Did you know that RSS stands for ‘Real Simple for Steve’? … well it should, at least this week. :-)

I had a couple of new RSS finds that seem to be making a difference. First up, I stumbled across a new RSS feed filter called FeedRinse.

There are lots of great tools for combining multiple syndication sources into a single feed – known as mixing or splicing, but the market is very thin on tools to filter feed sources down to a subject or conceptual level.

I have always felt that these two . . . [more]

I was browsing through some online guides to legal research and for Canadian legislation got referred by one to the www.legis.ca site, a place I hadn’t visited for quite some time. So I went for a look. It’s gone. Well, the content’s gone, replaced with a curious mix of advertising and ravings — a folie á deux, if you will:

XXe si?le, eh well it would not remain large thing of the modernit? maudits, debt consolidation non profit organization Fante?Bukowski To lose conscience, so d?en to know more: wouldn’t this be the word d?ordre of modern litt?ature? To lose its

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The Times Law Page for Tuesday March 28 contains an assessment of where English law firms are on the blogosphere: ‘A blog shows we are not a stuffy, old-style firm.’ Discuss

Not surprisingly English law firms are divided as to the usefulness of the legal blog – a few quotes:

BLOGGING is to public relations what e-mails are to letters and is one of the most important technological innovations for law firmsAndy Havens, a US legal marketing manager.

“If your firm doesn’t have at least one lawyer who is blogging, you look like a firm who, in 1996,

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A fascinating post from Australia about a judge who just found it too tempting to copy from another judge’s earlier work.

‘Plagiarist’ magistrate refuses to quitBy Hedley Thomas, 25-03-2006, From: The Courier-Mail

COPYCAT federal magistrate Jennifer Rimmer has rejected a top-level invitation to “take the honourable step” and quit her $220,000 job to save further public embarrassment.

Federal Chief Magistrate John Pascoe asked Ms Rimmer to resign her job-for-life after it was revealed she had copied more than 2000 words from a Victorian colleague’s judgment in a sexual harassment case.
Mr Pascoe, concerned that public confidence in the

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The NYT has a provocative op-ed today on whether students are being so spoon fed by search engines that they lose their ability to research and think for themselves.

We have to warn articling students about the dangers of Googling, but after a while, they’re back on the engines.

Are we just too trusting about web-based research? . . . [more]

1. Honda (U.K.)
2. CAUT Bulletin: Canada to Investigate Use of Thumbprint for Law School Test.
3. Toronto Star: M. Geist: U.S. Patriot Act’s long reach
4. Wikipedia: cage match
5. Patriot Act
6. PIPEDA
7. Newsweek: S. Levy: (Some) Attention Must Be Paid!
8. Encyclopedia Brittanica: response to Nature
9. Nature: Brittanica and Wikipedia
10. TaxProf Blog: Supreme Court Releases Transcript of Oral Argument in Cuno
11. U. S. Supreme Court: oral arguments
12. Ordering SCC transcripts from Canadian Parliamentary Affairs Channel
13. New York Times: L. Greenhouse: Roberts Dissent Reveals Strain Beneath Court’s Placid Surface
14. New York Times: A. Cowan: Librarian Is Still John Doe, Despite Patriot Act Revision
15. chaos kitty’s

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As befits a Friday Fillip, this one has the merest connection to the law, let alone to legal research — though somewhat more to IT. The connection is the voice. Law is/was an oral discipline in part and this is all about the marvel of the human voice.

It’s a Honda ad, in which a choir impersonates a car, so to speak. No trivial “zoom-zoom” here. Here we have the full experience. You go to http://www.honda.co.uk The intro – Discover the New Honda – starts you off, but then you find yourself in a garage. When you get there, click . . . [more]

From the March issue of the CAUT Bulletin: Canada to Investigate Use of Thumbprint for Law School Test. And Michael Geist in a February article in the Toronto Star.

Personally, I think it is time for a cage match pitting the Patriot Act vs. PIPEDA. And because I’m in a ranting mood, why don’t we start giving our acts catchy stage names? Think of the possibilities, PIPEDA could be the Beaver Libertarian Act. The Criminal Code could be the Evildoers Disincentive Act, you get the idea. I’m sure we can come up with lots of catchy names that will get . . . [more]

One of my IT colleagues, who freely admits that he does not carry a Blackberry because of its addictive nature — even in the evenings when with family, brought to my attention a Newsweek article that recaps a presentation by Linda Stone, a former Apple and Microsoft executive, on the social implications of a syndrome she calls continuous partial attention. At a technology conference who’s theme was The Attention Economy, where speakers were reportedly competing with laptops and Blackberries for their audience’s attention, this speaker apparently struck a nerve.

The article says:

Stone first noticed the syndrome a decade

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As a footnote to the earlier posting on Wikipedia and Ted’s follow-up, Encyclopedia Brittanica shot back today with a comprehensive rebuttal to the earlier Nature article. . . . [more]

Mr. Enrich: In a footnote in Flast [v. Cohen], the Court specifically says, “Having now decided that there's Establishment Clause standing, we can also reach the free-exercise question without discussing whether there would be independent standing.”Justice Scalia: I had not recollected that footnote. I will -- I will find it.

Revisions to the U.S. Patriot Act still don’t adequately protect the rights of American librarians and readers of library materials. As set out in the New York Times story today, under the original version of the legislation:

[a] Connecticut librarian …was visited by the Federal Bureau of Investigation last year and presented with what is known as a national security letter demanding patron records.

The subpoena, issued as part of a counterterrorism investigation, not only barred him from disclosing the target of the inquiry, but also forbade him and others at his place of work to ever discuss the letter

. . . [more]