This is obviously a day for new blogs. Connie posted just now about All About Information, and I am glad to have discovered the University of Alberta Faculty of Law’s Faculty Blog. Posting seems regular since it launched a couple of months ago, so this is clearly one to bookmark. And from the Faculty Blog I learn about Bouck’s Law Blog, a brand new blawg by John C. Bouck, a retired B.C. Supreme Court judge. His is the only judicial blawg I know of in Canada. . . . [more]

Dan Michaluk of Hicks Morley LLP has started a new blog about the legal aspects of information called, appropriately enough, All About Information. He is covering subjects such as freedom of information, privacy, e-discovery, e-mail, records management, and many other subjects. Some good, substantial discussion here, which he hopes to expand upon as he goes along.

Welcome to the blawgosphere, Dan!

Posted 7:30 a.m. from home. . . . [more]

A recent New York Times article focuses on how blogging can boost your career. What’s really cool about this article is that librarian Ellyssa Kroski is mentioned. The article describes how Kroski decided to start blogging about her professional interests to build connections that could lead to a job. Not only did her blog lead to a job, but she is now being invited to speak at national conferences and has even completed her first book Web 2.0 for Librarians and Information Professionals. . . . [more]

We talk a fair bit on Slaw about translation between French and English, as befits a blog on law in Canada. See, e.g.:

• Return to Sender
• Legal Translation
• Google Translate
• Translate a Word, Phrase or Document

I’ve recently been introduced to a pair of translation tools that I ought to have known about but that for some reason I didn’t. Just in case you aren’t aware of them, let me briefly describe them.

First, and most obvious, I suppose, is Quebec’s Grand dictionnaire terminologique, a clear upside to the Office québécois de la langue française. Here you’ll find . . . [more]

Public hearings into what is referred to as reasonable accommodation of minorities are to begin in September in the province of Quebec.

Internationally famous philosopher and McGill University scholar Charles Taylor and sociologist Gérard Bouchard will co-chair the consultations that will take place in some 17 cities of the province.

The Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences was created by the provincial government last spring after a number of incidents involving clashes or controversies between members of minority groups, in particular religious minorities, and the members of the highly secularized French-speaking majority that overthrew the restraints of . . . [more]

I’d like to share a bit of research I put together over at my new blog. Last week I re-assembled The Lawyer’s 2006 global 100 law firm websites, and then re-ranked the list by the number of pages indexed within the search engines. I then posted some commentary on law firm content strategy, and what we might read into a list like this.

In the future, I’d like do more demographic lists. I’d also like to look further into why a firm like DLA Piper has 10 times more pages than any other global 100 law firm, or . . . [more]

Reading online is not a perfect experience. Many folks won’t tackle long documents at all and print whatever needs to be read. Whether or not new paper-like paper-thin monitors will change text readability in the future, there are a few things we can do now to improve online readability of text — and one new technique that may or may not prove useful.

Old hat first:

• Increase the type size to suit your vision (all modern browsers let you do this easily).

  Take a look at this page if you’re uncertain how to make a font larger, either on the

Yesterday I had one of those “What did we do in the old (i.e. pre-web) days?” experiences, as, I suspect, did many others who were similarly trying to access information from some particular government web sites. The Ontario ministry site from which I was seeking some information was down and had been for a while. I thought I’d make some phone calls instead, but where to find a phone number? Of course, the online government directory – but it was down as well. Then I remembered the blue pages in an “old-fashoned” phone book – but of course no phone . . . [more]

Those of you who use Firefox may want to take a look at a new add-on, Firedoodle. It provides a toolbar that lets you annotate any web page — that is, treat that page as though it were a whiteboard — and then save the annotations. You can draw in various colours of variable opacity; you can frame a portion of the page (see the linked thumbnail pics below); and you should be able to place markers at chosen points in the page and leave sticky notes on the page (though I’ve had trouble getting the former to work). . . . [more]

The English language Walter Owen Book Prize is awarded every other year by the Foundation for Legal Research to the author(s) of a book which “represents an outstanding new contribution to Canadian legal literature and which enhances the quality of legal research in Canada.” For those who might have missed it, the 2007 prize was awarded at the CBA in Calgary this past weekend. This year the judges’ panel split the prize between John Swan for his new Contracts text, published by Butterworths, and Ari Kaplan for his book on Pension Law which is published in the Irwin Law Essentials . . . [more]

In a piece in the Science section of today’s New York Times, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom opines that there’s a better than 20% chance we’re “living” in a computer simulation. It seems that because we’ll soon — by 2050, let’s say — be smart enough to get really, really good at this Second Life stuff, and because there’s always someone who’s into nostalgia, a game of life in the past might be created.

Your move. . . . [more]

The Christian Science Monitor reported today that both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are considering getting rid of their paid subscriptions and providing free access to all of their content. This caught my eye, as the Journal has long been admired as one of the few media outlets actually able to make money off of their online content. Their columnist suggests that “If both the Times and Journal abandon the idea of pay-to-read content, it is essentially dead for the time being on the Web.”

As part of a younger generation (well, sort of anyways) of . . . [more]