Today is the deadline for public comment submissions to the CRTC with regard to their net neutrality hearings in July. This is from Michael Geist:

The CRTC has set out a series of questions in its public notice, some of which may be too technical or legal for many Canadians. However, there are some key questions that anyone with an interest in net neutrality can address including questions about how network management could result in unjust discrimination or undue preferences as well as how network management could result in controlling content or influencing telecommunications. Moreover, the CRTC asks

A new journal, Policy and Internet, has issued calls for papers for its first volume. The Policy Studies Organization and the Oxford Internet Institute and Berkeley Electronic Press, the publishers, are aiming to release the journal in the summer of this year. They claim that “[i]t will be the first major peer-reviewed journal to investigate the policy effects of the Internet and related technologies.” Those interested in submitting articles will want to take a look at the Aims and Scope page.

(Two irrelevancies: 1. Why “Internet” and not “the Internet”? That word doesn’t sit easily as an abstract . . . [more]

Interface design matters. More and more, usability and user-focus are central themes in website design manuals such as Krug’s Dont Make Me Think, King’s Designing the Digital Experience, and Goto and Cotler’s Web Redesign 2.0: Workflow that Works. These successful popular works rely on a lot of serious user testing of the Jakob Nielsen variety, which tracks eye movement and identifies typical scanning patterns and optimal designs based on them.

If you have wondered why, then, the interfaces at WestlaweCarswell and Lexis-Nexis QL are so difficult to use, Julie Jones of Cornell has the answer for . . . [more]

Pew Internet has released a demographic of Twitter users. Hat Tip to the Law Librarian Blog.

No surprises that Twitter users are mostly young, urban, mobile, and they also use other social media. The report reveals the comparative median age of major social networking sites:

• Facebook – 26
• MySpace – 27
• Twitter – 31
• LinkedIn – 40

Broad source demographic information (Americans as a whole group + or – 3% accuracy) is interesting, but it may not give organizations the right kind of data for decisions making.

It is great to see stats that might give a picture of . . . [more]

Master’s students at the Université de Paris X – Nanterre have produced a comparative guide that provides an overview of the legal situation in 70 countries on issues relating to:

• nationality, adoption, marriage and divorce
• estates
• international private law

The guide is written in French.

[Source: Précisément.org, un blog pour l’Information juridique] . . . [more]

There are some people — well, there used to be — who keep their notes in a notebook and keep their notebooks. (Some even pass them on to posterity.) But that was then, and, Moleskine notwithstanding, this is now. Paper may be passé, the urge to note, however, is still with us; and because the brain is no larger than it once was, despite all the pushing this way and that from importunate data, notes must be recorded externally somehow. I use scraps of paper left strategically in key places, post-its glued at eye level, Stickies on my . . . [more]

While it’s mainly an American based survey there’s much of interest in the latest ILTA Survey of Corporate Law Departments.

I was surprised that

Word 2003 still dominates word processing

Sharepoint hasn’t been widely deployed

Most corporate law departments have had experience coping with electronic discovery

Knowledge management doesn’t seem to be of interest to most corporate law departments

There appears to be ample opportunity for creative technological exchange between law firms and their clients . . . [more]

The New York Times has introduced a trial way of reading the paper on line. The “article skimmer,” supposedly based on the way that people spread out the paper on a Sunday brunch table, displays thumbnails of articles in a grid formation, allowing you to skim over the material easily. The image below shows a portion of the Technology section, and can be enlarged by clicking on it.

. . . [more]

As of today, Harper’s Index is free online. For those of you who might not know, Harper’s Index is a collection of information set out in single lines as if it were statistical data and in a way that is meant to surprise and interest you. In the online Index you’re presented with a search box — which will return helpful suggestions as you type, guiding you to those terms that do in fact appear within the index.

For example, a search for “law” produces over half a dozen screenfuls of items, the first of which is:

1/85 Number of . . . [more]

I expect that the needs of lawyers are somewhat different from the general public when it comes to the websites of public bodies, particularly those of regulators and tribunals. What got me thinking about it was a solicitation to provide feedback on the British Columbia Information and Privacy Commissioner’s website as they embark on a refresh or redesign.

I assume that when most public bodies are thinking about their websites, they look at how to make it useful for the general public. Which is obviously important, but I know that I’m a heavy user of a number of government websites . . . [more]

Legal Information & Technology is a new ‘eJournal’ [update: actually a digest service] on SSRN‘s Legal Scholarship Network.

You can preview the first issue collection of references with their summaries here:

Here is a description on the scope:

This eJournal includes working papers, forthcoming articles, and recently published articles in all areas of legal information scholarship. Topics include (but are not limited to): 1) the impact of legal information on domestic, comparative, and international legal systems; 2) the treatment of legal information authorities and precedents (e.g., citation studies); 3) the examination of rules, practices, and commentary limiting

I DO have a dependence on coffee. I DO NOT have a dependence on technology…or do I? This question requires some serious philosophical introspection on my part, which I will not make you suffer through. I hope that the more interesting aspect is why I write about this today.

It is the anniversary of Abe Lincoln’s birthday, and as the Smithsonian points out, he had an interest in technology. The US News agrees that Lincoln was a technology leader. Lincoln was even a communications technology leader with his use of the telegraph. A reasonable person may theorize that his . . . [more]