We see the term “cloud computing” a lot these days. Its a term that’s hard to define – like Web 2.0. It essentially means having your software work “out there” somewhere, and/or your data reside “out there” somewhere – rather than on a computer in your own home or office. Think of it as commoditized outsourcing. The term is sometimes used to include SAAS and other concepts, and sometimes in a much more limited way. From a legal point of view, the issues and risks for using any flavour of cloud computing are the same – although the . . . [more]

Joe Hodnicki over at the Law Librarian Blog shared this Clay Shirky presentation last week. The title of the talk was “It’s Not Information Overload, It’s Filter Failure“.

I’m with Joe here. This kind of thinking works on so many different levels. And perhaps someone, someday, will use a Guinness with Shirky as their contest prize. Would hook me in, anyway. :)

Enjoy…

. . . [more]

Losing face, saving face, facing up to the music, it’s a facer, the face that launched a thousand ships — yes, even Facebook: all about what’s up top and up front. It’s what we present to the world and how that world knows us. There even seems to be a hard-wired ability in the human brain to recognize faces, damage to which produces the unhappy condition of prosopagnosia (the most famous instance of which is found in Oliver Sacks’ book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat“). In case you doubt that this is a special-purpose . . . [more]

Nina Platt is a U.S.-based consultant who, like me and Steve Matthews, has a law librarian/knowledge management background and started a consultancy last year in the form of Nina Platt Consulting Inc. Congratulations to Nina who has just added a third blog to her fold, the Electronic Resource Review. So far it covers research and knowledge management electronic products. I thought the September 19th write-up of KM products from West, Lexis Nexis, and Interwoven to be of particular interest.

Here is the list of Nina Platt Consulting blogs:

• Strategic Librarian – “Using strategy to develop the law

I moved last weekend! My husband and I have spent the last couple of years (and the next 20?) developing a farm. In the technology portion of our development plan, we decided not to put hard wired telephone lines on our property to avoid the large Individual Line Surcharges that the CRTC allows and we paid the last time we developed a property.

Moving to the VoIP world has been interesting. Our digital cordless handsets don’t work and we have had to revert to a single analog handset until I can find a cordless analog phone. I have yet to . . . [more]

Francis Gurry, formerly a Senior Lecturer in Law in the University of Melbourne, was appointed Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in the spring and will take office on October 1. Yesterday he gave an acceptance speech to the the General Assembly of WIPO in which he outlined some of the challenges facing the UN organization and its member states. From the press release:

“The functional consequence of this trend [to harness the economic value of innovation through the acquisition of property rights] is that the system is becoming a victim of its own success” with patent

Slashdot reports that today has been declared World Day Against Software Patents by the European based Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure

They believe that software patents impede innovation and investment.

So depending on what side of this debate one falls on, feel free to either celebrate and promote it, or cringe and rail against it.

My thoughts? First, my bias – I’m not a patent agent, although I do deal with a lot of IP and IT issues, and advise companies that create and sell software or SAAS products. I have mixed feelings about it – but can’t help . . . [more]

Like an alcoholic seeking a drink, I thought that I would buy software to automate and save time in making backups of whatever I’m working on and have saved. I made a careful search for well-recommended software and discovered that Novastor Backup 10, Professional, for a single user, was highly recommended.

What a mistake! My attempt at downloading what I had bought failed. I eventually got a very nice young man from Novastor’s tech support to assist me with the installation. He had to download a number of upgrades, patches or whatever, from Microsoft, making it clear to me (and . . . [more]

September 2, 2008 was the 10th anniversary of Swissair Flight 111 disaster in the Atlantic Ocean just off Peggy’s Cove (about 40 minutes outside of Halifax). It is one of those events where anyone who was in the region at the time, can tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing when they found out. The 10th anniversary was a solemn event and the events of that day and their aftermath strike many Nova Scotians to their core; especially those volunteers and fisherman that aided with the recovery efforts.

The resulting investigation by Transportation Safety Board (TSB) . . . [more]

I have a drawerful of fountain pens and a cupful of other writing implements on my desk. I also have perhaps half a dozen computer keyboards in various boxes around the house — but it’s not the same thing. Not at all. There’s writing, and then there’s writing. And now, in September, when bevies of reluctant happy children are flushed back to school, I still get a hankering after a pencil box with a sliding tongue lid full of brilliantly sharpened 2B pencils. Remember the quiet thrill of breaking the silence of that blank white page with the first . . . [more]

If Twitter is more popular with lawyers than we expected, the best may be yet to come.

Yesterday Twitter launched a new design. The changes are largely cosmetic, but there are some functional changes as well.

I’m finding Twitter much easier to use, and some of the features are faster. If the public thinks the same it could increase in popularity.

So if you haven’t tried “Tweeting” yet, now might be the time to check it out. . . . [more]

It was being reported generally yesterday (BBC News, New York Times) that hackers, a group called Anonymous, broke in to Governor Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email accounts and copied some material which they then made public.

It doesn’t seem as though the material taken will in any way compromise or even embarrass the Governor — except in so far as it reveals her injudicious use of a large public email system in connection with government and important personal matters. It’s unlikely that any of us will suddenly find ourselves nominated for vice-president of a country, even a small . . . [more]