Here’s a third in the series of short posts about Google, appropriately enough about a short form of searching, this time. A Norwegian with the screen name of Mr. Calzone has created a site that makes short work of the otherwise long Google search string: no need to go to his website first, no need to download an app: simply put your search term at the end of the string http://gog.is/ Thus, for example, a search for “slaw” would be http://gog.is/slaw. You can use more than one search term if you separate them with commas or + signs, so avoiding . . . [more]

Not content with the blue ‘g’ announced this spring (too close to too many other icons?), Google has introduced yet another favicon:

This design is based on submissions by the public. I’ll get used to it, but at first sight it seems to me to try to do too much with too little space. . . . [more]

Of the future, that is? The British blog, cutely named, Royal Pingdom, has measured the frequency of certain terms and buzzwords, using good old Google, and compared it to that for the years since 2004 to uncover possible trends — that glimpse of the future we all seek. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, “’Web 2.0′ peaked in 2007 and has been decreasing in 2008″ and “While the interest for ‘blogging’ hasn’t changed much over the last couple of years, ‘microblogging’ has seen a rapid rise since early 2007 (presumably due to Twitter).”

There’s a surprise or two, though, for me at least: . . . [more]

I’d like to point out a new resource that I gave a passing mention in the Clawbie awards. Charon QC has launched a new Pageflake for Canadian Law Blogs.

While Pageflakes have been around for a while, they remain a great method to collect the latest content from a topical set of RSS feeds. For those that might not have (or know how to set up) a personal RSS reader, a Pageflake aggregation like this can act as a digital newspaper.

And now as I write this, I see it was previously mentioned via this post by Simon F.… . . . [more]

The American Bar Association’s ABA Journal has posted the Blawg 100, the top 100 law blogs as chosen by their editors, in various categories and is asking readers to vote for their favourites. Our own Slaw has been nominated in the “technology” category. A number of friends of Slaw are also in the running, including Law 21 by our own contributor Jordan Furlong in the “careers” category.

Head on over to vote for your favourite! If you have already voted on a previous day you can vote again. . . . [more]

Just a quick note to say the 2008 Canadian Law Blog Awards are now live at Clawbies.ca. Congratulations to the winners, and also to those who took part in the new nomination process. A complete roundup of the nominations is listed over at the Vancouver Law Librarian Blog, and I would encourage everyone to surf through those peer-to-peer recommendations.

Similar to last year, everyone will have a chance to blog an ‘acceptance speech’ and I will relay those posts on the Stem Blog during the second week of January.

Happy New Year!
Steve . . . [more]

On my must-read list are some of the LLRX.com articles for this month. The authors have put together some great resources. Here’s the line-up:

Neurolaw and Criminal Justice
Ken Strutin’s article highlights selected recent publications, news
sources and other online materials concerning the applications of
cognitive research to criminal law as well as basic information on the
science and technology involved. — Published December 28, 2008

Deep Web Research 2009
Marcus P. Zillman’s guide includes links to: articles, papers, forums,
audios and videos, cross database articles, search services and search
tools, peer to peer, file sharing, grid/matrix search engines,
presentations, . . . [more]

An item I blogged about yesterday over at Stem, I am about to start a new role in 2009 as a column editor for the ABA LPM’s Law Practice magazine. The column will be called LegalWEB2.0, and is set to begin in the Jan/Feb issue. Here’s a small screen capture from the inaugural column:

Connected to this new role, I am hoping you’ll help one of our first columnists Doug Cornelius by taking a new survey on law firms that block social media websites via their proxy servers or firewall. If your firm blocks these sites, or even . . . [more]

There have been a couple great BigLaw blog lists that have come out over the past week, and both are well worth noting here on Slaw.

First up, 3 Geeks and a Law Blog have published a list of officially sanctioned BigLaw law blogs, with the term sanctioned being defined as a link from the firm’s main website. A good metric, IMO. This list now totals 141 blogs from 56 law firms, and is based on looking at the NLJ 250 firms.

The second list comes from the crew over at Law Blog Builders Lexblog, and is an . . . [more]

Two of my favourite blogs, The Court and Michel-Adrien Sheppard (aka Library Boy) come together in this post, which went up today. Michel-Adrien is certainly no stranger to SLAWyers, as he is a frequent contributor to the discussions here. Thanks to Michel-Adrien and the intereviewer for this insight.

I’m sure I’m not alone in my fascination with career path stories – learning how someone else came to be where they are now. The steelworker who is now a systems architect, the former prison guard who is now a lawyer – these stories show just how powerful serendipity can . . . [more]

At this moment in time I’m delighted to report an honour that’s fairly unique: Slaw made the ABA’s list. With all due respect to Simon and my other friends,
at the end of the day, it’s absolutely not rocket science what Slaw does.
It’s a 24/7 nightmare but we shouldn’t of underestimated the readership.

Slaw

Moderated by Simon Fodden, professor emeritus at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Slaw was start­ed largely for the legal research and IT community in Canada, but it may soon transcend its tech designa­tion. The name Slaw was chosen in deference to Salon

There’s an interesting, long article in the New York Times Magazine, “Google’s Gatekeepers,” in which the author, Jeffrey Rosen, takes a look at how Google copes with the various demands of governments and citizens to remove or block material thought to be offensive in one way or another. Rosen, a law prof at George Washingto, concludes with a swipe at lawyers (and, presumably, their bosses):

Given their clashing and sometimes self-contradictory missions — to obey local laws, repressive or not, and to ensure that information knows no bounds; to do no evil and to be everywhere in a