Search Engine Land confirmed yesterday that RSS feeds for search results are on their way to Google.

Interesting? Yes, but after a bit of thought, I’m lowering my expectations. There’s no way to be know if these concerns will ever come about, but let me document them anyway:

• Drinking from the Firehose? – If, as expected, this works similar to blog search RSS, the amount of content could be huge. Putting up tighter filters may help, ie. searching in quotes, longer search phrases, more specific search terms; but the web is a big place…
• Content I Want? – Blog search

A culture of long hours and stress are driving increasing numbers of lawyers to drink and drugs, both within and outside the workplace.

Times Online has a piece, “Long hours and stress drive lawyers to drink and drugs,” on a survey published this week by Legal Business, that shows alcohol and drug abuse to be “endemic” among lawyers in big, City firms. One unfortunate soul, a partner in a big London firm, claims to have spent £100,000 on cocaine in a year “and nobody noticed.”

As the stress caused by the financial collapse works its way . . . [more]

Robert Ambrogi has a post over on Legal Blog Watch about a conference at Seattle University School of Law on the digital future of legal casebooks. It seems that the situation in the U.S. is no different from that here: publishers and academics are unclear about what they want in a casebook, though both (some academics, certainly) perceive that electronic casebooks are the way to go.

One upshot appears to be that CALI and Gene Koo will organize a group to build and use an e-casebook on cyberlaw. There is, of course, a certain “rightness” about a course in . . . [more]

Bill Ives has a couple of posts on the use of wikis for knowledge management at law firms on his blog, Portals and KM.

In Wikis in Knowledge Management at Law Firms – Part One: ThoughtFarmer Example he reports on a discussion at a recent event in Boston, where two examples were discussed. The first was of a Canadian firm (unnamed) where the KM and IT people had set up Domino wikis (i.e. inside the firewall) for the various practice groups. The result was that they created silos of information. As a solution they turned to ThoughtFarmer. After . . . [more]

The states of Nevada and now Massachusetts require that holders of personal information must encrypt that information. Nevada imposes this requirement on businesses with respect to some kinds of information — names associated with social security numbers or various other kinds of access codes. Massachusetts imposes the requirement on everybody and applies it to storage on mobile devices and transmission through open networks.

A memo by the Chicago firm of Wildman Harrold describes both laws and gives citations.

Do we need this kind of rule in Canada? PIPEDA and its provincial counterparts require holders of personal information to keep it . . . [more]

That was the message delivered last night by Steve Spencer of Digital Fortress Corporation at the monthly Internetwork meeting.

He makes a good point. Many people think about disaster recovery when dealing with business continuity plans. That is the wrong focus, as recovering from a disaster has a huge cost in terms of lost customer service, idle staff time, and and hits to productivity and customer relations.

When it comes to IT infrastructure – ie the servers and systems that run a business – the better approach is to think about disaster prevention. In other words, consider the possible things . . . [more]

Just over a month ago I said right here on Slaw,

…government officials should also review legislation relating to liability of public apologies so that responsible companies like Maple Leaf are not penalized in the process.

It seems someone was paying attention.

A new proposed law would address this issue. The Ministry of the Attorney General of Ontario said in a release today,

The Apology Act would, if passed:

• Allow individuals and organizations, such as hospitals and other public institutions, to apologize for an accident or wrongdoing, without it being used as evidence of liability in a civil

Readers will have already noticed that Slaw now counts Gary P. Rodrigues among its regular contributors; but we are proud to announce it, even if we’re a little late in doing so.

Gary was the senior publishing executive at both Carswell and Lexis Nexis during the periods of their greatest expansion and development and was, in effect, the architect of their current print and online publishing programs. As well, he is a former President of the Canadian Publishers Council and a former CoChair of Access Copyright when it was known as Cancopy. From time to time, he has served as . . . [more]

It’s nowhere near Friday, but that mustn’t matter. Even so there’s a tenuous connection with our regular programming, having to do with copyright law and Dolores Claman’s problems with the CBC (or vice versa). So… today’s the day you get to vote for the new hockey theme for Hockey Night in Canada. On CBC’s Anthem Challenge webpage you’ll find links to the five finalists’ music. Have a listen, and then vote. It’ll be good practice, anyway, for October 14. . . . [more]

As a follow-up to the post on Google Picasa’s facial recognition software, there are other new potential Google products that are raising privacy concerns.

A Google spokesperson announced this week a patent application that will rank social network users based on their influence, measured by metrics that would include how many people visited their profile, number of friends, and how active they were on the site.

The product would even track how frequently people post on sites and how successful they are in getting others to read or watch things that they post. Ranking could also be based on . . . [more]

From the earliest days of online legal research, the death of the traditional law report in print was predicted. Online access to cases would make print unnecessary. In the paperless world that was imminent, there would be no need for the traditional law report. Storage problems for sets of law report series would be eliminated and the cost of searching cases would be greatly reduced.

That was the vision for online legal research in 1973 when Lexis Nexis and Quicklaw pioneered in offering commercial online access to case law. It was going to be just a matter of time before . . . [more]

Here’s an article by Dorothea Salo, an experienced and outspoken Institutional Repositories manager, on the state of IRs, open access, and academic libraries: Innkeeper at the Roach Motel. Its a real blast of industrial cleanser where we usually get soft soap. Here is her blog: Caveat Lector. Also see this interesting interview with her. . . . [more]