Many people are distracted today, and I thought this might be a bit of a “Tuesday Fillip”. This word cloud shows the use of terms in Barack Obama’s Inauguration speech today. The more often a word or phrase, the larger it will appear.

Source: Barack Obama Inauguration 2009 Wordle
Licensed under Creative Commons by http://www.wordle.net/

Link courtesy of L.J. Montserrat. . . . [more]

A new effort on the web, OverFlowLegal.com (“The Definitive Portal of Legal Information on the Internet”), is aimed at filtering the flow of blawg posts to bring you only those of quality. How does this happen? Though the effort of members, apparently. You join OverFlowLegal and:

OFL members who demonstrate an ability to identify, post, rate, categorize and comment on quality content will be invited to become Associate Editors of OFL. Associate Editors who demonstrate an ability to manage other member’s posted content may be invited to become full time staff as Editors of OFL.

As you’ll see if you . . . [more]

LegalTech New York (this year February 2 to 4 at the NY Hilton) want the blogosphere to come to the party.

They’ve announced complimentary passes to bloggers, with front-row mains power access seating for bloggers in each room. On the second day, following ABA TechShow‘s Bloggers’ Ball model, Legal Tech has a bloggers’ breakfast from 9 to 10.

[I can’t resist commenting on how great the design is of the ABA page in comparison with the ALM LegalTech, though as a former TechShow chair, I might well be biased.]

LegalTech has always enjoyed strong exhibit space and it should . . . [more]

Good fun over at the latest RIAA show trial. The defendant, Joel Tenenbaum, (who has countersued), has hired Harvard law prof Charlie Nesson, whose law school team is employing a full range of social networking and IT tools to effectively embarrass the RIAA, which has since the start of the trial abandoned its policy of suing downloaders. (See my post over at Ipilogue for more on the story.) As part of this strategy, Nesson moved to obtain permission to live-stream video of the trial. The judge has today agreed to let the January 22 hearing be streamed over the internet, . . . [more]

According to the Law Librarian Blog there is a message from Westlaw circulating outlining a new restrictive browser policy:

Westlaw access will be blocked when using Web browsers that are no longer supported by the companies that created them. The lack of support can create problems during Westlaw development which may result in a security risk. Users attempting to access Westlaw using one of these browsers will receive an explanatory message that offers alternatives.

Westlaw access using the following browsers will be blocked:

• Netscape (all versions)
• Mozilla Firefox versions lower than 1.5
• Safari versions lower than 2.0
• Internet Explorer versions

Just posted to the CanLII blog:

CanLII invites you to a user meeting in Toronto

CanLII is pleased to invite you to a user meeting in Toronto on February 11 2009. On the agenda:

• demo of SATAL – the point-in-time legislative system soon to be launched on CanLII;
• creation of a CanLII users group;
• demo of APIs developed to streamline use of CanLII content by institutional users.

The presentation will be followed by a cocktail. They ask you inform them if you plan to be present.

For more info, check their blog post for time, location and RSVP contact . . . [more]

I hadn’t seen before today the Master of Laws Guide which assembles in a single site comparative information for foreign graduate students contemplating the choice of schools where to study.

Back in the last century, when I had to face the same question, one was reduced to talking to law school teachers and colleagues about what they knew of a particular school. The amount of sheer misinformation that this generated was extraordinary. A law school’s reputation (for good or ill) lingers long after any facts may have changed.

My own advice (when asked by students) is to pick people not . . . [more]

The professional social networking site LinkedIn has slowly been making a number of changes that are making the site increasingly useful. I am still finding my way around, but changes I find of interest:

• the addition of third party applications that allow me to do things like share my presentation slides (via Slideshare) and to see recently added presentations of others, and to see what my contacts are reading with the Amazon.com application;
• increased and improved functionality of groups, allowing those in a group to have a discussion;
• suggestions of people who I might know who are on LinkedIn

As Simon Fodden pointed out earlier, one of the greatest limitations of Twitter is the amount of unwanted “noise” it produces,

What has to happen for Twitter to become useful and enjoyable for me is the introduction of filters or channels or folders… I need to be able to group them by my own taxonomy and then, depending on what I”m up to, screen out the noise and leave the signal.

A new service by LexBlog might help legal professionals accomplish this.

LexTweet gathers tweets from legal professionals on Twitter, which effectively creates a legal channel. The service has . . . [more]

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]

It’s not easy to get a computer to recognize Charley’s aunt — or your copy of Insurance and Risk Management in Commercial Leases, for that matter. Seems our visual cortex et al. do a rather marvelous job of making sense of photon streams. Thanks to ASCII and to some nifty OCR developments, words aren’t all that hard for the machines we live by, but people and objects are a tough nut that the computer world is working hard to crack.

There is, of course, the impetus provided by the U.S. Homeland Security’s wish to recognize the face of terrror when . . . [more]