To date, I think most would describe the web as a medium dominated by written discourse. If we measured the most addicting activities online, from communication media like IM and email, to discussion forums and chat, to the popularity of blogs, written dialogue really has been the star of the show.

Recently though, as in the past 2 years, we’ve seen audio and video content make huge strides. Most of us have watched the inroads made by podcasting, vodcasting & the youtube generation, each given the media moniker of the next ‘great one’ set to dominate the web. And technology . . . [more]

So the Globe/CTV commissioned a poll in which a majority of the thousand people in the sample said BOTH that they trusted judges (who aren’t elected) more than members of Canada’s parliament (who are elected) AND that they’re in favour of electing judges.

Did it strike any of the thousand in both majorities that perhaps, just perhaps, the reason they trust judges more than politicians is precisely because that judges ARE NOT elected?

Did it strike the pollsters to point out that inconsistency? (I assume they didn’t because it would skew the results. In fact, it might even cause the . . . [more]

Over at the Berkman Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School in partnership with LexisNexis, at the Harvard Law School a major study by Gene Koo on what law students aren’t prepared for.From a US perspective, not much has changed since the MacCrate Report on Legal Education and Professional Development
Much of the study won’t exactly be news to the readers of Slaw.
Let’s start with the provocation at the outset:

A large majority of lawyers perceive critical gaps between what they are taught in law schools and the skills they need in the workplace, and appropriate technologies

Archive-It is part of the Internet Archive’s effort to preserve our digital documents. It aims at organizations, offering them a chance to construct curated collections of their web documents and sites, collections that can then be searched later. One of the main partner institutions is the University of Toronto.

Of the collections that already exist, Slawyers might be most interested in the following:

• Canadian Political Interest Groups

  “Canadian Political Parties and Political Interest Groups will archive the websites of all of the national Canadian political parties, and a number of special interest groups across the political spectrum.” [30 sites]

• National

Slaw contributor Agnese Caruso has just started a personal blog called Slice of Life. (Once blogging gets under your skin, it’s hard to resist the impulse.) Looks like it’s going to be enjoyable.

Of interest, too, is that she’s chosen a blogging platform that’s new to me: Blogsome. Like the others — and Blogger in particular — it’s free and seems easy to use. What is different from Blogger is the ability to choose from among a wide variety of themes originally created for WordPress installations and to modify those to suit your sense of style. Worth considering . . . [more]

“Could you repeat the question?” 

No, this isn’t about that sort of lap-dancing, as distracting as it might be.

There’s an article, in today’s online Washington Post, from a Georgetown law professor explaining why he has banned computer laptops from his classroom. It’s worth reading. (It would be worth reading even if the author’s first name weren’t one I’m attached to.)

I’ll quote his conclusion.

I am sure that the Internet can be a useful pedagogical tool in some settings and for some subjects. But for most classes, it is little more than an attractive nuisance. Technology has outstripped

All,

As I said, I cannot speak for the company or its intentions. I am only saying that from where I stand and from my limited understanding of the issues raised, it appeared very difficult for their appeal to succeed. That does not make their application frivolous and it is not like there were no legitimate issues raised in the application. Further, I am

Somewhere, stored in the Slaw archive, amidst the collected wisdom of this congregation, is the thread listing new collective nouns for groups within the legal profession.

Actually, it’s here.

Anyway, so that the contest doesn’t run interminably – and to kick start it – John and I are now able to announce the prize. It will be awarded two weeks, hence, as part of that day’s fillip, Simon F willing.

What’s below are paragraphs from e-mail exchanges between us setting out how we arrived at the prize, and what it will be. All explicit identifiers have been removed to protect . . . [more]

Because this is Good Friday, a holiday, and a serious one for many people, this won’t be a flippant fillip. I’m simply presenting you with two rather different blogs that might catch your interest.

The first is Hometown Baghdad, which describes itself as: “A documentary web series following the lives of a few Iraqi 20-somethings trying to survive in Baghdad.” This is an unusual implementation of the blogging format, using You Tube to play out documentary segments across the weeks. There are new video episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday; I’m not entirely clear but it seems that everything . . . [more]

ThinkFree, one of the online office companies fighting for the alt-MS turf (and something we posted about nearly a year ago), has released a WordPress plugin for its free MS Office file viewer. I’ve installed the plugin here at Slaw, which is produced by WordPress, and I’ve created some sample links below in this post to demonstrate how it works. On the creation side, you need only make a link to the file and the plugin does the rest.

The links that follow are to Microsoft Office files (.doc, .ppt, and .xls formats) available on a web server. . . . [more]

Using CanLII a fair bit lately, I’ve noticed something that may or may not have been there in the old version having to do with obtaining a decent URL for a case.

The problem in a nutshell is that by the time to get to the case you’re looking for, the resultant URL is made up of all of the decisions taken (or taken for you) until that point, and there doesn’t appear to be a straightforward way from the resulting case page to reduce it to the minimum necessary.

Let me assume something close to the best case scenario: . . . [more]

There have been various ways to do it before, but now the easiest way to make and mark up a Google map is by using Google itself. A new feature, My Maps, requires you to log into your Gmail account; then when you go to Google Maps, you’ll see a new tab, “My Maps.” Within that tab you’ll be able to create a map of anywhere on the globe and populate it with the usual blue teardrop location identifiers. But now you can edit the popup text field associated with those location identifiers and create a rich text or HTML . . . [more]