For the hardcore tekkies among us there’s Techmeme, a scraping together of a lot of tech blogs to bring you the stories that might otherwise cost you a dozen or more separate RSS feeds. It offers some business stuff (“Why Cisco bought WebEX”), some strong opinion (“RIP Twitter”), some tech news, wacky and not (“Bracelet Phone”), and some advice (“16 Ways the Media can use Blogs”). If nothing else it will lead you to sources you might not find otherwise, and then you can practice filtering and combining your own tech feed. . . . [more]

A recent InformationWeek article “Most Business Tech Pros Wary About Web 2.0 Tools in Business” (February 24th) discusses the results of a research survey of 250 business tech professionals’ thoughts about the applicability of various Web 2.0 tools in their workplaces. The survey revealed that these tech professionals are either hesitant or skeptical about blogs, wikis, etc., or they are enthusiastic but hesitant to adopt them.

The tech pros surveyed identified several major challenges to introducing Web 2.0 tools in their workplaces:
-security
-lack of expertise
-integration with legacy technologies
-difficulty proving return on investment

Other highlights of . . . [more]

Just a follow up to Simon F’s posting from August 16th on the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques (ittig); when I was browsing Worldlii today I discovered it has been added to their family of national legal databases. It doesn’t seem to fit the with the structure of the other national databases, and is somewhat difficult to navigate in either English or Italian. I wonder if there is a point at which worldlii has too much information and stops being functional? . . . [more]

For a while now, Google has been testing out various ideas in a search engine of theirs called SearchMash. It’s got a lot of AJAX, so it’s quick to respond, and the funcitions on offer now seem quite practical. It might be worth making this your next-to-everyday Google.

Some of the features it offers:

• click on a domain name in the results and see only results from that domain — which, for example, in a search for “slaw,” brings up a list of all of our posts and pages, some 3500 results;
• use the “hide details” button and all of

There’s a brief article in the Globe online reporting that the partners at the significant Toronto law firm Goodman & Carr LLP voted last night to wind down the partnership over the next few months. . . . [more]

There’s an interesting article in the NY Times Magazine about the potential impact of neuroscience on criminal law and the whole business of intention. “The Brain on the Stand,” by Jeffrey Rosen, explains that in capital cases

[l]awyers routinely order scans of convicted defendants’ brains and argue that a neurological impairment prevented them from controlling themselves. The prosecution counters that the evidence shouldn’t be admitted, but under the relaxed standards for mitigating evidence during capital sentencing, it usually is.

Which is pretty much a matter of bad cases making hard law, because the notion of “intention” is and . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of Canada has just released a Special Edition of its Bulletin of Proceedings containing a statistical overview of activities for the period 1996-2006.

It is broken down into the following sections:

• Cases Filed: “The total of 513 cases filed in the year 2006 is approximately 15% lower than the annual average number of cases filed over the last decade”.
• Applications for Leave Submitted: “number of leave applications submitted to panels of the Court for decision, the number of leave applications granted and the percentage granted of the total submitted… In 2006, there were 506

I found out about this title from a request by the Dean’s research assistant who asked a reference librarian if we had it in the law library print collection:

Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (2007)

The url also gives links to the table-of-contents and the summary of the reports reccomendations and findings.

There is some interesting matter in the report, but surprisingly not much specifcally on technology and new ways of learning and transmitting knowledge. . . . [more]

A couple of months ago I pointed you to a video explanation of OpenID by Simon Willison. He’s given another talk, “The Future of OpenID,” that he’s put online along with his slides, to take you further into this topic; there’s another introduction and then descriptions of all the things that can (and will) be done with it, as well as a tour of things that are still wrong with it.

Why should you take some time to learn more about OpenID — or anything, if it comes to that? Because Microsoft’s Bill Gates has weighed in on . . . [more]

I’ve been in Europe all week, and my sole access to information has been La Republicca, Corriere and 2 minutes of excruciatingly slow dial-up access. So I haven’t been able to follow Slaw as closely as I should.

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At at the Law Society’s Solo and Small Firm Conference ten days ago, my partner Gavin MacKenzie spoke as the Treasurer about the looming problem of access to legal services outside the big cities.

As he travels to meet with County Law Associations he’s learned in community after community that Ontario’s small town lawyers are an aging breed whose ranks . . . [more]

J’en ai déjà fait mention dans de précédents billets, le vol d’identité cultive frissons et peurs, et ce, comme tout récemment ce papier repris dans La Presse se faisant l’écho d’une étude de Gartner où une hausse vertigineuse du vol d’identité par Internet aurait été ressentie en 2006.

Ce type de discours ne m’intéresse pas. Quoi que! Car en allant sur le site de Gartner, nenni. Rien ne réfère à cette étude faisant état du catastrophisme de la situation, si ce n’est un papier du 27 février, de «4 pages» coûtant 95$ s’intitulant «The Truth Behind Identity . . . [more]

Michel-Adrien Sheppard, sometime Slawyer and full-time Library Boy, mentioned JurisPedia here a number of months ago, but didn’t talk about it then. I thought I’d take a look and see how things were going in this law wiki venture.

Jurispedia, which aims to construct an encyclopedia of worldwide law, looks to be an initiative of 5 institutions:

1. l’Équipe de Recherche Informatique et Droit, Faculty of Law of the University of Montpellier I in France,
2. the Faculty of law of the Can Tho University in Vietnam,
3. the Faculty of law of Groningen University in the Netherlands,
4. the JURIS team