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]

Of the future, that is? The British blog, cutely named, Royal Pingdom, has measured the frequency of certain terms and buzzwords, using good old Google, and compared it to that for the years since 2004 to uncover possible trends — that glimpse of the future we all seek. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, “’Web 2.0′ peaked in 2007 and has been decreasing in 2008″ and “While the interest for ‘blogging’ hasn’t changed much over the last couple of years, ‘microblogging’ has seen a rapid rise since early 2007 (presumably due to Twitter).”

There’s a surprise or two, though, for me at least: . . . [more]

I’d like to point out a new resource that I gave a passing mention in the Clawbie awards. Charon QC has launched a new Pageflake for Canadian Law Blogs.

While Pageflakes have been around for a while, they remain a great method to collect the latest content from a topical set of RSS feeds. For those that might not have (or know how to set up) a personal RSS reader, a Pageflake aggregation like this can act as a digital newspaper.

And now as I write this, I see it was previously mentioned via this post by Simon F.… . . . [more]

practicePRO, LAWPRO’s risk management and claims prevention initiative, provides lawyers with tools and resources to help them succeed in the practice of law and avoid a malpractice claim (see this article for information on the most common legal malpractice claims).

As we have completed another year we have updated our most popular downloads list. What are other lawyers looking at? The top 5 downloads were as follows:

1 Peg Duncan’s Canadian focused E-Discovery Reading List
2 Rollie Thompson’s article on the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines
3 A LAWPRO Magazine article on The Dangers of Metadata
4 A sample . . . [more]

One of my favourite blogs, Lifehacker, mentioned a new version of a fabulous Firefox extension.

Mouseless Browsing (MLB) is a Firefox-Extension which enables you to browse the internet with the keyboard. The basic principle is to add small boxes with unique ids behind every link and/or form element. You just have to type in the id and press enter (there is also an automatice mode available) to trigger the corresponding action i.e. following a link, pressing a button or selecting a textfield.

I like browsing without a mouse because I have the perception that it is faster to . . . [more]

Mike Kujawski, who writes the Public Sector Marketing 2.0 blog, has created the Government 2.0 Best Practices Wiki:

“[T]he intent of this wiki is to compile a central list of current initiatives (and eventually ‘best practices’) involving social media and government. These can be internal or external, marketing, HR or IT, it doesn’t matter. I even added a special ‘unofficial’ category at the bottom of each page for all side initiatives.”

There is information about RSS, Twitter, wiki, YouTube, Second Life, Facebook and social bookmarking projects from government bodies in Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand and the . . . [more]

♬ I am the eye in the sky
Looking at you
I can read your mind♬

Words and Music by Eric Woolfson, recorded by the Alan Parsons Project.

Recently my attention was drawn to a little-known feature that Yahoo.com uses both inside and outside the Yahoo network. This feature is known as “web beacons” (http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/webbeacons/). A web beacon, according to Wikipedia, is a “web bug“. Wikipedia states: . . . [more]

I’d like to update my thinking on the following question:

What is the responsible way to get rid of electronic information that one does not want, or that one has a legal duty to get rid of (like irrelevant personal information)?

Some of the alternatives:

• delete the information from one’s drive. (unlikely to be satisfactory, since ‘undelete’ programs are readily available)
• reformat the drive
• apply a specialized ‘wiping’ program (one or more times)
• destroy the drive physically
• encrypt the data on the drive then destroy the keys

Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner takes the view that the best way properly . . . [more]

Most of our readers would be aware of the ongoing strike at York University led by CUPE 3903. York administrators have also indicated serious financial difficulties.

What people may not have realized is that the strike also affects law students at Osgoode Hall.

A second-year Osgoode student, Thomas Wisdom, shares the challenges some of his peers are facing,

First- and second-year students with summer jobs: A lot of people are ecstatic about the fact that they will be gainfully employed at law firms in the summer months… [but] they face the frustration of renegotiation start dates with

The American Bar Association’s ABA Journal has posted the Blawg 100, the top 100 law blogs as chosen by their editors, in various categories and is asking readers to vote for their favourites. Our own Slaw has been nominated in the “technology” category. A number of friends of Slaw are also in the running, including Law 21 by our own contributor Jordan Furlong in the “careers” category.

Head on over to vote for your favourite! If you have already voted on a previous day you can vote again. . . . [more]

I dare say more than a few SLAW readers will have a New Year’s resolution that, in one form or another, has at its core, a goal of getting to an empty inbox. Unfortunately, there is no magic button – it takes a lot of time and effort to get to an empty, especially if you have hundreds (or even thousands of messages) in your Inbox.

I won’t focus on cleaning up older messages in this post. My LAWPRO Magazine article Surviving the E-mail Onslaught has some quick tips. Probably the best collection information on this topic is the Inbox . . . [more]

Twitter developers, rather like life itself, are plunging into every possible nook, cranny and crevice for a foothold on this latest development, and twit apps proliferate. All this in aid of the blurt — but I digress. Now for those who truly belong to the twittering classes comes TweetGrid, which lets you monitor multiple flows of info in one screen on your browser. You can choose the grid pattern that suits you, anywhere from a single (1 X 1) stream, up to a frenzied 9 panel (3 X 3) spray. In each panel of your grid, you can enter . . . [more]