This might have been better as a comment responding to Omar’s post just prior to this one, in which he lamented the lack of a Canadian Citer, but since it involves Javascript, I was afraid it might not survive intact as a comment.

I know it’s not quite what Omar wanted — that’s way beyond my ability — but faute de mieux I’ve refreshed a tool I put together a couple of years ago: Javascript bookmarklets that search CanLII. As I’m sure most of you know, the idea behind a bookmarklet is to make these little patches of . . . [more]

Michael Lines previously mentioned Jureeka, the web browser extension that links to legal material online, which can only be used with Firefox and Chrome.

Cornell law has launched a similar extension called Citer, but allows integration with IE, Safari, and Opera as well.

Bonnie Shucha explains how it works,

With Citer, you select an area of text on a web site that contains the cite you would like to look up, click a button in the browser bookmark linkbar, and Citer will attempt to transfer you to a page containing the content.

Jureeka is a

And who wouldn’t — get it, that is — with Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and AI prof Nigel Shadbolt advising? Data.gov.uk is HMGovernment’s open access data site, containing three thousand data sets. The public is invited to take the data, manipulate and mix it how they please, and let data.gov.uk know if they develop an interesting application as a result.

As they say on the front page:

We’re very aware that there are more people like you outside of government who have the skills and abilities to make wonderful things out of public data. These are our first steps in

In updating a list of Internet search engines, I realize how so many have “dropped off”, presumably given the dominance of Google.

I checked Wikipedia’s entry for web search engines and like their chronological listing of search engines from 1993 to current (the history of web browsers is also good).

Mosaic and Magellan anyone?

I was fortunate to be in information studies at the University of Toronto between 1995 and 1997 when web browsing was just starting to take off (and yes, prior to that I gophered on a ‘486 computer on an extremely slow telephone modem).

However, given the . . . [more]

♫ A moment of despair
That forces you to say that life’s unfair
It makes you scared of what tomorrow may bring
But don’t go giving into fear ..♫

Lyrics and music by: Stone, Greenberg, Daniel Pierre, recorded by Joss Stone.

You may wonder what human rights has to do with Internet Explorer. Prior to the earthquake in Haiti, the news was filled with the cyber-attacks on Google. The latest attacks on Google’s network appear to have originated in China, reported ComputerWorld in a post dated Jan 12, 2010 and were directed at the Google accounts of human . . . [more]

The value and potential of Facebook and Twitter real-time updates are obvious. So obvious that companies and websites implementing real-time systems for themselves are gaining significant benefits. The report The Real-Time Web and its Future, edited by ReadWriteWeb lead writer Marshall Kirkpatrick, interviews 50 companies, developers and executives leveraging real-time web technology. It also provides insights gained from more than 300 industry leaders that participated in the Real-Time Web Summit in October 2009. The report features best practices and innovation in leveraging real-time, and profiles of 20 people you should know and understand to participate effectively in the real-time . . . [more]

Even as recently as the early 2000’s, the idea of achieving full in-office productivity while traveling on the road seemed difficult to imagine. The laptop, smartphone, cloud infrastructure, and internet access technologies of the day simply weren’t capable or ubiquitous enough to match in-office facilities and resources. But fast forward to 2010, and these ingredients have evolved and shifted significantly.

Firms like Heritage Law are predicated on the reality that any lawyer or staff member can work effectively from practically any remote office on a full time basis with nothing more than a Voice Over IP (VoIP) telephone, a broadband . . . [more]

This may seem like a Friday Fillip, but it’s such an interesting idea that I thought Slaw readers might be interested.

Today, Radio 4 officially launched a major new series ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’, written and presented by the Director of the British Museum, Neil Macgregor. In brief segments over the next year, the history of mankind will be discussed by reference to a variety of objects. . . . [more]

This week in biotech was all about lines. Not any kind of illicit lines, and not the most direct route between two points, just your traditional figurative delineations:

Line drawn: Since 2004, there have been increasing numbers of instances where pharma companies have compensated generics manufacturers in settlements of patent litigation initiated by the pharmas. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC, tasked alongside DOJ with enforcing antitrust law) in general, and its current Competition Bureau Director in particular, does not like these settlements. This week, the FTC published a report that claims that these settlements result in substantial extra delay . . . [more]

Neil C alerted us three years ago to a tool that our friends in Ithaca were developing to help legal researchers.

In late December, a new version was unveiled which permits three separate or combined searches:

Find Legal Research Guides

Search the Legal Internet

Search academic blawgs

Out of the Jungle has a fuller discussion, but this struck me as having real merit.

. . . [more]

The Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security) today warned against the use of Internet Explorer until a full patch is released for this critical “zero day” weaknesses called Aurora.

More details (in English) from the BBC here, and a technical discussion here.

“Using Internet Explorer in ‘secure mode,’ as well as turning off Active Scripting makes attacks more difficult, but can not fully prevent them,” BSI said in its statement. . . . [more]

There’s a post over at Marketing Strategy and the Law, “How to Cover a Conference Using Twitter,” that give some good advice. Use the “official” conference hash tag, don’t bother with quote marks . . . that sort of practical stuff.

I’d like to add my 2¢ worth. (Time to move that expression up-market, don’t you think? I mean 2¢ won’t even buy penny candy nowadays.) And I should preface it by saying that by and large I’m not a fan of having conferences tweeted at me: I find that the sudden deluge of individually incomprehensible tweets is . . . [more]