Although Microsoft Word still underlines it in red, googling the word cyberchondriac provides 46,800 hits, and the term cyberchondria has had its own Wikipedia entry since June, 2005. It seems that the practice of self-diagnosing medical conditions with the assistance of Dr. Google continues to grow in popularity.

Although health professionals have plenty of online resources at their disposal, specialized search engines are popping up to cater to the demands of laypeople in pursuit of an ailment, a cure, or merely a second opinion. For instance, Healia allows a searcher to filter their results for articles at a basic (or . . . [more]

There is a thoughtful short article in the September issue of The Walrus by Jon Evans, “Apocalypse Soon”. The focus of the article is on the future of online texts, or ebooks, and ebook readers. Although the author makes a number of overgeneralizations, there is a good point about why e-books have so far only captured a small percentage of the market – 0.2% according to Evans. Evans partially explains this by reference to “contrast”, which print has an electronic text doesn’t, and goes on to praise the virtues of the Sony Reader.

We actually purchased a Sony reader . . . [more]

Ever wanted to know which links users are drawn to on your website?

For the past week, I’ve been testing out Crazyegg.com, which will track site visitors and clicks with a tiny snippet of code in your website template. The free subscription for this site offers up to 6000 page impressions, and creates a series of visual maps to represent the most dominant linking patterns on your site.

The results can be displayed as a ‘heat map’:

Or as ‘confetti’:

Want to try yourself? Please feel free to use my temporary login for the VLLB test (user: steve@stemlegal.com; pw: . . . [more]

… with the Canucks (story). But I guess this wasn’t what Simon intended about me getting a post up at Slaw. Ah well, I’ll try to get something more substantive up shortly.

Although I’m sure there’s a legal angle… why else would a signing of this magnitude take this long? ;-) . . . [more]

Karen Sawatzky, Librarian at Pitblado LLP in Winnipeg, points us to a post on Law Librarian Blog about Twittering in the U.S. House of Representatives. Posts to the Clerk of the House’s Current House Floor Proceedings Page are pumped out via Twitter ever five minutes or so when the House is sitting. This is the sort of thing that could really excite politics junkies.

Twitter is a “microblogging” application that we’ve talked a bit about before here on Slaw:

I don’t think Hansard is built moment by moment throughout a sitting day, . . . [more]

Unless you’re someone who builds or modifies web pages, you can unfurrow that brow and relax into a “what will they think of next” state of mild wonder. And until they think of that next thing, XRAY is worth a look. It’s a patch of JavaScript, acting as a bookmarklet, that takes the source code and css of the page you’re on in your browser, sends it back to the home planet from where a small window is sent to overlie your browser window: click on any area in your browser and that area’s bone structure, so to speak, is . . . [more]

The latest lovechild of the Zoho-Google cuddlefest is an offline capacity for Zoho Writer. After installing Google Gears (see my post on Understanding RIA), you’ll see that there’s an offline button that appears in your Zoho Writer toolbar. According to an information video, this currently lets you download 15 documents to be read — but not edited — offline. A full editing, document creation function is to be added in about a month’s time.

All of which is cool for two groups of people, I guess: the advantaged (or driven), who fly a lot and are, thus, . . . [more]

According to a post today on Information Today’s Newsbreaks page, Thomson West will be making the American Law Reports exclusive to Westlaw as of January 2008. In the post, Carol Ebbinghouse, director of the California Second District Court of Appeal Library, writes about the origin and history of the ALRs. She also says:

As a legal research educator and a librarian who has worked with law students and attorneys as well as judges, I can tell you that there are users who won’t know a product like ALR is gone from an online service until they really need it.

Today’s New York Times has reports that “activist… internet gadfly… self-styled Robin Hood” Carl Malmud has begun a direct challenge to the big online publishers by copying and placing online 1000 pages of court decisions from the 1880’s that he acknowledges getting from a Thomson microfiche. He says he aims to make freely available up to ten million pages of caselaw.

The judgments Malmud has published are available on his site, public.resource.org. At the moment there is a hyper-compressed tiff file of all of the thousand pages — nearly 4G in size, itself a formidable barrier to access I . . . [more]

According to a list of laughable laws, fit for the summer silly season, it’s treasonable in Britain to place a postage stamp bearing the image of the monarch upside down. And in England, all men over the age of 14 must carry out two hours of longbow practice a day. And… there are 25 of these odd survivors for you to enjoy on the Times Online. There are also over a hundred comments to enjoy, most, however, being aimed at the poor American lawyer who didn’t read carefully enough and thought the item about York was about New York. . . . [more]

More music today — because there’s less music available lately. At least online. The internet radio folks have been having their problems with the DRM and copyright people in the U.S. And the differences between U.S. copyright laws and those of other jurisdictions has led to a number of streaming music sites being unable to reach outside the republic’s borders. About a year ago I mentioned Pandora in the course of a Friday Fillip on Etta Baker; this was the website I used to listen to popular music, blues, jazz and other non-classical ditties. But no more.

So it was . . . [more]

On 26 and 27 October, 2007 there’s to be a conference at the Faculty of Law, University of Western Ontario, on The Charter of Rights and Freedoms and Canadian Labour Law. Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin is scheduled to speak. The conference schedule [PDF] and the registration form [PDF] are available online.

[hat tip: Colin Galinski] . . . [more]