I gave a talk earlier today on the use of social media in politics, focusing on the Canadian scene, at the Miles S. Nadal Management Centre.

Issues of copyright, including the use of YouTube, are discussed, as well as social media alternatives to defamation actions.

Social Media And Politics in Canada (4/21/09)

Audio of the talk available here until a Slide Cast can be set up. . . . [more]

The Law Commission of Ontario’s “Conversations about Law Reform” is coming up in about three weeks (May 12th and 13th). There’s a Public Lecture and a full day Symposium. . . . [more]

Western Law has a new student paper, Amicus Curiae.

On page 7 of their second issue, released earlier this week, they profile some of the student bloggers in our school.

We have Legally Blogged, by Chris Crighton, who also maintains a site at Esse Quam Videri.

There’s also Dany Horovitz’s, Business Blogged, of the Financial Post Executive Blog. Dany is in the 3-year joint J.D./M.B.A. program with Ivey, the only one of its kind in Canada, and focuses more on business law. He also cross-posts to Law Is Cool.

And there’s a piece by Lawrence . . . [more]

Taking off from David Canton’s post on the Economics of Spam, here’s a link to a survey from McAfee published today that has some findings that surprised me – One e-mail is like driving three feet:

An estimated worldwide total of 62 trillion spam emails were sent in 2008
Globally, annual spam energy use totals 33 billion kilowatt- hours (KWh), or 33 terawatt hours (TWh). That’s equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes in the United States, with the same GHG emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion United States gallons of gasoline
Spam filtering . . . [more]

Here’s a link to a first chapter by the Advanced Legal Research instructors at Stanford Law School in a work on the history of CALR. I suspect they need to get into the stacks more

It’s interesting as far as it goes, but it doesn’t capture as much of the early detail as Jon Bing’s Handbook of Legal Information Retrieval. Jon’s book led me to Louis O. Kelso’s Does the Law Need a Technological Revolution in 18 Rocky Mntn. L. Rev. 388 (1945-1946) – yes 1946. It discusses the application of computers to the task of legal research. . . . [more]

In a comment to the recent post by Patricia Hughes, Justice B. T. Granger of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice referred to a set of slides for a presentation he had given at the 2008 CBA Canadian Legal Conference in Quebec City entitled “The Future is Now: Improving Access to Justice: The Need for Lawyers and the Judiciary to Go Electronic.” I thought that this was a presentation that might interest more than a few Slaw readers and got in touch with Justice Granger, who kindly agreed to let Slaw publish the slides.

Of course because this was about . . . [more]

Slaw’s own Ted Tjaden is quoted in this week’s Lawyers’ Weekly on whether the free access to the law movement has reached the point of such reliability and comprehensiveness that it can be considered as an adequate substitute for the commercial giants. Canlii’s Daniel Poulin comes to the defence of Canlii.

“I rarely use free resources,” Tjaden said.

“We have the luxury of having one of the better-equipped law libraries in a Canadian law firm with extensive print resources and online subscriptions.

“Although free search engines do supplement the legal research I do, we continue to rely on the value-added

They say the key to a good golf swing is in the follow-through. Hopefully the same is true of blogging, because this week on the Cross-Border Biotech Blog saw a lot of our trends and stories revisited with new developments and new perspective:

Electronic medical records drew a lot of attention this week, with the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference and the first EMR implementation by a large hospital group being topped by an even larger and more influential implementation — the U.S. military.

Budgets and bailout issues were also active. There was good news . . . [more]

Some stories are beyond Twitter. The full text from Trinity Church on Wall Street, and reports from the Telegraph, Ma Jones and the NYT.

Someone can tell me whether this represents progress, or another sign of the apocalypse. . . . [more]

Here’s an interesting ‘map’ of the current top internet sites and trends. Made by Information Architects Japan, it features top representative websites imagined as stops on the Tokyo subway system, and charts the ‘success’, ‘stability’, and ‘position’ of each site. This is a beta version, and they are looking for comments. When its ready, you can download it from Flickr, or you can order a printed version. See last year’s version here. . . . [more]

Heads up. No, it isn’t a soccer ball flying into your yard from the over zealous kick of spring fever infected neighbourhood children. It is a news release about some enhancements to Quicklaw. There are even screen shots of the new look.

The new Quicklaw functions are designed to follow your workflow and eliminate screen clutter:

• Set your own Start Page with the streamlined global navigation toolbar
• Speed up your research with sharper buttons and icons, highly readable fonts, and an inviting colour palette
• Consistently locate Related Links, General Search screens, and the What’s New icon (available soon) on

About two years ago I wrote about an application in development that would make your computer desktop more like your real desktop, providing the ability to arrange things in piles, pin icons to “walls” and the like. BumpTop has finally been released (Windows 7 only). There’s a brief video on the site’s main page that puts the app through its paces, so you’ll get a chance to see what it can do. It may suit the way some people work, but I doubt it’ll find much favour in law offices — though I could be wrong. . . . [more]