Some time ago in his column, Joel Alleyne wrote about Law and the Semantic Web. He borrowed a definition of the semantic web that described it as “… an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily”.

For those of us just getting up to speed on the potential of this way of organizing and discovering the internet, here is a great . . . [more]

The Precedent Blog reports that four University of Ottawa law students have filed a complaint with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada over alleged poor privacy practices by social networking site Facebook. The students are working with The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa. On May 30th CIPPIC filed a 35-page complaint under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) against Facebook, alleging 22 separate violations of the Act.

According to the Press Release from CIPPIC:

A team of law students, some of whom are dedicated Facebook users,

Ted Tjaden sparked a good discussion here on whether lists of links are useful on a firm’s intranet. But whether or not your useful links live in such a corporate location, there has to be a way to record URLs that interest you. Of course, each browser has a bookmarks feature, replete with the ability to create folders and to organize them according to your own sense of order. But, as the post on ReadWriteWeb says, you don’t always want to clutter up your more-or-less permanent list with ephemera — those sites that you think might be interesting to look . . . [more]

Adobe has done what was clearly on the cards: it’s bundled a number of the web apps it’s been gathering over the past months and is calling the unified collection Acrobat.com.

There you’ll find: the beautiful word processor, Buzzword; Adobe ConnectNow — which ZDNet esteems to be the killer app in the bunch — which lets you collaborate online, sharing your screen, etc.; Share, which enables just that; My Files, the storage place; and PDF Converter, the only disappointing aspect, which gives you the right to convert a grand total of 5 (five) files to PDFs. Clearly Adobe is . . . [more]

Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson point out in the May 29th FIR Cut of their public relations and technology podcast For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report that the Canadian government has a contract with Open Text to develop social networking tools for its quarter of a million employees.

The May 27, 2008 news release on the Open Text website indicates this a renewal of their enterprise content management (ECM) system currently used by 58 federal government departments and agencies. What is new are the implementation of Web 2.0 capabilities:

The contract will also enable the Canadian Federal Government

Montenegro’s new top-level country-code domain — .me — is coming available in stages, so if you’re interested in acquiring something nicely narcissistic in the way of URLs, you’ll need to be on the alert. Phase 4, the period when anyone, whether or not in Montenegro and whether or not with a registered trademark, can apply for a domain, begins on June 6. The goodies get given out on a first-come first-served basis.

[via Rouse & Co. International] . . . [more]

One of the highlights of this year’s CALL conference was the presentation by Darlene Fichter on Web 2.0 which kicked off our conference program Monday morning. I was privileged to introduce Darlene, who is Coordinator of the Data Library Services at the University of Saskatchewan and Advisor on Emerging Technologies, as well as consultant and project manager on various website, portal, library and intranet projects. Her talk was delightful. These slides which she posted to Slideshare for us only partially capture her lively presentation.

I love those gophers! During her presentation Darlene identified that . . . [more]

Simon noted last year the sources available for legal researchers on Microsoft’s Live.com book search.

However, an announcement on Microsoft’s blog on Friday indicated that the project is over and that this field has now been yielded entirely to Google. . . . [more]

It might just be if no-one can find it using the conventional search engines. That’s why it’s great to see Mark Kuiack’s PracticeLink page contain a great article by Sharon Nelson on Search Engine Optimization techniques, designed to educate lawyers.

Everyone responsible for a law firm website should be looking at this closely. For the non-legal community, Wikipedia is still a useful source. . . . [more]

Now in its third year, Mesh conference is billed as Canada’s premier Web conference. The focus is social media and the organization (from perspectives such as business, government, non-profits, start-ups, PR and marketing).

I have been live-blogging the sessions I am attending on my blog http://conniecrosby.blogspot.com. I also highly recommend Ottawa social media expert Mark Blevis’ blog posts at http://www.markblevis.com/. He is covering many of the same sessions from a different perspective.

We both covered the keynote on digital advocacy by Michael Geist yesterday so it is worth a look.

mesh08 . . . [more]

Google Sites, now open to everyone, lets you create a website as quickly and as easily as could be imagined. Not of much use to law firms as a front page, perhaps, Sites nevertheless could be handy for ad hoc purposes, because you can control who is permitted to see and to edit the site. So if you’re looking for a simple intranet tool or a project site, you should take a look at what the friendly giant has to offer.

There’s a video with a really simple tutorial. . . . [more]

I don’t use flowcharts, but if I did I might find Flowchart.com useful. It’s a free (with signup) online application that lets you create — yup! — a flowchart, replete with linking lines, arrows, boxes etc. which you can then drag to new positions along with their respective connections until the whole pleases you. There are actually more features for the adventurous than I’m listing here, enabling you to embed your flowchart in a website and, apparently, record the flow as a video, among other things. The simplest thing to do is take it for a test drive using the . . . [more]