Safety is an illusion in today’s workplace. The current economy coupled with rapidly advancing technologies allows opportunities, or makes it necessary, for organizations to change the way they work. For individuals in many organizations, it could mean that risks (suggesting change, launching a new product, revamping a process) are not taken in an effort to maintain some kind of status quo (continued employment for example). The obvious downside for not taking a risk is that sometimes maintaining the status quo is equivalent to stagnation and failure.

I have always been a glass half full, change equals opportunity, bring on the . . . [more]

A California town has decided not to have a Facebook page after being advised by its lawyer of the legal risks.

The ABA Journal has the story.

Excerpt:

The legal issues include:

• May city officials remove vulgar posts and misinformation, or are the comments protected by the First Amendment?
• If a quorum of city council members comment on a Facebook post, is it a violation of the open meetings law? Such laws require advance notice of meetings and an opportunity to attend, blogger Robert Ambrogi writes at the Media Law blog.
• Is the city obligated to retain user comments

♫ Let the pendulum swing.
Let the old guard surrender
It is a new day, a new world…♫

Lyrics and music by Steve Wood and Julia Loggins, recorded by Kenny Loggins.

The ABA Journal on Aug 23, 2010 released an article entitled: A Law Prof Explains Why He is a Cell Phone Luddite.

The article starts with this statement:

Some high-profile professionals are ditching their cell phones, giving them more power over their time and eliminating distractions that interrupt their work and their relationships.

Having experienced a period of time this summer effectively ‘off the grid’ where . . . [more]

Earlier last week, I presented the CCCT IntellAction Working Group selection of principles that should guide the design and organization of court web sites and further explained, in a later post, principles 4, 5 and 6 on notification, content organization & search and security. In this post, I further explain the next three principles:

• Principle #7: Bilinguism
• Principle #8: Accessibility
• Principle #9: Interactivity

Comments and suggestions are welcome! . . . [more]

Earlier this week, I presented the CCCT IntellAction Working Group selection of principles that should guide the design and organization of court web sites. In this post, I further explain the next three principles:

• Principle #4: Notification
• Principle #5: Content Organization & Search
• Principle #6: Security

Comments and suggestions are welcome! . . . [more]

Back in January, I announced the formation of a working group under the auspices of the Canadian Centre for Court Technology (CCCT). The objective of this working group was to draft guidelines facilitating the modernization of Canadian court web sites. Since that time, we have made progress and expect to have finished a first draft of the Court Web Site guidelines before the upcoming Canadian Forum on Court Technology.

One of the five parts of the guidelines is titled “Principles – Cutting Through Context and Issues: What Principles Should Guide the Design of Court Web Sites?”

In . . . [more]

Twitter has launched it’s own “tweet this” button for blogs and websites; an intended replacement for the many third party buttons people are currently using for web content sharing. The biggest of those companies is Tweetmeme, whose service we use here at Slaw. Here’s a capture from Twitter’s new offering:

Techcrunch calls it “poaching the best ideas from the eco-sytem”, and it’s a strategy Twitter’s used for innovation a few times now. The best example is probably shown by the company watching the iPhone app market evolve for Twitter clients. Once the innovation had taken place and proved . . . [more]

Here’s an interesting new online resource — where “interesting” involves some head scratching and not a little wonder. It’s a tax wiki conceived by U of T law prof Benjamin Alarie and built with the help of students in his tax class and others. Taxwiki.ca aims to

. . . establish a publicly-accessible and editable “wiki” of current “interpretation bulletins” and other tax materials. These are not, of course, official CRA interpretations bulletins, but they would initially use as “seed” materials the current stock of bulletins. These are edited and refined by expert users, with the goal of providing an

As we were alerted in a comment by Nick Holmes last year at this time, the U.K. has gathered together in one place nearly all of its online legislation. Legislation.gov.uk is managed by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, in turn part of the U.K. National Archives. At the moment the site is still lacking a promised “changes to legislation” function that will chart the various amendments, repeals, etc. to legislation occurring since 2002. There is, however, a point-in-time search facility.

Curiously, I’ve been unable to find a statement on the site as to whether the online version of . . . [more]

On Wednesday in an Official Google Blog post, Urs Hölzle of Google informed us that Google Wave would no longer be developed:

Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

Hölzle goes on to give some hope that some of this initiative may live on in other ways:

The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have

My colleague Laurel Murdoch showed me the latest issue of the Harvard Law School Bulletin, the lead article focusing on the changes happening at the Harvard Law Library, led by John G. Palfrey, the Law School’s vice dean for library and information resources (formerly of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society). Palfrey is the author of a very interesting piece that Louis alerted us to, entitled Cornerstones of Law Libraries for an Era of Digital-Plus

Palfrey’s piece ends with a collaborative challenge:

Our next step should be a process akin to a design charrette.60 We ought to

Two interesting topics have come up in recent days; both of which seem connected. The first is Amazon’s prediction that ebook sales will overtake paperback sales by the end of 2011. Not entirely surprising, considering they’re already outselling hardcovers (“180 e-books for every 100 hardcovers”). And on it goes: paperback sales are eclipsed, ebooks will then be compared to the combined sales, paper becomes the minority, and so on. I think we all know the trend.

So if the market’s future is digital, what exactly do we want from the experience? The answer to this question depends a lot . . . [more]