The marvelous English actor Stephen Fry (Oscar Wilde, Jeeves and Wooster, etc. etc. and the impending ITV series about a solicitor, Kingdom) has a new column for the Guardian Weekend all about his obsession with gadgets and things techie. The first column, “Welcome to dork talk“, sets the table for what is bound to be a run of highly entertaining — and knowledgeable — columns on thing that might well interest more than one reader of Slaw. Fry says:

…[W]hat kind of devices might I be discussing over the coming weeks? Including, but not confined to: mobile

Today’s Glasgow Herald reports on a new service called CaseCheck, which is built on an open source blog platform. The service sprang from an innovative on-line dispute resolution service.

CaseCheck is a free online archive of decisions by the Scottish courts and industrial appeals tribunals launched on October 1. What makes it unique is the ability of readers to annotate the summary report of each decision, commenting on utility and coherence ((Family lawyers in Canada will remember that this was the service that the late J.G. MacLeod of UWO performed as he edited the RFLs)).

The next step is

Mind42 (“for two” — the notion being collaboration) is an online mindmapping tool that manages to capture pretty much the best of all the features of mindmapping. You can create any number of child or sibling nodes, move them around by simply dragging them, attach files and notes to them, use images for node text, and set up chat channels associated with nodes. When you’re done, you can share your map with a few or many. Or, as I’ve done below, embed it in your webpage via an iframe:

You can also export it to Freemind, Mindmanager and RTF (although . . . [more]

KM Space, the excellent BLOG of Doug Cornelius, has a post today on the Microsoft purchase of a 1.6% interest in Facebook.

It’s easy to stop at the fact that this purchase values Facebook at $15 billion. Discussions with colleagues have yet to reveal the importance of Facebook in the business world (admittedly, I also thought that the internet would never last.) On what basis did Microsoft come to the conclusion that this investment makes sense?

Doug’s post suggests that an enterprise version of Facebook, delivered on the SharePoint platform, may be the goal. While SharePoint doesn’t have the name . . . [more]

[Bill SB 362] would prohibit a person from requiring, coercing, or compelling any other individual to undergo the subcutaneous implanting of an identification device, as defined.

California Senate Bill 362, made law October 12, 2007

I had no idea that anyone was considering the insertion of chips into employees, but I find I’m not surprised by the revelation. Apparently, a Cincinnati video surveillance company, Citywatcher.com (seemingly no longer online), required that employees be so branded.

[via Deeth Williams Wall E-Tips] . . . [more]

Following my jubilant post on Thanksgiving about all major English Canadian legal publishers now having new title RSS feeds, in her recent post Why Can’t We Be More Like Canada? UK librarian lo-fi librarian bemoaned that UK publishers are behind and have not equally taken up the call.

In response, legal publishing consultant Nick Holmes has now put together his own sample RSS feeds for Sweet & Maxwell and Jordans in an effort to urge the publishers on. He discussed the effort on his blog Binary Law in the blog post Feeding the five thousand (2) . lo-fi seems pleased . . . [more]

If IMAP’s your thing, you might be interested to know that Gmail is in the process of making it available to all who have a Gmail account. Check yours to see if the prezzie has already arrived.

If you’re not clear what IMAP is all about, pop over to the IMAP Connection for a lesson, or get the full 9 yards from Wikipedia. . . . [more]

In plenty of time for the holiday gift season, Wired Magazine has released Wired Test in PDF, free to download. There you’ll find the results of tests on an advertised “300+ New Products,” gadgets all. The fun of cruising atop our society’s excess aside, this issue of Wired has some real value, given that firms must evaluate and buy a wide range of tools, that, seen from the outside might be labelled gadgets. So you or your firm may well want to know which is the best Camcorder or DSLR camera, the best laptop or smart phone. And, yes, there . . . [more]

It’s not often we Canadians get some play on the US legal gossip queen Above the Law, so let’s congratulate McInnes Cooper’s student recruiting video for making the grade.

Law firms are in tough when it comes to online video. The quality standard expected by the average user is that of the nightly news. And the inevitable re-hash of unoriginal legal imagery is a huge block in the road – someone is *always* going to critique your choices.

So isn’t it great to see McInnes Cooper bring this out? A mix of fun & facts, and a shot . . . [more]

One area in which the new ways of communicating and collaborating that are discussed so often at this site are coming to the fore is in labour relations. Social networking sites are proving to be a valuable tool for labour union to bring a group of people together in a common cause.

In a widely-reported event last month, IBM workers in Italy wanted to stage a protest over a performance bonus they had not received. They decided to hold the protest in Second Life; IBM has long been a business leader in the virtual world. Protestors from around the (real) . . . [more]

The Future of Things has an update on the progress of electronic paper. The article is an interview with “the father of e-paper” Nick Sheridon, and includes some history, notes on current applications (including sony’s e-reader), and speculations about 2012, when he expects to see e-paper in widespread use.

The main advantage of e-paper, of course, would be the ease of editing. It might be especially useful for labeling foods and drugs, for instance.

via Stephen’s Lighthouse . . . [more]

I’ve blogged a couple of times already about Zotero, that impressive Firefox extension that operates as a note-taker and bibliographic software. Zotero can tell when you’re viewing a book or an article or, now, a legal judgment, but until recently it had no category, if you like, for blog entry. That’s changed.

COinS (ContextObjects in Spans) is a simple way of embedding citation metadata in web pages. Zotero developed a WordPress plugin that uses the COinS specification for making basic metadata available to it. ((There seems to be a problem with the way the plugin interacts with version 2.2.2 . . . [more]