Oddly, it’s still winter. And I can’t stop myself from gazing longingly down at the south, far south. So I’ve decided that this Friday, we’ll be flying down to Rio. It’s 27 degrees there at the moment and will be warmer tomorrow. I’d hoped to take you there via a webcam, but sadly I can only find working webcams there for traffic, so I’ll take you a bit further south to Santos, where there’s a webcam on the beach.

Anyhow, getting there so abruptly would cause us to miss out on half the fun — at least, it . . . [more]

The American Bar Association’s ABA Journal has posted the Blawg 100, the top 100 law blogs as chosen by their editors, in various categories and is asking readers to vote for their favourites. Our own Slaw has been nominated in the “technology” category. A number of friends of Slaw are also in the running, including Law 21 by our own contributor Jordan Furlong in the “careers” category.

Head on over to vote for your favourite! If you have already voted on a previous day you can vote again. . . . [more]

I dare say more than a few SLAW readers will have a New Year’s resolution that, in one form or another, has at its core, a goal of getting to an empty inbox. Unfortunately, there is no magic button – it takes a lot of time and effort to get to an empty, especially if you have hundreds (or even thousands of messages) in your Inbox.

I won’t focus on cleaning up older messages in this post. My LAWPRO Magazine article Surviving the E-mail Onslaught has some quick tips. Probably the best collection information on this topic is the Inbox . . . [more]

As part of our current awareness services, we troll the Ontario Gazette looking for regulatory changes of interest. I found in the December 27 issue an amendment to the Rules of Civil Procedure which I think may provoke some interesting discussion before it comes into force on January 1, 2010.

RULE 4.1 DUTY OF EXPERT

DUTY OF EXPERT

4.1.01 (1) It is the duty of every expert engaged by or on behalf of a party to provide evidence in relation to a proceeding under these rules,

(a) to provide opinion evidence that is fair, objective and non-partisan;

(b) to provide . . . [more]

I wrote two weeks ago about privacy issues related to the log files that are created and retained by internet companies. The moral of that story was that there is a significant amount of information that is collected in these logs and when they are retained and collated, they can reveal a lot of personal information. I concluded by saying:

I don’t think it’s too far fetched to think of a day when it will become standard for all investigations involving the internet to include a warrant served on Google or Yahoo! or Microsoft for all logs related to a

Twitter developers, rather like life itself, are plunging into every possible nook, cranny and crevice for a foothold on this latest development, and twit apps proliferate. All this in aid of the blurt — but I digress. Now for those who truly belong to the twittering classes comes TweetGrid, which lets you monitor multiple flows of info in one screen on your browser. You can choose the grid pattern that suits you, anywhere from a single (1 X 1) stream, up to a frenzied 9 panel (3 X 3) spray. In each panel of your grid, you can enter . . . [more]

I forgot to celebrate the winter solstice, when the days start to lengthen once more and sunlight seems to be a thing you can bank on even though brutal January and February lie ahead. But if time “creeps in this petty pace from day to day,” so does this lengthening of light; a measly 38 seconds got tacked on to yesterday, for example. I know this because of SunPosition.com, a business in Barrie Ontario that specializes in locating the sun in the sky — anytime, anywhere.

Knowing how Sol was (or will be) there (or here) can be of . . . [more]

Just a quick note to say the 2008 Canadian Law Blog Awards are now live at Clawbies.ca. Congratulations to the winners, and also to those who took part in the new nomination process. A complete roundup of the nominations is listed over at the Vancouver Law Librarian Blog, and I would encourage everyone to surf through those peer-to-peer recommendations.

Similar to last year, everyone will have a chance to blog an ‘acceptance speech’ and I will relay those posts on the Stem Blog during the second week of January.

Happy New Year!
Steve . . . [more]

Lake Superior State University in Michigan has just published its 2009 List of Banished Words, aka the “34th annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness”.

The list started in 1976 and is based on submissions by the general public.

Among this year’s list are:

• “green” anything
• carbon footprint and carbon offset
• maverick
• bailout
• Wall Street vs. Main Street (I suppose the Canadian equivalent “Bay Street vs. Main Street” would also qualify)
• iconic
• game changer
• it’s that time of the year again (for making lists?)

The previous lists are archived . . . [more]

♬When will my reflections show
Who I am inside?♬

Written by Matthew Wilder and David Zippel, recorded by Christina Aguilera.

We are at an important transition point – when one year ends and a fresh new one is about to begin. The point is an important legal, celestial and financial one – while the world isn’t much different following the crossing of the line from one year to the next, that crossing signifies the closing of a circle, the closing of financial books and the start of determining the passage of time for the consequences of events that . . . [more]

The open access movement in academic publishing continues to gather steam: two books are newly available free online.

Daniel J. Solove, Berkeley Law Prof, has released “The Future of Reputation, gossip, rumour and privacy on the internet.” Originally published in 2007 by Yale University Press, the book

…offers a fascinating account of how the Internet is transforming gossip, the way we shame others, and our ability to protect our own reputations. Focusing on blogs, Internet communities, cyber mobs, and other current trends, he shows that, ironically, the unconstrained flow of information on the Internet may impede opportunities for

The Law Commission of Ontario doesn’t have a very long period to look back — we effectively began our work in February 2008, having spent the previous four and a half months (that included the holiday break!) since our launch getting organized in one way or another — and we really don’t have that long to look forward (since despite the above, the Agreement that created the LCO began in January 2007 and expires in January 2012 and we are in that sense entering our third year). . . . [more]