legal side that it’s hit the news recently.

It won an important decision before Justice Eady of the English High Court in which the court held that Google was not liable as a publisher of defamatory comments when comments made in an internet forum about Metropolitan International Schools, a British company that operates Internet-based training courses, surfaced in the top rankings of a Google search for the company. Of course now the Schools’ highest hit is Eady’s judgment.

“When a snippet is thrown up on the

The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s confirmation hearings on Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to be associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court begin Monday morning. She will be on Capitol Hill undergoing questioning by the senators during the next week.

Of all the news outlets planning coverage, perhaps the most interesting is Associated Press. Their plan is to have live coverage via Twitter feed @AP_Courtside. They will be taking it a step further by taking questions and directions on coverage for their blog from their readers via Twitter, according to their blog post yesterday at Yahoo! . . . [more]

I had a bit of a head-scratching experience just now: Google gave me a precise answer to a search that was more or less framed as a question; and I can’t recall ever seeing that before. Is this an old feature I’ve never stumbled on or is it something new that’s having a soft launch?

I usually don’t give Google a question, having learned instead to feed it a string of keywords tied in a Boolean knot. But today I asked “how many canals in amsterdam”? The first item in the results was an unequivocal answer — and not one . . . [more]

Google Books has released a number of improvements designed to make reading and sharing their material easier. The Books blog, Inside Google Book Search lists seven changes:

1. embedding and links – From the new toolbar on a Books page you can copy a link to the source or the html necessary to produce an iframe in your blog or web page that will embed the source.
2. improved search – There’s now more context around your search terms, and you can rank your search results by relevance as well as page order.
3. thumbnail view – More useful, perhaps, where images are

Simon Fodden posted here last Fall about Obiter2, the wonderful Quebec-legal-research-focused website by lawyer Marco Rivard.

A colleague in Montreal pointed out to me yesterday that his site has since added a Custom Google search engine that targets Quebec/French civil law doctrine and legal information (Moteur de recherche Google ciblant la doctrine et l’information juridique).

For example, a search on “valeurs mobilieres” produced French language results here from a number of law firms and other organizations. . . . [more]

The semantic web is coming, the semantic web is coming!

Simon Chester alerted us a while ago to Google Lab’s new project: Stub Posting on Google Squared. It has now launched: http://www.google.com/squared. Simon C asked in his post what Slaw readers might make of this, and I’d like to repeat his question now that you can take it out for a spin and kick its tires. I can see how the basic organization into fundamental facets that shift depending on the nature of your search terms would be useful to school students; but I’m not sure whether it . . . [more]

No one else is doing it (perhaps because they have not made it home yet), so I’m going to do a drive-by post to praise Slaw for winning the 2009 Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing. I’m going to try not to hurt my arm, but this is significant. From Callacbd.ca:

This award was initiated as a means of acknowledging the work that is done by publishers to provide the Canadian legal profession with high quality materials for use in understanding and researching the law. It is hoped that this award serves both as a means to honour

The folks at Online University Lowdown have put together their listing of the 50 Best Blogs for Law Librarians. Congratulations to our own Steve Matthews whose Vancouver Law Librarian Blog was included at #4! . . . [more]

There weren’t exactly an Ark’s worth of devleopments this week, but what did develop came two-by-two.

This week saw two very public regulatory developments in the U.S.:

• The FDA took two heavy steps against highly visible advertising: they said that General Mills’ claims on Cheerios boxes that the cereal can help lower cholesterol means that Cheerios are a drug and should be tested and regulated accordingly; and they chastised a number of pharma companies for ads placed with Google because the ads (limited to 95 characters) do not contain the required risk information. 
• Also in the U.S., Rep. Pallone