Either by email or in-person, I’ve been asked a few times recently how one creates an RSS feed from a static website. A pretty good question, where the answer could involve anything from installing a single CGI script, to adding a blog or CMS to the website, to a custom programming solution.

But just a couple of days ago, I came across a new solution posted at both RSS4Lib & Techcrunch called FeedXs that will allow for the manual posting of items to an RSS Feed with no online publishing required whatsoever.

This isn’t a perfect solution, simply because one . . . [more]

When your friends (are they really friends?) suggest that you’re spending more time with IT and computers than you should be, you’ll soon be able to answer them back that everything is really a computer, or part of one, so there’s no alternative.

Coming in March is a book by Seth Lloyd, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, called Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos (Knopf, ISBN 1400040922 / also available now as an e-book). As the title suggests, Lloyd shows how the universe is in fact a computer. Here’s an excerpt (via . . . [more]

Simon C’s post from earlier this week reminded me of one of my favourite oddities from Nova Scotia Statutes and inspired me to take a closer look to see what else I could find:

– My favourite (which hasn’t been much of a problem this year), is section 34 (1) of the Public Highways Act, which requires all able bodied males between the ages of 16-60 ” to work with their shovels on the highways during the winter whenever the highways become impassable from snow.”

– Another favourite is from section 6(2) of the Beaches Act. It seems . . . [more]

Librarians are often shocked at how uncritical, even gullible, lay researchers can be in approaching websites that the search engines throw up. It’s therefore wonderful to have the folk-wisdom of caution in a single place. See Karen’s Schneider’s Beyond Algorithms: A Librarian’s Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust . . . [more]

The blogosphere is abuzz with discussion about the dispute between DoJ and Google about surrendering a week’s worth of search recordsHere is a copy of the Motion to Produce – hell just a few terabytes of data surely – as part of Alberto Gonzales’ effort to be more aggressive in the War Against PornA nice turn of phrase from Xinhua.
The BBC has a great explanation of what is at stakeAlso the AP Story at MSNBC and John Battell sets the context nicely., and just how critical the issues are.
What is surprising – and frankly distressing – . . . [more]

Canadian law firm librarians have an increasing challenge finding historical stock trading prices. This is the story thus far:

For many years we enjoyed the proprietary system from The Globe and Mail called “InfoGlobe” which primarily delivered news content but also had an archaic, difficult system that allowed for pulling up historical stock prices. Once we had become “dragon masters” after many hours of training and practice, we could quickly pull up any range of dates, any configuration of data (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) for any public company, existing, predecessor or deceased.

At the time we grumbled at the difficulty . . . [more]

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) has just released two recent reports of possible interest to Internet researchers. The reports are:

A Brave New World? Access Copyright in its Own Words on Issues Affecting Research Libraries (December 2, 2005. Prepared by Davina M. DesRoches. PDF, 9 pages). Examines the positions taken by Access Copyright on copyright reform as it affects research libraries.

A Compilation of Views on Aspects of Copyright Reform, as Submitted in Response to the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (December 2, 2005. Prepared by Davina M. DesRoches. PDF, 65 pages). A useful summary of the

I see there is a recent 304 paragraph decision in B.C. – Newman et al v. Halstead et al, 2006 BCSC 65 – in which the court awarded damages totalling $681,000 against an individual defendant (who did not appear at the trial, hence there was no defence per se) for her liability in making defamatory statements on her website, chat rooms and email about various teachers in which she made allegations of misconduct and allegations that the School Board mishandled or covered up this activity.

Be careful what you say on the Internet! Despite its often ephemeral nature, publication . . . [more]

Well, Ted Tjaden was only a few days off when he pointed us to an excellent 2005 LLRX article on mining the deep web by Marcus P. Zillman. Zillman’s article has now been updated for 2006! See Deep Web Research 2006. . . . [more]

Hi all. Well for a first post I pick a doozy. What is our work worth? I am writing for both a selfish and an unselfish reason. First, I am trying to gain a salary range for research lawyers as a distinct group, which I have not come across in the generalist publications that compare, for example, litigation associates’ salaries. I do have an article giving the going rate for free-lance legal researchers though ($125 – $150 an hour). Second, I think this is a self-worth exercise, as I suspect there is out there a ‘research lawyer discount’, that is, . . . [more]

Just about as old as Slaw, which is to say a toddler, the IT.Can Blog is the current info provider for the Canadian IT Law Association, and presumbably something you’ll want to read if IT law is your thing. The blog seems to provide mostly summaries of recent interesting cases and the occasional bit about legislation. There’s room for comments as well.

Cool that it’s disponible in both langues officielles. Wish we could faire ça in Slaw. . . . [more]

Congratulations to our own Connie Crosby: she’s now a regular columnist on Sabrina Pacifici’s redoubtable LLRX.com, dubbed by LawTechnologyNews one of the 10 best sites of the decade. She’ll be writing on The Tao of Law Librarianship and is already into her second column, “Do-It-Yourself Professional Development“. How can we have missed the first? Stay tuned for the second installment of DIY PD because she’s going to interview another Slawyer, occasional contributor Lousie Tsang.

Tao Te Ching: “Through knowledge, intellectual thought and words, the manifestations of the Tao are known…“ . . . [more]