Today Google has released its real-time search function. It will index much of the internet’s real-time content — such as tweets on Twitter or postings on Facebook or entries on blogs that have pubsubhubbub enabled RSS — and offer up these results for searchers in a dynamic fashion. So, for example, a search for [copenhagen climate summit] yields at fourth position on my screen an item titled “latest results for copenhagen climate summit” that displays dynamically the very latest updates on that topic from Twitter et al. The image below will give you a better sense, perhaps; click on . . . [more]

It’s that time of year again! The 2009 Canadian Law Blog Awards (CLawBies) is now open for nominations. Categories will resemble last year’s when the nominations were first opened up to the adoring Canadian law blog audience. From the blog:

How to Nominate in 2009:

Between now and Monday December 28th, publicly nominate a Canadian authored legal blog using ANY of the following methods:

1. Tweet your endorsement on Twitter.com along with the hashtag text: #clawbies2009. We’ll be monitoring!
2. Email your favourite blog, along with a sample post or two, or any other notable highlights to Steve Matthews at steve@stemlegal.com

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

Personalized Search for everyone

googleblog.blogspot.com… – Permalink – Similar

Google’s website/wiki building application now provides users with a range of templates that take most of the fuss out of formatting a website — at least, if you have a fairly specific purpose in mind. The basic “web page” template, though, offers users a lot of easy-to-customize features. Lawyers may find the intranet template useful. The barrier to publishing on the web keeps dropping; now there’s no excuse.

New site . . . [more]

While some lawyers are very tuned into social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, many have yet to realize the communications potential of these tools. The newest issue of LawPRO Magazine aims to change this.

Here’s a sample of the topics covered:

• Social Media: Why? An overview of how social media are changing the legal landscape;
• Social Media: What? A guide through the many social media available PLUS inteviews with five lawyers who walk the social media talk;
• Social Media: How? A primer on social media as marketing and networking tools in law practice; and
• Social media pitfalls to

I’ve joked previously that the Google crowdsource traffic feature was a free ambulance chaser application.

A British firm has developed a iPhone application specifically intended to document all the details necessary for future litigation, the iPhone Car Incident Assistant application (iCIA). The Times Online reports:

It appears ambulance chasing has gone digital after Bott & Company, a law firm in Manchester that specialises in personal injury claims, has developed an application for the iPhone that prompts people involved in an accident to record insurance and witness details, take multiple photographs, store GPS information and click through to a

I don’t know how long this has been going on, but some courts are sending judgments to CanLII with hyperlinked tables of contents. Plain old text TOCs are nothing new, of course: long — long, long. . . — judgments pretty much demand them. But courts seem to have discovered that, because they create and submit their judgments to CanLII in MS Word format, it’s fairly easy to construct a hyperlinked table of contents.

A search for [table of contents] turns up recent “hot” TOCs from Newfoundland and Labrador, British Columbia, and Ontario.

This is, of course, . . . [more]

A notice to the profession on the Ontario Court of Appeal website reads:

Electronic Delivery of Copies of Reasons for Judgment

On January 1, 2010 the court will modernize its procedure for delivery of copies of its reasons for judgment to counsel and litigants.

Rather than requiring litigants or counsel to attend at the registry office of the court to obtain a paper copy of the decision, the court will send a PDF copy of the signed judgment by e-mail to those counsel and litigants who have provided an e-mail address. Copies will continue to be available for those parties

“The Internet is an open door to knowledge, entertainment, communication – and exploitation.”

This quote is in R. v. Legare, 2009 SCC 56, Justice Fish writing for the unanimous majority (at para 1) (emphasis in original).

While I have no wish to write about the facts in this particular matter, it is interesting that a decision about exploitation should be published by the SCC in December.

Unfortunately, the holiday season is often rife with frauds. A grandson in jail scam was recently reported and McAfee has posted an article in their newsroom titled the 12 Scams of Christmas . . . [more]

The New York Times has released a viewer for its newspaper called the Times Skimmer, which displays stories in a simple grid format for use on small screens such as those on smart phones. Readers are able to choose stories from a menu of Times topical sections and categories. Keyboard shortcuts allow readers to thumb their way more efficiently through the news. As well, they can choose from seven different formats. Click on any of the thumbnails below to see an enlarged version of the format.

The Skimmer isn’t the best way to read the Times on an iPhone: . . . [more]

Here’s a recent statistic from an American study:

“Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.”

More on the blog of a PhD candidate in informatics, Slight Paranoia.

We have had some debate in Canada about law enforcement’s right to collect from ISPs (without a warrant) the name and address of people behind IP addresses. Cases have gone both . . . [more]

Many North American law firms have developed their intranet portals using Microsoft SharePoint 2007 software (soon to be released in a new 2010 version).

There have been numerous posts on SLAW discussing SharePoint; in addition, Microsoft has an industry page for law firms that provides some useful links to case studies.

There are several reasons why many law firms are using SharePoint:

– Content aggregator/organizer: SharePoint can be used to create a true intranet portal, being the interface – via a web browser – between the user an a variety of data sources such as your document,

Harvard’s Berkman Center has released the draft of a report, “Next Generation Connectivity: A review of broadband Internet transitions and policy from around the world” [PDF], which examines the position of the United States in relation to various other countries with respect to salient aspects of broadband connectivity. The report takes into consideration a country’s regulatory scheme and the economic model used to provide broadband services, in addition to the more usual measures by which countries are ranked.

The report has a lot to say about Canada, none of it very flattering. (The table of contents doesn’t adequately . . . [more]