Osler Hoskin Harcourt appeared to be the first major Canadian firm to employ RSS feeds from its website.  It has been using RSS to deliver newsletter articles from its various practice groups for the last several months.

Now Osler goes audio (their tagline, not mine) with podcasting from its website.  See:  Osler Reports .

Aimed at potential business clients, and discussing the latest trends in business, the first installment released this month runs about 7 minutes and discusses cross-border mergers and acquisitions.  Trends are identified using the experiences of their own clients as examples. 

Production value of the first podcast is very high, with . . . [more]

Since we are getting close to the dog days / silly season:

‘Free’ Danish beer makes a splash
By Clark Boyd
Technology correspondent

The Danes love their beer, but increasingly they are looking beyond the old Danish standby, Carlsberg, to quench their thirst.

The beer draws its inspiration from the open source movement
Students from the Information Technology University in Copenhagen is trying to help by releasing what they are calling the world’s first open source beer recipe.

It is called Vores Oel, or Our Beer, and the recipe is proving to be a worldwide hit.

The idea behind the . . . [more]

Ever since the creation of the Canadian online corporate filings system SEDAR in 1997, the race has been on to develop a commercially viable service to provide more sophisticated search capabilities than allowed by the free website. First to bring itself forward to law firms was

One of my partners just alerted me to a posting on The Deal about Blog Searching:

If you need any more evidence that search doesn’t end with Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc., look at the blog search engines. Technorati Inc., the self-proclaimed leader, IceRocket, Mark Cuban’s new venture, and Feedster Inc., another blog search pioneer, are just a few of the examples of a segment within search poised for growth.

Scott Rafer, CEO of Feedster, told me that Google and Yahoo! go about search in completely different ways. See the video interview for more on that. He added that search

. . . [more]

This via ResearchBuzz: the Canadian Census from 1911 is now online. It may be of only tangential relevance to law, but historians and perhaps even property lawyers will find it interesting.

Tara Calishain, who is ResearchBuzz, called up some place in Yukon — you can only search by geographic location. I, being Toronto-centric, tried a more or less random page for Toronto. Here’s a small snapshot of a very small section from the middle of one of the Toronto pages. Lots and lots of Scots and English and Irish…

. . . [more]

What follows is an exchange of emails (some excerpted) that preceded the launching of Slaw. I asked the group of core contributors about taxonomy — coming from “blogging,” I felt the need for categories. You can see how vexed the matter of taxonomy is and how interesting the discussion was getting to be, when, too anxious about ushering my baby into the light of day, I let a few days’ radio silence signal the end of the exchange, and imposed my own views.

Connie Crosby, as you’ll see, had the bright idea to post the exchange. It will act as . . . [more]

Just stumbled on a publication called Jungle Law, aimed at law students, which had a cute miscellany page:

herewith:

20 Random Bits of Lawyer Knowledge

We found them. Use them to your advantage.

1. U.S. Presidents Who Were Also Lawyers
John Adams
Thomas Jefferson
James Madison
James Monroe
John Quincy Adams
Andrew Jackson
Martin Van Buren
John Tyler
James Polk
Millard Fillmore
Franklin Pierce
James Buchanan
Abraham Lincoln
Rutherford B. Hayes
Chester A. Arthur
Grover Cleveland
Benjamin Harrison
William McKinley
William Howard Taft
Woodrow Wilson
Calvin Coolidge
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Richard Nixon
Gerald Ford
William Jefferson Clinton

2. Oldest . . . [more]

How ubiquitous, embedded, transparent and animated can the internet gets and what will happen then.  That was the topic of the plenary session at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Law Libraries last Wednesday.  It’s adapted from the article Jerry Kang, the presenter (a UCLA law professor), co-wrote with an architecture professor:

Jerry Kang and Dana Cuff, Pervasive Computing: Embedding the Public Sphere, 62 Washington and Lee Law Review 93 (2005).

I enjoyed his presentation a lot, but could not help being distracted by the fabulous software program he used in his presentation.  Instead of using the rather static PowerPoint, he used . . . [more]

Researchers at Stanford University have developed a browser extension that:

transparently converts a user’s password into a domain-specific password. The user can activate this hashing by choosing passwords that start with a special prefix (@@) or by pressing a special password key (F2). PwdHash automatically replaces the contents of these password fields with a one-way hash of the pair (password, domain-name). As a result, the site only sees a domain-specific hash of the password, as opposed to the password itself.
Web Password Hashing

 
This is aimed at those of us — most of us, perhaps — who use one . . . [more]

Of note to many, the Vancouver Association of Legal Administrators (VALA) is now to be known as the British Columbia Legal Management Association (BCLMA).

If you haven’t passed by as of yet, the Knowledge Management sub-section is in the process of setting up a blog. It’s mostly my posts to date, but I’m hoping for more contribution from others in the coming year.

Steve . . . [more]

The concern over C-60 involves a section of the bill that deals with remedies open to copyright holders. That section contains the following language: "…the owner of copyright in a work or other subject-matter is not entitled to any remedy other than an injunction against a provider of information location tools who infringes that copyright by making or caching a reproduction of the work or other subject matter."

This from a decent piece last week by Elinor Mills, a staff writer at CNET News.com. Presumably the bad drafting will be straightened out before it gets debated in the Fall. . . . [more]

You may have wondered what exactly Lexis is.  Here is a found poem on the subject

Here is the explanation that Googlism provides at http://www.googlism.com/index.htm?ism=lexis&type=1:

 Googlism for: lexis

lexis is our professional content management
lexis is the study of vocabulary in
lexis is no more available
lexis is an online service that provides a wide range of full
lexis is focus
lexis is available to all law students
lexis is closed or phone line is bad
lexis is a library with newspaper
lexis is available via the web for students at www
lexis is http
lexis is a . . . [more]