Michael Geist is giving the Hart House lecture tonight, Our Own Creative Land: Cultural Monopoly and the Trouble with Copyright. Watch the webcast at 7.30. Or listen to the podcast which will appear on rabble.ca’s RabblePodcastNetwork (great site, by the way). . . . [more]

I learned today, via the Law Librarian Blog, about the Index and Paraphrase of Printed Year Book Reports, 1268 – 1535 compiled by Prof. David J. Seipp of Boston University School of Law. Now I have no excuse at all not to brush up on my Law French. . . . [more]

“The United States tops the rankings of The Global Information Technology Report 2005-2006's ”Networked Readiness Index“ for the third time in five years, maintaining its eminent position as a leader in the area of innovation and confirming its position as an information and communication technology powerhouse.

Yahoo, the underdog, is trying out in beta a contextual search tool called Y!Q (“IQ” — get it?). The notion, so far as I understand it, is that the search engine is able to discern from a passage of web page text that you highlight what the key terms are and to let you search for a particular term or set of terms within that context.

It seems that there are two ways to use this tool. One is, as a web site manager, to load the JavaScript on your pages and thereby cause little icons to appear next to . . . [more]

[cross posted on Information Management Now]

3L Epiphany wrote a very interesting taxonomy of legal bogs. On March 17th, 2006, the list was up to 686 legal blogs, all categorized and sorted. A definite resource for anyone interested to witness how many law blogs, or blawgs, exist out there. . . . [more]

There’s an interesting article in the recent D-Lib Magazine: “From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections,” by Daniel J. Cohen. He talks about the task of refining search tools in a couple of specific ways so that a researcher can extract the kind of document needed from the welter of uncatalogued documents on the internet (or in offline collections). It’s not hard to see the potential for getting better access to law-related documents or otherwise making better use of full-text-indexed law related databases.

You might take a particular look at two of the tools his . . . [more]

The Web 2.0 Awards have recognized many interesting and useful initiatives. . . . [more]

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — A University of Memphis law professor has banned laptop computers from her classroom and her students are passing a petition against it.

Professor June Entman says her main concern is that students are so busy keyboarding they can’t think and analyze what she’s telling them.

Students have begun collecting signatures on petitions and tried unsuccessfully to file a complaint with the American Bar Association.

Student Cory Winsett says if he must continue without his laptop, he’ll transfer to another school. Winsett says he won’t be able to keep up if he has to rely on hand-written notes,

. . . [more]

I’m a bit late in finding out about Netvibes. (Thanks, fellow Slawyer Louise Tsang.) It’s a Web 2.0 browser desktop, that much like Google’s News effort, is customizable both as to content and layout. But it offers a whole lot more, taking advantage of all of the Web 2.0 stuff that’s out there. As well, it’s a fairly good-looking thing, which helps if you’re gunning to be folks’ home page.

What you see on the left is a list of the functions/objects that by drag and drop you can place on your Netvibes page. I particularly like the . . . [more]

I’ve had to up the strength of the spam comment filter, because some stuff was still getting through, though heaven knows how.

Please let me know if you experience any difficulty making comments. I do not want to inhibit legitimate commenters. . . . [more]

I’m just back from the fabulous ABA Bricks Bytes and Continuous Renovation conference, held at the University of Washington in Seattle. It was one of the most useful and practical conferences I have been to in a very long time, with some great speakers and tours of fabulous new libraries at the University itself, Seattle University, the new Federal Courthouse and also Microsoft’s Office of the Future. Great to hear librarians and architects talking about new building plans and what went right – and just as important, wrong, when building. What they would do differently if given the chance. People . . . [more]

This doesn’t have much to do with law or even anything immediately practical, but Bernard Golden’s note, Why new chips + Xen = dream machines just happened to catch my eye. Both Intel and AMD are now building multi-core processors. According to Golden, these will run cooler and increase battery-life for portable machines–great news for students, barristers and other occasional transients. In addition, these chips are designed to do some of the virtualization work that all had to be done with software before. This will make it possible for people to run more than one operating system (Windows XP, Linux, . . . [more]