While on Twitter I recently came across Mari Moreshead who does “client services and community management” for CourtCanada.com. I had never heard of CourtCanada and so checked their website and asked if I might interview her for the purpose of reporting back to Slaw readers.

CourtCanada was started in 2006 by former bankruptcy lawyer Gregory Azeff who is the company’s President and Chairman of the Board of Directors. CourtCanada is currently comprised of two services:

InSolve – a bankruptcy case management system, first beta tested in February 2007 and released in final version January 2008. For cases in the . . . [more]

There’s an interesting, long article in the New York Times Magazine, “Google’s Gatekeepers,” in which the author, Jeffrey Rosen, takes a look at how Google copes with the various demands of governments and citizens to remove or block material thought to be offensive in one way or another. Rosen, a law prof at George Washingto, concludes with a swipe at lawyers (and, presumably, their bosses):

Given their clashing and sometimes self-contradictory missions — to obey local laws, repressive or not, and to ensure that information knows no bounds; to do no evil and to be everywhere in a

On Nov. 27, 2008, I attended a session hosted by the Toronto chapter of the Legal Marketers Association (LMA) on Social Media Success.

The event was moderated by Max Valiquette of Youthography, and featured a panel with Parker Mason of CNW Group, Michael Rabinovici of AR Communications Inc., and Stuart Wood of Torys LLP.

Wood claimed his firm didn’t know he was there. But the event was promoted on the LMA website, and as he soon found out, he was part of an impromptu podcast when Mason revealed he was recording the session.

Full audio . . . [more]

CBC’s Search Engine says, provocatively:

With the election of Barack Obama, digital culture in the U.S. hit a tipping point, where a robust online public sphere proved itself capable of changing the world. Meanwhile, here in Canada we’re approaching our own tipping point, where a series of ignorances and capitulations threaten to turn our country into a digital ghetto.

Having spent some time yesterday discovering that Skype is not able to provide Skypein telephone numbers for Canada the way it can for 21 other countries and that Google’s really interesting Grand Central isn’t available in Canada, I’m ready . . . [more]

I just arrived home and am catching up on the terrorist attack on Mumbai this evening (tomorrow morning in India).

BlogTalkRadio SAJA (South Asian Journalist Association) are holding web-based phone-in discussions every 12 hours, 10 – 11:30 am/pm ET or 8:30 – 10:00 am/pm Indian time. The guests on the first call (evening of Nov. 26 in Canada) included Benjamin Piven, former Fulbright Scholar in Mumbai and Suketu Mehta, author, “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.” Author Rohit Bhargava has posted the details on his Influential Marketing Blog.

For those wishing to follow the latest news, some . . . [more]

Looks like Twitter is cutting outbound SMS messaging:

Unexpected changes in our billing have forced us into a difficult situation with our Canadian SMS service. We can’t afford to support this service given our current arrangement with our providers (where costs have been doubling for the past several months.) As a result, effective today we are no longer delivering outbound SMS over our Canadian shortcode (21212).

The ability to update Twitter over SMS will still be supported over 21212. But we know that this is only part of the experience and we want to make Twitter work in the

Yesterday saw the release of Windsor Law Professor Richard Moon’s long-awaited report on Internet Hate Speech and the jurisdiction of the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

The editorial writers are lapping it up – here is the Globe and the National Post, as well as the CBC’s more measured coverage.

The principal recommendation of this report is that section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act be repealed so that the censorship of Internet hate speech is dealt with exclusively by the criminal law.

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson has described the Moon report “an important contribution” to the discussion . . . [more]

On Friday, Google launched its “SearchWiki,” a way of customizing your own search results. I gather that they’re rolling it out according to some pattern, which means you may not see this feature in your results for a few days yet.

What you will see is illustrated below:

If, for example, Slaw hadn’t come up top in my results in a search for “slaw,” I could have moved it up there with the arrow, and ever after it would be first. For me. Which is what I don’t quite get: why exactly would I want to fix the results of . . . [more]

Everything I know about social media I learned from PR professionals in my brief career in that field prior to law.

Neville Hobson (a social media guru in the U.K. who hosts one of my first podcast subscriptions, For Immediate Release) launched an RSS feed yesterday that combined over 60 of the best PR blogs around the world.

He based the selection on a PR Network previously created by David Jones, a local PR guru based in Toronto (he also hosts one of my other first podcasts, InsidePR).

I thought it was a great idea, so I . . . [more]

Back in September I posted about the imminent launch of Europeana, the digital library, museum and archive that will share Europe’s cultural objects online with Europe and the world. Well, it launched on November 20, as scheduled, got 10,000,000 hits an hour and crashed. The site is now down until some time in December, we’re told, when it will return in a more robust form and ready for the huge digital crowds that clearly want in. Ah, the tribulations of success.

[via ::CultureLibre.ca::] . . . [more]

The Register has an interesting report on crimes in virtual worlds.

According to a study [PDF] by the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), there is a lot of crime in virtual worlds, and it can be lucrative.

Quoth the author of the study: “While annual real-money sales of virtual goods is estimated at nearly €2bn ($2.51bn) worldwide, users can do very little if their virtual property is stolen. They are a very soft target for cybercriminals.”

There is of course an action plan – indeed a 12-step program – one step of which is “Clarification of virtual property . . . [more]

One of my more recent clients is Clio, a Vancouver-based SaaS (Software as a Service) company built for web-based law practice management.

Clio’s target market is clearly set at solos and small firms, and feature wise they’re incredibly strong. They know who they want to serve, and what they want to deliver. However, like other SaaS companies, and especially within the legal market, the biggest challenge they face is how create an environment of trust.

This concept of trust is extremely important for clients both when establishing a sales proposition, but perhaps more important, in maintaining a strong . . . [more]