A comment in Boing Boing from a correspondent in China claimed that the Chinese don’t use Google but rather Baidu when they search. Whether or not that’s accurate — and whether it says anything about the importance of Google’s decision to conform to the Chinese government’s restraints and prior censorship — it made me go for a look. Chinese is, of course, within an ace of being the major language on the internet, and I’d never even taken their search engine for a spin.

I tested it with Slaw and slaw.ca, plus a couple of other variables, and came up . . . [more]

Two days ago, a colleague and I chatted briefly about this:

“Today…the library is relinquishing its place as the top source of
inquiry. The reason that the library is losing its supremacy in carrying
out this fundamental role is due, of course, to the impact of digital
technology. As digital technology has pervaded every aspect of our
civilization, it has set forth a revolution not only in how we store and
transmit recorded knowledge, historical records, and a host of other
kinds of communication but also in how we seek and gain access to these
materials.” –Jerry D. Campbell, “Changing . . . [more]

1. I Love Radio.org: Quest for the Cheap, Broadcast-Quality Recording Gear
2. Connie Crosby: Check This Out! – A New Canadian Correspondent
3. yousendit
4. PowerPoint: Audio
5. UCLA Anderson School of Management: Business Database Selection Tool
6. LIVEDGAR Training Overview
7. EFF: Deep Links
8. Internet Archive
9. House of Butter
10. PracticeSource
11. UC Davis: LawLib list: House of Butter announcement
12. Law Librarian Blog
13. Amazon.com: “A House of Butter“
14. Arts Council of Indianapolis: Joanna Wos
15. Practice Source
16. InformationWeek: Turn On, Plug In, Keep Up
17. MercuryNews.com: Top 10 tech trends for 2006
18. New York Law School: Helpful software
19. ABA Legal Technology Resource Center: Mobile Computing
20. Statement by the Prime Minister

The first Slawyer who can answer what this is correctly, wins a prize.

Prize.

(I have a feeling that some will be stumped, but someone will get it fairly easily.) . . . [more]

Connie’s talk of podcasting got me moving finally, so I’m testing that here on Slaw. If it works, you’ll be free to broadcast your mellifluous tones throughout the whole Slaw world. Essentially a podcast is nothing more than a link to an mp3 file (that can then be downloaded to your iPod if you wish — hence the pod part). Here is that link.

I’m going to be using a new (to me) part of the Slaw posting apparatus, to see if I can ensure the file info gets included with the RSS feed. Members who are interested in . . . [more]

I’m wondering everyone’s opinion on this:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004344.php

I don’t get it. Google cache is an almost complete reproduction of a webpage, and goes way beyond legitimate copying in my mind. This decision seems to open the door for every scraping program on the web today. They add a couple highlighted terms, and that’s ‘transformative’? What’s next, ads next to the cached page?

And why is it incumbent on webmasters to add a ‘no-cache’ tag to their robots.txt file? It’s not like the old days where you submit your site to a search engine, Google now indexes without asking. Truth be . . . [more]

House of Butter is the original blawg publishing the scuttlebutt on law publishers from around the globe, most notably Butterworths (thus, presumably, the name…). This blog has been around what seems like forever. The site is hosted by PracticeSource.

That is about all I can tell you about it. Originally I thought it was written out of the U.K., but more recently I believe it to be from Australia. I have no idea who created it or who writes it. The editor recently identified himself as “Sean”. I’m not even sure how one goes about submitting comments, although there . . . [more]

I was getting caught up on some ‘offline’ reading; wading through a stack of magazines when I came across a cover story in Information Week (Jan 9, 2006). The headline reads:

EMBRACE YOUR INNER GEEK. With consumer tech driving innovation, staying gadget-savvy is a business imperative, not just a indulgence. (You can find the full text of this article here).

In this article, the authors make the observation (from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas) that the lines between consumer and business tech are vanishing. Think about how most people react when they see an IT manager sitting . . . [more]

Blog provider Blogger and its related blog host Blogspot have been experiencing severe server problems for at least a week (probably longer). They have tried taking the system down a few times for service but today it has been up and down frequently. Tonight it has given up the ghost.

So, if you are attempting to log onto blogs hosted by Blogger (mine, Steve Matthews’ and Patrick Cormier’s, to name just a few), you may need to check back later if you can’t get on.

I’m not even going to link to all those sites, ’cause you will just be . . . [more]

I’m in a post-election frame of mind and so naturally my thoughts turn (with anticipatory wistfulness, if there is such a thing) to socialism. This should not surprise anyone. I’ve lived most of my life in a university, after all, one of the few remaining communal enterprises not driven by profit, so I’m bound to suffer from professional deformation. Working with Slaw, too, has got me speculating on the business, so to speak, of sharing the wealth, which starts as information and knowledge in this context. All of which leads me to wonder how lawyers might improve the state of . . . [more]

There is an article in the Mercury News that predicts the top 10 technology trends in 2006

1. WiFi will spread rapidly and WiMax will emerge.

2. Cell phones do everything.

3. Internet phone calls zoom in popularity.

4. The office moves to the Web.

5. Stem-cell research advances.

6. Biotechs target flu vaccines.

7. Even small start-ups go global.

8. Video comes to the blog.

9. On-demand video everywhere.

10 Clean technologies.

The full article can be found at MercuryNews.com

At least this what Silicon Valley thinks of the top trends. I am particulary interested in topic #2. I . . . [more]

In what may be his last statement as Prime Minister, Paul Martin today sent out this message:

Statement by the Prime Minister Paul Martin