Nokia has just unveiled its new flagship N series phone, the N97. Trying very hard to be all things to all people, it sports both a touchscreen and a keyboard. It is being touted as a social media phone, with tweaks to enhance the social media experience. Taken from Nokia’s press release:

The home screen of the Nokia N97 mobile computer features the people, content and media that matter the most. Friends, social networks and news are available by simply touching the home screen. The 16:9 widescreen display can be fully personalized with frequently updated widgets of favorite web services and social networking sites. The Nokia N97 is also perfectly suited for browsing the web, streaming Flash videos or playing games. Both the physical QWERTY and virtual touch input ensure efficiency in blogging, chatting, posting, sending texts or emailing.
The Nokia N97 supports up to 48 GB of storage, including 32 GB of on-board memory, expandable with a 16 GB microSD card for music, media and more. This is complemented by excellent music capabilities, full support for the Nokia Music Store and continuous playback time of up to 1.5 days. The Nokia N97 also has a 5-Megapixel camera with high-quality Carl Zeiss optics, 16:9 and DVD quality video capture, and support for services like Share on Ovi for immediate sharing over HSDPA and WLAN.
The Nokia N97 is expected to begin shipping in the first half of 2009 at an estimated retail price of EUR 550 before taxes or subsidies.

O.k., so it won’t be cheap, but perfection never is.

Not content to stick around the same old, same old for too long (oooh, look, something Shiny!), I have been poking around these last few days on FriendFeed. Initially I was quite lost over there, but, as with the other social hangouts I have been hanging out in, I am steadily finding my footing. FriendFeed is an aggregator of your blogs, media and social networking feeds into a timeline on their site, viewable and comment-able (is that a word?) by those “friends” subscribing to your feed. There are dozens of different services included on FriendFeed, including our favs Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. I am finding it to be an efficient way to collect information, review other’s information and connect with the multitudes.

Feeling lost about how FriendFeed can help you and your on-line connecting and marketing efforts? Louis Gray has this great list of 25 different uses for FriendFeed. It gave me a good foundation for beginning my stumbling. Check out his list and check out FriendFeed and see what you think. Feel free to search me out and connect!

Love Twitter, but wish you had more control over the environment, the audience, the context, etc.? Dreaming of manning your own personal or business micro-blogging site on your on web page? A new service, Shout’Em, is about to exit its private beta stage and go public at the Le Web 08 conference on December 9 and 10, 2008, reports Mashable. The service permits one to make their own Twitter-like network. Taken from the site:

Shout’Em is platform on which you can easily start co-branded microbloging social networking service. Something simple as Twitter or with more features like Pownce. It is up to you 🙂

Networks on Shout’Em are “lightweight social networks”. They have small set of features: microblogging, links and photo sharing, geo location sharing and mobile browser support.
We beliven[sic] that microblogging concept is more suitable for small comunities loking [sic] for simple service to comunicate [sic] than existing social networks with tons of features.

To our customers Shout’Em enables taking care only of the fun part. Naming, colors, design, promotion etc… We take care of all other technical details and provide scalable and reliable software.

You can sign up for the premium service to get that extra something special: private domains, instead of shoutem.com, selected ads, more bandwith and storage, unlimited number of subscriptions and followers per user, mobile browser support and other customizations.

Spelling errors notwithstanding, Shout’Em seems a useful tool for a business interested in harnessing the power of Twitter in a more controlled and limited format. Invite your colleagues, invite your clients, but leave your bandmates on MySpace.

Good to see more options for international legal research popping up on the Web. The Legal Research Plus blog written by Stanford Law’s Advanced Legal Research professors, references a “Quick Start” guide for foreign research in the AALL Spectrum, a publication of the American Association of Law Librarians. The list includes hard copy volumes as well. You can find the guide at The Wide World of Laws: A Quick-Start Guide to International Legal Research.

This same blog also reports on LawCite, a free source for citation searching of international tribunals and many foreign courts, including the ICJ, ICTY, Australia, Malaysia, Canada, Thailand and South Africa. The interface permits searching by jurisdiction, party or legislation. There are even law reviews, searchable by the same parameters.

Having had to perform international legal research before, I can attest to the difficulty of accurately locating authority in the traditional hiding places. Thanks for the tip, Pip Pip!