Montenegro’s new top-level country-code domain — .me — is coming available in stages, so if you’re interested in acquiring something nicely narcissistic in the way of URLs, you’ll need to be on the alert. Phase 4, the period when anyone, whether or not in Montenegro and whether or not with a registered trademark, can apply for a domain, begins on June 6. The goodies get given out on a first-come first-served basis.

[via Rouse & Co. International] . . . [more]

One of the highlights of this year’s CALL conference was the presentation by Darlene Fichter on Web 2.0 which kicked off our conference program Monday morning. I was privileged to introduce Darlene, who is Coordinator of the Data Library Services at the University of Saskatchewan and Advisor on Emerging Technologies, as well as consultant and project manager on various website, portal, library and intranet projects. Her talk was delightful. These slides which she posted to Slideshare for us only partially capture her lively presentation.

I love those gophers! During her presentation Darlene identified that . . . [more]

Simon noted last year the sources available for legal researchers on Microsoft’s Live.com book search.

However, an announcement on Microsoft’s blog on Friday indicated that the project is over and that this field has now been yielded entirely to Google. . . . [more]

What do law librarians get up to. Some wonderful images from AALL’s Day in the Life Competition in which the third prize combines my dear friend Ricki Andersen‘s passions for cats and statutes: . . . [more]

Good news!

According to online chatter, a recent patent application filed by some Apple employees hints that the company is working on making its mobile devices, like the iPod, solar powered. MacRumors.com briefly discusses the advantages and challenges of doing this. . . . [more]

It might just be if no-one can find it using the conventional search engines. That’s why it’s great to see Mark Kuiack’s PracticeLink page contain a great article by Sharon Nelson on Search Engine Optimization techniques, designed to educate lawyers.

Everyone responsible for a law firm website should be looking at this closely. For the non-legal community, Wikipedia is still a useful source. . . . [more]

Following up on Simon’s post last week and a supplementary comment by David Fraser concerning that international agreement on Anti-counterfeiting under negotiation that would permit ex parte searches for allegedly infringing materials. This raises the spectre of customs and border enforcement authorities searching laptops, ipods and other electronic devices.

All of the relevant technical discussion has been usefully gathered here.

I think the answer is to just give up travelling. . . . [more]

Today’s Dayton Business Journal describes a shake-up involving our friends at Lexis, as Reed Elsevier continues its process of moving jobs from Ohio to India.

The plans are to move a quarter of the jobs over the next few years. It’s been a forty year linkage between Dayton and legal research since the Ohio Bar started the work on automating legal information.

In a presentation given in Toronto late last year, former Reed Elsevier plc officer Sanjay Viswanathan gave a presentation that showed the LexisNexis parent company restructuring through 2010. The presentation shows the company will shift 900 jobs

Section 1 starts: . . . [more]

Jason Eiseman, Computer Automation Librarian at Schwabe Williamson & Wyatt, an Oregon law firm, has produced a three part tutorial for law librarians on using RSS. The tuts run as Flash movies with sound. The introduction runs 6 minutes, using an aggregator 13 minutes and advanced RSS 16 minutes. Since RSS is still very much a minority taste among legal workers, these tuts might prove quite useful. . . . [more]

Those of you who have cases that seem to have dragged on forever may find the Internet Medieval Source Book‘s pages on medieval law useful and interesting. A project of Fordham University, the main medieval law links page will give you a tour d’horizon of Roman, Canon, Germanic, English, Jewish, Islamic law texts. This is a fairly comprehensive collection of resources. . . . [more]

Just when you thought that the whole craziness of IP couldn’t get any more strange… along comes VueStar Technologies, a Singaporean company that claims a patent on using images to link to a webpage. It seems the company does have Singapore Patent No. 95940 and on that basis is sending bills to firms in Singapore for an annual license of their patent. According to the story in ZDNet Asia, the VueStar has also received a patent in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. A very quick search for VueStar in the Canadian patent database didn’t get a hit. . . . [more]