It’s Thanksgiving Day, and most Slawyers will be taking it easy like me, I hope. I’d like to thank you all, contributers and readers (I never say “lurkers”), for making Slaw something I really enjoy being part of.

And because this is a blog about law and IT, much of the time at least, I offer you an online list, courtesy of the federal government, dealing with the “Proclamation and Observance of General Thanksgiving Days and reasons therefore,” starting back in 1799 in Lower Canada (“In signal victory over our enemy and for the manifold and inestimable blessings . . . [more]

After a week of writing and reading thousands of words, a few pics wouldn’t go amiss, right? I can’t be sure I’ll get the number right, if it’s 1:1000, but I can come pretty close by tripping through various “photo of the day” offerings, which, if you saw them all each day would be… um… 7 x 1 x n, I think.

These are just thumbnails of today’s pics, but if you click on them, you’ll find the originals, and the site to visit each day to get them.

And for a treat, our own Globe and Mail’s “day in . . . [more]

In looking further at what Google is up to at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week, I stumbled on its own “Top 10 List” derived from the Google Book Search. The list – based on searches done between September 17 and 23rd – is somewhat eclectic (even bizarre) and bares scant resemblance to other book lists like Amazon’s best sellers. or the New York Times Bestseller List. I confess that I have read none of them though we do own one (in a different edition).

So Google’s Top 10 Books are . . . [more]

At the Frankfurt Book FairWhere Google isn’t the most popular outfit. Google has announced a new service bringing together some of its services as a tool-kit to promote literacy.

Excellent endeavour, although I was puzzled by the linguistic bias (English and German predominate) – why not Spanish, Hindi and Mandarin? And I’m not sure what is novel here, and what is just a wrapper for other services.

According to one commentary:

Google has asked literacy groups around the world to upload video segments explaining and demonstrating their successful teaching programs. Among the first few hundred to be

Since Steve Matthew’s post back in May about LexisNexis adding RSS feeds to their website, two more Canadian legal publishers have entered the ring:

• Irwin Law (new titles feed)
• CCH Canadian (various feeds by topic)

Congratulations, both! My dream from last February is slowly becoming a reality.

I am now regularly reading these feeds in my feedreader to stay up to date with the latest titles coming out. A news feed is a good idea as well.

When will the other publishers follow suit? Yesterday I was showing my rep from one of the other publishers how it works from . . . [more]

A company called MojoPac makes a program that will let you install practically any Windows application on a portable drive, such as your iPod or a USB flash drive or portable hard drive. You can then insert the drive into any computer running Windows XP and have your own applications and data available to you. When you’re finished working, remove the drive and leave nothing on the host machine.

This has real possibilities for someone who travels and isn’t always able to carry or connect a laptop, or someone who finds it more convenient to go from a home desktop . . . [more]

When I came in to work this morning, there was a toppling stack of cast-off books, binders, pamphlets, etc. on my desk. Lots of stuff. At a quick glance, none of it looks very promising.

People regularly clean out their offices and anything that looks somewhat informationish ends up on my desk, chair or booktruck, often without any indication of who left it. Sometimes people will “gift me” with books that are completely unrelated to anything remotely associated with law and I can tell by the looks on their faces that they think they’re doing me a favour. Most of . . . [more]

In recent decisions the Federal Court has found that Wikipedia is not a reliable form of research, at least not for doing research on immigration matters. Slaw’ers could have told them that, couldn’t we?

2006 FC 1125 (para 9)

2005 FC 261 (para 9)

So my question is: Is web 2.o concerned with authority and attribution etc.? And secondly, will it be able to satisfy the demands of the legal system with respect to these concepts? . . . [more]

I’ve realized that Firefox, my browser of choice, does a Google “I’m feeling lucky” search when I enter a partial URL in the address (location) entry field. Thus, if I enter simply “slaw” I get taken right to you-know-where — because this blog comes up first in a Google search for the term. It took me forever to stop the automatic typing in of “http://,” which is quite unnecessary in all modern browsers, but I seem to have shifted over to the “feeling lucky” approach pretty quickly.

Internet Explorer doesn’t do the same thing, though — at least my Mac . . . [more]

The following is from an email I received from RLG concerning the RedLightGreen catalogue searching service:

[O]n November 5th the RedLightGreen service will end. RLG, RedLightGreen’s parent not-for-profit company has combined forces with another organization that supports a similar service, WorldCat.org. We have decided to invest all of our efforts into developing and supporting a single product rather than continuing to support two.

Indeed, RLG itself has “joined OCLC to work together…” as it says on RLG’s home page. . . . [more]

“Five Weeks to a Social Library” is a free grassroots online course with the purpose of teaching librarians about social software and how to use it in their libraries. Topics covered include blogs, RSS, wikis, Flickr, social networking and bookmarking software, and selling social software at your library. The course will take place between February 12 and March 17, 2007, and it is limited to 40 participants.
For non-participants: course materials will be available for free and all live webcasts will be archived for later viewing.
Check out the course website for more information about the course content, . . . [more]

The Law Librarian Blog today mentioned an entertaining pre-print about persuasive legal writing. It is by Oklahoma City University School of Law professor Alex B. Long and is entitled [Insert Song Lyrics Here]: The Uses and Misuses of Popular Music Lyrics in Legal Writing.

From the abstract:

“Legal writers frequently utilize the lyrics of popular music artists to help advance a particular theme or argument in legal writing. And if the music we listen to says something about us as individuals, then the music we, the legal profession as a whole, write about may something about who we are