I thought for my first post on the shiny new Slaw format, I should talk about a shiny new object. Over a million iPads have been sold so far. Many comments about the iPad can be found on Slaw, including my thoughts that the iPad will be the disruptive tipping point that will define the category. This kind of device will fundamentally change how we consume information.

Several competing products are expected to be on the market within the next few months, some of which will address some of the iPad’s missing features. Of course, fans will say that the . . . [more]

Came across a cool Twitter app I didn’t know about yesterday: Twapper Keeper. Twapper Keeper lets you create an archive based upon hashtag, keyword, or person. All the relevant tweets are gathered in one place, and they can be exported and downloaded. The Twapper Keeper interface is easier to use than Google and this app gives you a great way to archive tweets from a conference, archive trending hashtags or keywords for historical or analysis purposes, or just for saving your own personal tweets. There are only 7500 Twapper Keeper archives now, but I am sure this number will grow. . . . [more]

This week in biotech, everyone was taking up a challenge.

• Grand Challenges Canada was launched this week to spend $225 million of the Canadian government’s money on 5 “grand challenges” over a 5-year period. The first task — a grand challenge indeed — is to create a new class of point-of-care (POC) diagnostics. Along with the X-Prize’s ventures into healthcare, we are seeing an interesting experiment in the ability of prizes to drive innovation.
• In a sign of progress being made globally against basic health challenges, this week with fewer children are dying as malnutrition, HIV and TB all

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Hamlet uses Early Case Assessment to assess his risks.

Earlier this week, I was at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries in Windsor, where I had the opportunity to hear Pierre-Paul Lemyre from LexUM.

He was speaking about the Guidelines for Canadian Court Web Sites being developed by the Canadian Centre for Court Technology.

He mentioned that the Centre is organizing a Canadian Forum on Court Technology in Ottawa on September 22 and 23.

The final version of those web site guidelines should be about ready by then. Slaw contributor Patrick Cormier described the process for developing those guidelines in January 2010. . . . [more]

The Canadian government announced a consultation on the future of Canada’s digital economy at the Canada 3.0 conference this week. I encourage readers to add their thoughts to the consultation process – which is open for the next 60 days.

It is summarized as:

Digital technologies are critical to every aspect of our economy and society. That is why a strategy for the digital economy is needed to ensure that Canada is positioned to benefit from the opportunities that it presents.

All Canadians have a role to play in helping shape Canada’s digital future. Your perspectives, suggestions, ideas and submissions

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I had the pleasure of presenting on knowledge management at the CALL/ACBD/MichALL law library conference currently underway in Windsor, Ontario. I shared the panel with Ginevra Saylor of Fraser Milner Casgrain, Denise Bonin of andornot, and SLAW’s own Simon Fodden.

It would appear that knowledge management is alive and well, albeit perhaps in an evolving manner. I will try to post shortly in more detail on the discussions that ensued at the session but thought for now I would post here at the following link a PDF of the paper I submitted called The Evolution of Law-Related Knowledge . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of Washington issued a decision on May 6th supporting a public library’s decision to fully filter Internet content, stating that such filtering could be viewed as “collection development”. The case is known as Bradburn vs. North Central Regional Library District.

Library Journal has an article that summarizes the decision and provides reactions and predictions from various experts. . . . [more]

This week was the BIO international convention. 15,000 screaming fans biotech nerds converged on Chicago for a week of … well… I wrote a song about it.

Highlights were:

• Consulting company Battelle collaborated with BIO to release a report on biotech employment and government initiativeson a state-by-state level across the U.S. The data covers an interesting time period (2001-2008) and showed flat job numbers in pharma even before the 2008 recession and industry consolidation;
• A session on partnering with nonprofits was full of insight on why these collaborations are good for companies, nonprofits and patients; and
• A session

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The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive has just published its 3rd annual study of link rot (see link in the top right of the home page under “Additional Resources”).

Link rot describes “a URL that no longer provides direct access to files matching the content originally harvested from the URL and currently preserved in the Chesapeake Project’s digital archive (…) In some instances, a 404 or ‘not found’ message indicates link rot at a URL; in others, the URL may direct to a site hosted by the original publishing organization or entity, but the specific resource has been removed or . . . [more]

I have my fingers and toes crossed that an Apple Store in Michigan can hook me up with a shiny new iPad tomorrow. I am flying through Detroit on my way to the CALL/MichALL 2010 Conference in Windsor. An iPad is an early birthday present since an e-reader has been on my must have list for a while. Now that I can acquire an e-reader on steroids, I can’t wait any longer. Canadians have to wait for the iPad release, and since I can’t reserve over the phone, or online without a US mailing address, I just have to make . . . [more]

The new Google search results page finally got propagated as far as my browser mere moments ago.

Google will now use a full two column display (with a third column on the right for ads). Where before options were strung out across the top (“web images blogs” etc), they’re now arrayed at the left in bold colour:

The various filters and facets affecting the results can be displayed in a drop-down list. It doesn’t seem possible to set that list to expanded or collapsed within your preferences, but perhaps I’ve missed something. . . . [more]