Google better not pull an Anakin…

The Register has reported that Google is planning to record background noise using your computer’s microphone, match this noise (say from tv or radio) to the correct program, and then serve up targeted ads relevant to the program you’re watching or listening to. Is it just me or is this the civil liberties equivalent of Iran developing a nuclear energy program? (gee, worst case scenario, is there anything that could go wrong?) the Register article is here

Law blogs as legal resource?

According to Bonnie Shucha over at Wisblawg, LexisNexis is now indexing blog content as part of their information aggregation service. A few comments on her blog reflect the seeming absurdity of paying LexisNexis to access what is otherwise free content, but the consensus seems to be that a large subset of data available through LexisNexis or similar companies is freely available already and what you’re paying for is not so much access to data as access to readily available, nicely sorted, indexed, and searchable data. I’ve got to agree with the latter viewpoint on this one, although I’m not positive that blogs have a place in what is otherwise a fairly reliable source of legal information. (seems the equivalent of citing wikipedia in a research paper)