I’d like to invite Slaw readers to come check out Quickscribe’s new BC Legislation Portal. Launched yesterday, this site provides daily updates (every 4 hours actually) for changes in BC Law.

To relay a bit about what’s going on under the hood, this site is actually extending the value of Quickscribe’s RSS feeds. I posted on the VLLB a while back about the detailed nature of these feeds, but as I got to use them more, wondered if there might be some value to aggregating them as a collection. The BC Legislation Portal does just that. . . . [more]

LinkBlip lets you send someone a URL and then notifies you by email when they click on the link. I suppose this might be useful in certain situations where you want to have a rough measure of either compliance with some requirement or the effectiveness of a promotion. Feels a bit sneaky, though.

[via Infobunny’s Twitter] . . . [more]

MIT Technology Review has released its list of the 10 technologies that it thinks are most likely to change the way we live. Some of the more interesting ones include:

• Offline web applications: Programmers using Web technologies to build desktop applications that people can run online or off.
• Reality mining: Using data gathered by cell phones to learn more about human behavior and social interactions.
• Wireless power: Moving towards a world of wireless electricity.

We just added a couple of links to our homepage to help with research. You can download a plugin that lets you search our catalogue from your toolbar. You can also search for any other catalogue or database, or make your own. Its all here.

It might help you come to grips with complex research tasks, which are described helpfully in a couple of recent ACRL blog posts, here, and here.

Finally, if none of that helps, try what this guy tried. . . . [more]

LinkBunch is a site that lets you put in a list of links and hands you back a single, small URL, which goes to a page where you’ll find your hotlinks. Handy, perhaps, for making a temporary web page with a collection of resources or targets. Would be better if it permitted link text rather than, or as well as, the actual URLs.

[via law.librarians — you do subscribe to law.librarians, don’t you?

— in turn via Emily Chang’s eHub] . . . [more]

PdfMeNot is a service/tool that converts PDF files into Flash files on the fly. This means that you’re able to view them inside your browser, if you don’t have a decent PDF viewer plugin, and needn’t download PDF files or call up Adobe software to view them. You can zoom in and out and proceed page by page through the file, but you can’t search within the file using the PdfMeNot viewer.

The tools page gives you a bookmarklet that turns every PDF link on a web page you’re viewing into a link to the target in the Flash viewer . . . [more]

It’s Family Day in Ontari-ari-o, and reading week in at least some of the faculties in some of the universities, so I’m sure that explains the lack of traffic or the decrease in the denominator in the signal to noise ratio. Or both. So, there’s room for me to add some noise.

For the geeks among us (or within us), you know that Vista SP1 is around the corner for the common folk. The tech gurus have been playing for some time. In that vein, here’s something from ZDNet

Vista SP1 vs. XP SP2 – Benchmarked

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1332&page=1

Looking at the

This via Ken Varnum at RSS4Lib:

The Library of Congress’s Law Library of Congress now offers RSS Feeds on the following topics: News & Events, Research Reports, Webcasts, and Global Legal Monitor.

The “Research Reports” feed, for example, includes such topics as “How to Do Russian Legal Research” and “Children’s Rights: International Laws.”

These new feeds are also now part of the larger LOC RSS Feeds we talked about in Dec/06. . . . [more]

While researching articles discussing virtual worlds (including both Internet-based games and social networking spaces) I came across an upcoming conference on virtual law. The Virtual Law 2008 Conference is being held April 3 – 4, 2008 in New York City in conjunction with Virtual Worlds 2008 which is running concurrently.

You would think by now these things don’t surprise me, but I have to admit being a bit “gob-smacked” when I came across this conference. Are there really enough lawyers practising in this area to build a whole conference to address it?

Digging a bit further, I learn that the . . . [more]

My temporary return to teaching has got me using PowerPoint again, now de rigeur in today’s law school classroom, and it’s reminded me of my like-hate relationship with that tool. I’m certain that if anyone with serious presentation chops looked at our academic slides they’d be horrified, because we probably make every mistake in the book. But doing it right two or three times a week for hours at a stretch isn’t easy; it’s the rare bird who can combine personal passion with restrained verbiage on the big screen and get the timing right as well.

I’m sure our readers . . . [more]

Tuesday night I gave a presentation to Toronto Wiki Tuesdays about the use of wikis in law firms. On Monday, to get some additional ideas, I posted a message to Slaw asking for any new examples of wiki use in law firms since I wanted to present more than just wikis I had a hand in myself. The next day a very interesting discussion ensued on Slaw about whether wiki use is suitable for firms. This was a fantastic discussion, starting to really get at the heart of whether a firm should be using wikis and what really works. So . . . [more]

The world’s largest legal vertical search engine launched yesterday according to a press release. The Public Library of Law (pLoL) has partnered with legal research provider Fastcase, Inc. It may be more of a directory than a search engine, even though Fastcase CEO Ed Walters claims it makes”first-time legal research as easy as using Google.”

What is available on PLoL?

* Cases from the U.S. Supreme Court and Courts of Appeals
* Cases from all 50 states back to 1997
* Federal statutory law and codes from all 50 states
* Regulations, court rules, constitutions.

“Unlike other free resources,