Me, I always wanted to be the bass player. Not the bouncy Macca sort, mind you, but the guy who slouches around at the back of the band almost too cool to breathe. But lots of other folks would have preferred to be the drummer: even further back, maybe, but… well, louder. And having a whole lot more gear. So this fillip is for them. It’s about drumming and the beat.

Go to Audio Playground’s Virtual Drum Machines‘ site. You’ll find an incredible cornucopia of drum machines from the past all lovingly recreated by Joseph Rivers thanks to the . . . [more]

We don’t realize how much we rely on a service until it’s unavailable.

Did any Slaw readers get affected by the Google outage?

The headline in Information Week read:

Gmail, Google Search, Google Maps, Google Analytics, YouTube, AdSense, and Blogger experienced outages Thursday morning, according to discontented Twitter users.

Here is the statement:

“Earlier today, Google News was temporarily unavailable for many users, from approximately 3:30 AM until around 7:00 AM, Pacific Time. This issue has now been resolved. We know how important Google News hit is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously.”

“The . . . [more]

Thanks to a Law Times Tweet, I learned that the entertaining peek into the lives of summer students at Cassels Brock & Blackwell is back in business. You may remember this blog from Connie’s post last summer.

Having summer students spend time blogging about their experiences probably seems like a crazy thing many. I think this is a great marketing initiative, both for attracting potential students, and also to the wider community. How many of you saw the tweet from Law Times – a main stream publication? How likely is it that this news will show up in . . . [more]

If you’ve not yet had your fill of Richard Susskind, the much-mentioned-on-Slaw author of The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services, you can hear him in conversation with Berkman Center’s Brock Rutter in a discussion recorded yesterday on how IT can make practice “better and more efficient through the use of software and applications to streamline repetitive legal tasks.”

The interview is found on Radio Berkman. . . . [more]

That was the title of a presentation I attended this morning at the London TechAlliance breakfast club series.

David Ciccarelli of Voices.com was the presenter. He is well qualified to present, as he has built his business using these methods. Voices.com is interesting in itself. It is essentially a job mart for voice actors that puts together voice actors with those needing their services. As you will see from their web site, they have an impressive client list. . . . [more]

Legal researchers, what has your bar association done for you lately? What should it be doing? Are you content to join the substantive sections dealing with legal issues you research, or would you prefer to have a special section dedicated to legal research generally? I know that legal research sections have been established in British Columbia, Alberta (North and South), Manitoba and Quebec. Are there any others? In provinces where there is no separate legal research section, why is that? Is there any movement to create legal research sections in those jurisdictions? What about a national . . . [more]

In email conversation with a well-known figure of the US eDiscovery world a few weeks back, I realized that we had both noticed that the eDiscovery world has a dirty little secret: there are some eDiscovery vendors out there, offering both software and services, who promise more than they can deliver.

Let me hasten to add, before I start receiving a torrent of protests, that there are many, many vendors who deliver what they promise, and that often failure to deliver is not a reflection of the vendor’s capabilities (or their promises), but rather issues with communication, changes in project . . . [more]

I can’t do more than point to some links, but Google’s pre-emptive response to Wolfram|Alpha appears to be about to launch.

It is discussed by the BBC, ZDNet , SearchEngineWatch and Inquisitr . The Beeb says

It takes information from the web and displays it in a spreadsheet in “split seconds”, something Ms Mayer said would normally take someone half a day to do.

During the demonstration, a query for “small dog” was typed into the search box. Seconds later a table popped up showing photographs of various dogs, their origin, weight and height in a clear and simple

This post from the Fifth Column details a mix-up with the re-tweeting of a comment on the Tamil protests in Toronto. I remember seeing this Tweet myself, and being somewhat surprised that an experienced politician would offer such a strong opinion. Seems now that he didn’t.

Points out yet again the need to be a skeptical cautious consumer of information, whatever its form. . . . [more]

In what it is describing as a “small settings update” Twitter has altered the flow of blurts such that we no longer see public replies to people that we’re not following — those @doofus Well, not on your nellie! messages that simply cluttered up your flow. I am mightily pleased. (Others, not so much.) My position is that there are plenty of ways of learning about interesting folks to follow, and sometimes the irrelevant noise from some of the chattier folk I once followed made the whole exercise a painful process. Now I might actually consider . . . [more]

Further to my post last night, we have received more than a dozen calls and e-mails from lawyers further to the fraud warning blast LAWPRO sent out Monday afternoon this week. Thankfully, that e-mail blast prevented most of these lawyers from being victims of a bad cheque fraud.

However, two of the lawyers who called didn’t get our message because their Spam filter caught our e-blast. One happened to call us for advice on how to handle a suspicious transaction further to articles he had read in past issues of LAWPRO Magazine. The other just happened come across our . . . [more]

Google today launched a set of new options for filtering and presenting its search results. Now when you do a search, you’ll see a link in the upper left corner of the results page offering to “show options”:

This opens a menu down the right-hand side of the window displaying a dozen filters, as shown in the image to the left. The videos option displays thumbnails of videos, mostly from YouTube, whose titles contain your search terms. The forum option (somehow) manages to find in your results the hits from forums. Reviews seems to select journals and book reviews. The . . . [more]