Etta Baker died this week at the age of 93. Chances are you’ve never heard of her — and, which is more important — have never heard her. She was a mother of nine and a blues guitarist of the Piedmont style, who started recording in 1956 and didn’t stop playing music until her death. Her fingerpicking style influenced a great many guitarists throughout the sixties, including Taj Mahal, who recorded with her. The New York Times article on her gives you a decent overview.

I want you to listen to her, though. And fortunately . . . [more]

Wonderful article! . . . [more]

Almost a year ago I did a post about Google’s RSS Reader. A typical Google beta, there were a lot of rough edges pointed out by Steve Matthews. Now it’s been redesigned and is worth another look. It imports your OPML file of subscriptions, and there’s a host of new features that I haven’t had time to explore.

Google Reader opens the first time, by the way, with a video that hopes to explain RSS through an analogy with email. It might — I say, just might — click with some folks who haven’t quite grasped the concept . . . [more]

Today’s e-gram from the ABAJ leads with a story about the Bar in Albany considering regulating lawyer blogs:

BLOGOSPHERE ABOIL – N.Y. Proposal Would Designate Lawyer Blogs as Advertising

A few juicy extracts:

“Computer-accessed communications” such as blogs should be included in New York’s definition of legal advertising, and therefore require state scrutiny, according to a proposal from by a committee created by the state’s Administrative Board of Courts.

The state code of professional responsibility should extend court jurisdiction to out-of-state legal advertising that appears in New York.

Do we have any Slaw readers in New York State?

The

The Annapolis Valley Apple Harvest is in full swing here in NS but the apple harvest to which I’m referring is an apple of a different variety. In the first few weeks of term, I am noticing an exponential rise in the number of Mac Laptop users amongst our students. In a very unscientific way, I would say that well over half of the students that are coming to our reference desk or working here in the library (especially first year students) are using Mac Laptops.

I would love to hear from Slaw’ers at other institutions to find out if . . . [more]

Slaw’s own Steve Matthews has hit on a winner with the post Top 10 Uses for RSS in Law Firms on his blog. Here is the quick list, and I encourage you to visit the original post for the full discussion:

Top 10 Uses for RSS in Law Firms

1) Current Awareness
2) RSS for Firm Marketing
3) Vanity Feeds
4) Internal Research Collections
5) Client Press
6) Feeding on Marketing Content for KM
7) Case Law & Legislative Changes
8) Aggregated Tagging
9) RSS Republishing
10) Feed Mixing & Filtering for Subject Collections

Very smart. I feel like I . . . [more]

Earlier this month, I visited San Francisco for the first time. I’d long been fascinated by the thought of a city built on a geological time bomb, and walking its streets was quite an experience.

Everyone knows there’ll be a massive seismic rupture underneath the city someday. But San Franciscans are neither hot nor bothered by it; they go about their lives in their beautiful city. Their chances of being engulfed in an earthquake remain extraordinarily small, and there’s nothing they can do to prevent it anyway, so why worry?

I think you could draw a few parallels between . . . [more]

Propylon’s Legislative Workbench supports the creation, amendment, translation and multi-channel publishing of legislative documents. It addresses the unique challenges of legislative document authoring and workflow using XML and open standards. It can be deployed across a range of database and application server configurations.

Propylon’s Legislative Workbench is an integrated suite of legislative applications that includes bill drafting, tracking, status, automated engrossment, a searchable legislative repository, journal, calendar, publishing and in-chamber systems.

I’d never thought about this technology niche, but I can see how it makes sense. It would be interesting to play around with it, but this is definitely a . . . [more]

As a proponent of RSS, I try my best to follow the RSS feeds from a number of “very active” BLOGs. Recent postings on SLAW and other BLOGs have highlighted a problem with RSS – it’s a great way to divert content from bloated in boxes, but it’s just not as intuitive as email for many lawyers.

Perhaps more importantly (for me personally), the RSS vs. email issue merely illustrates the bigger issue – how can lawyers spend productive days in the office given the ever increasing demands on their time and attention? From emails and RSS whose only purpose . . . [more]

The Google Books Library Project got a big boost this week: University Complutense of Madrid Library has joined the project. Its the first Spanish language library ( and the first from a non-English-speaking country) to join the project. The library is the largest university library in Spain, and the second largest library in the country behind the National Library. In addition to holding thousands of Spanish language classics, the library’s collection includes French, German, Italian, Latin, and English language books.

Google news release

University Complutense of Madrid Library news release . . . [more]

I wasn’t much of an articling student. I worked hard, but not smart: my learning curves were more like sheer cliff faces. I’m sure I wasted a lot of clients’ money and lawyers’ time during my year of service, and the firm was right not to ask me back.

In retrospect, I can see many things I should have done differently. But at the time, I was seriously peeved that no one had prepared me for this, that I hadn’t the first clue of what the practising Bar required. That’s been a pretty common experience for many new lawyers before . . . [more]

There is an interesting little discussion happening over on the law blog of Frédéric Rolin about what exactly the proper French equivalent of “law blog” should be.

English. Simple: law blog or blawg. Sounds easy.

But in French?

Here are some of the suggestions by Rolin and by people who sent comments:

• Give in to worldwide Anglo-Saxon linguistic imperialism and just call blawgs “blawgs” – Rolin does write that French blawgers who are on Technorati all seem to use the tag “blawg” (ha! vendus!)
• bloig (blog + loi=law or statute)
• juriblog – my favourite
• blex
• bleg
• droig (from droit=law)
• jurnal