As Michel-Adrien has pointed out, I had the privilege of attending the Podcasters Across Borders conference held in Kingston, Ontario this past weekend. Participants ranged from hobbyists to business people, but the whole weekend had a collegial community feel to it. I was surprised as to how much law-related content I found.

First, a simple explanation of what podcasting is: it is like a radio show, but based on the Internet. Episodes are portable–they can be played from one’s computer, or can be down-loaded from the Web to an MP3 player such as an iPod. The name is a . . . [more]

My goal was to post this prior to Simon Fodden’s “Canada Day” Friday Filip below. Unfortunately, the screed that follows has nothing to do with colorful flags or the Maple Leaf Rag (however, to see colorful covers of ragtime sheet music, see my recent updates at Classic Ragtime Piano).

In a recent speech I gave in Toronto at an Ark Group presentation on Knowledge Management in Law Firms I spoke on how a firm’s culture affects knowledge management. I addressed 3 broad aspects of this topic:

1) The 8 “Settled Truths” About KM, Culture and Law Firms

2) . . . [more]

This fillip goes all red and white For Canada Day… But lots of places do the red and white thing, it turns out. Humph!

Designer Shahee Ilyas has analysed the world’s flags and has represented them all as pie charts of colour, with the wedges accurately describing the area of the flag so coloured. Below you’ll see the flags of sixteen countries rounded out, so to speak, that I’ve pulled from Ilyas’s work. Canada is in there somewhere. Can you spot it by colour or proportion? This is the true patriot challenge. (And no peeking at the source code.)

1. . . . [more]

Powerset is — or will be in September — among other things a natural language search engine. Relying on Xerox Parc’s natural language technology, over $12 million in financing and a staff of more than 40, Powerset hopes to beat the odds that have downed just about every single challenger to Google after the intitial flurry of interest — “the dead cat bounce.” (Parc has reproduced a NY Times piece on Powerset on its site.)

Powerset also plans to rely on community involvement to both train the engine and develop a sustained buzz.

ZDNet has a long piece on . . . [more]

In Denis v Truemner (2007), 84 OR (3d) 260 (Ont. S.C.J.), in dealing with the costs claimed in the action, Spies J. said:

[26] The disbursements claimed by the defendant are significant. They include airfare in the amount of $398.00 and online electronic legal research in the amount of $606.00. On its face, the amount for research is excessive as the defendant only referred to six cases. Airfare for counsel is not dealt with in the Tariff, although I have the power to award it if I find that this disbursement was reasonably necessary. I note the plaintiff claimed for

Zotero, the cross-platform Firefox note-taking and biblio plugin, now “does” legal research. That is, there’s a format for logging cases and statutes; and the site works “automatically” with CanLII and Lexis/Nexis. So, for example, if I go to the CanLII report of the Johnson v. Johnson case from the Alberta Court of Appeal –

. . . [more]

For those of you interested in the debate around old media vs. new media, this is very interesting: Statistics Canada released data demonstrating Canadians spent less time listening to radio in 2006 than in previous years. The data shows that much of the decline occurred among teens aged 12 to 17 and young adults aged 18 to 24. Statistics Canada also goes on to say that the popularity of digital music players and online music services have the biggest impact on this decline.

Surprise, surprise. . . . [more]

Creative Commons Canada published its Podcasting Legal Guide for Canada: Northern Rules For The Revolution this past weekend.

The document was released at the Podcasters Across Borders 2007 conference in Kingston, Ontario.

“The Canadian podcasting community is emerging as an important voice in Canada that deserves broad support and attention. While accessible and easy-to-use technology has removed many technological barriers for would-be podcasters, the legal challenges can be daunting. Podcasting touches on several legal areas, including copyright, trade-mark, and personality rights, each of which brings its own complexities and uncertainties. Conventional broadcasters typically enjoy the benefit of internal legal resources,

This is a post of a few parts, and one that is probably so far off topic for Slaw that I wouldn’t have written it if the material it’s about weren’t so incredibly interesting — and important. I don’t gush often — at least, I think I don’t. But I’m gushing about this content.

1. I subscribe to the TED Blog feed and, so, received an entry about a presentation by Hans Rosling. It’s a 20 minute talk on the development of nations along a number of axes, which makes it sound truly dull. It is, in fact, one of . . . [more]

Read/Write web has a great post showing some of the Top Web Apps in Canada. Cool not just because it shows some great Canadian web companies like Mike McDerment’s Freshbooks, which I’d previously discovered via Rob Hyndman, but also for that nice preamble on Canadian Internet usage. Something that should be said more often:

Canadians use the Internet more than anyone in the world. According to comScore, Canadians spend on average 39.6 hours per month on the Internet, followed by Israel at 37.4 and South Korea at 34, while the USA is in 8th position with 29.4. Canada

I maybe should save this for Friday, but I found out about this link through the Canadian Association of Research Libraries listserv. Its from a May 18th posting on Facebook:

A Fair(y) Use Tale
YouTube, May 18, 2007

Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University provides this humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms . . . [more]

Xerox is touting it’s new semantic search development, Fact Spotter.

The “smart” search engine can comb through almost any document regardless of the language, location, format or type; take advantage of the way humans think, speak and ask questions; and discriminate the results highlighting just a handful of relevant answers instead of returning thousands of unrelated responses.

“Our advanced search engine goes beyond today’s typical ‘keyword’ search or current data-mining programs, which typically end up searching only 40 percent of all the documents that are relevant because the keywords are too limiting,” said Frédérique Segond, manager of parsing and semantics