What is the end of the year without a “best of” list or a blog award? For a third year, lawyer, consultant, speaker and writer Dennis Kennedy has put together his picks for the 2007 Blawggies, the law-related blog awards.

Here’s the “executive summary” of the award winners. I do encourage you to read the whole post for details and the honorable mention choices.

2007 Blawggie Award Categories and Winners.

1. Best Overall Law-Related Blog – Tom Collins’ More Partner Income

2. The Marty Schwimmer Best Practice-Specific Legal Blog – Ken Adams’ AdamsDrafting

3. Best Law Practice Management Blog –

The end of support for the Netscape browser shouldn’t come to anyone’s surprise. The software’s user population has dwindled to almost nothing, and the dropping of support was long overdue.

But for me, I have very fond memories of this browser software that is soon to be a footnote in web history. For many of us early web users Netscape was the first quality graphical browser we used — Mosaic was pretty good, but Netscape made our mouths drop.

For myself, the software progression went from gopher browsing, to Lynx, to Mosaic, and then finally to Netscape 1.0 . . . [more]

…or even earlier, and Canada’s still under British rule somehow.

I use Google Calendar, and when I’m logged in I see a menu of other Google goodies at the top left of the window, thus:

Google Maps is not in the Calendar menu, and so I have to go to the “more” link to find it. Imagine my surprise when that “more” link flings me into the arms of Google UK’s version of the goodies page, whence the maps, of course, start with the British Isles.

Thinking I’d logged on wrongly somehow, I backed out of Google Calendar and logged . . . [more]

The Lawyers Weekly December 21st article “Should legal blogs be seen as scholarship?” does just what its title says: It briefly explores the key differences and similarities between legal blogs and journal articles, and whether blogs have the same authority/credibility as journal articles inside or outside a court of law. . . . [more]

Yesterday’s Sunday Times ((From the Murdoch empire in London, not the NYC one)) was reporting on Lexis’s parent’s plans for the legal market – and they want to focus far beyond the mere $18 billion plus market for legal research and associated applications in 2004.

They report that the average lawyer is going to spend almost their morning using Lexis products:

“Two or three years ago, Lexis Nexis was a legal research company, full stop,” Sir Crispin Davis said. “By and large, a typical lawyer would spend half an hour a day using our products. Now it is more like . . . [more]

Law is increasingly a peripatetic (no, not “very pathetic”) profession. ((So much for video conferencing and other virtual get-togethers; f2f (^`^ en français?) just won’t go away, it would seem.)) And those of our members who are more mobile may have wondered whether it was just advancing age or that flying was indeed getting even more difficult lately — hard as that may be to imagine. Well StatsCan has just released November’s plane-spotting score, and the fault is in the stars and not ourselves:

The 42 Canadian airports with NAV CANADA air traffic control towers reported 388,559 aircraft take-offs

RSS, as we know, means Really Simple Syndication. 

Let’s imagine that KISS means Keeping It Simple Syndication.

An adequate use of RSS combined with KISS may help to reduce RISK (Rats, I Should Know) problems and this feeling:

Law.com’s Legal Technology page has a nice overview of the use of RSS to keep current but the focus is on keeping up-to-date on matters that might specifically affect one’s clients, or potential clients. The article is written by the David Whelan of Osgoode Hall’s Great Library.

Previous posts, here, have . . . [more]

The impressive provider of online apps, Zoho, is coming out this weekend with an updated version of its presentation software, Zoho Show 2.0. (Sounds appropriately seasonal, doesn’t it: zoho show two oh, ho ho?). If you’re looking for an alternative to heavy and costly PowerPoint, this might be it, particularly as your presentation is going to live on someone else’s server and be there (more than likely) when you’re fumbling around for the memory stick that has your deck on it.

Its features are listed on the Zoho blog, and there’s a video to talk you through them. . . . [more]

Those who are interested in the XO laptop (the One Laptop Per Child machine) – including those of us who have bought/donated for our (or others’) children (or ourselves) – may be interested in this little piece on the BBC News Technology page. The correspondent presents a review by his nine-year old son, apparently the first British child to use the XO. I found it quite exciting to read how quickly the child interacted with children overseas already using the XO. From that page, one can also watch a 30-odd minute video of the child’s review. (I watched only . . . [more]

Yesterday was a big day in blog postings about Twitter! A full explanation later when I have more time, but in the meantime here is a note about one of my favourite posts from yesterday–

The Logic + Emotion blog gives a visual explanation of why Twitter is becoming increasingly popular in December 11th’s post “Why is Twitter Exploding? Because it’s a Conversation Ecosystem.”

My favourite part of the explanation? The “gratuitous analogy” calling Twitter “the Crocs of the web”. A visual:

You will have to head over to the original post to see the comparison. . . . [more]

Everyone’s going wireless — and that now included Taser, the company that makes the stun gun that’s been in the news so sadly of late. We don’t usually blog about technology here if it’s used to convey something other than information, and legal information at that. But I thought that those of us in the world of law should have a certain degree of familiarity with the tools that are used by (the other?) forces of social control. So here’s a quick note about Taser’s newest product, XREP, or eXtended Range Electronic Projectile. This small projectile is fired from a . . . [more]

Those of you who are interested in the whole phenomenon of social networks and blogging generally — if only because innovations will come to law sooner or later — might take a look at a piece by Alex Iskold on Read/WriteWeb, “The Evolution of Personal Publishing.” His opening diagram gives you a sense of what he’s thinking. Note that blogging (which is us, and which is finally after some years catching on with lawyers) is firmly lodged in the “heavy” and “corporate” end of things — appropriately, I suppose.

. . . [more]