Mike Kujawski recently posted an item to the Public Sector Marketing 2.0 LinkedIn Group about an online database containing links to the social media policies of dozens of organizations around the world.

If your library, law firm, agency or organization is thinking of creating policies and guidelines for the use of blogs, wikis, or social networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook, this is a good place to look for guidance and examples.

Kujawski publishes the Public Sector Marketing 2.0 blog. . . . [more]

Simon Fodden first spoke about the new Google Buzz here on Slaw last week. He didn’t have access yet at the time (do you now, Simon?).

First impressions

I was surprised to see it appear unannounced in my Gmail box a few days ago as an option on the left side of my mailbox. When I clicked on it, I was even more surprised to see I had followers and people I followed already set up (those people I was connected with who also have Gmail accounts). I was already privy to a number of conversations in progress. My . . . [more]

There’s an interesting little post on Tim Bray’s blog, Ongoing, entitled “The Listening Engine.” Bray, one of the bloggers I’ve been following for years now, is the Canadian software developer and entrepreneur who co-founded Open Text Corporation and who is now the Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems. He’s thoughtful, sensible.

In The Listening Engine he puzzles over how it is that RSS and Twitter are resources that some people simply don’t make use of:

When I first discovered the magic of RSS, I expected that it would sweep the entire online population, including everyone’s kids,

. . . [more]

Google is now rolling out its Twitter-killer, Buzz. It’s integrated with Gmail, but since I’m not one of the lucky ones yet, I have to rely on the video — see below — and the blog for information. (I’m using Gmail in Google Apps, which, unless you’re paying the big bucks, won’t be benefitting from this: methinks moving to Apps was a mistake.)

From what I can gather the notion is that:

• you can send realtime messages to the world or to a selected group of people within your Gmail address book (whether you send directly into your friends’

. . . [more]

Wired Magazine is reporting that the Judicial Conference of the United States, the body that develops policy for federal courts in that country, has proposed new model jury instructions that explicitly ban the use of applications like Facebook and Twitter:

U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson of Kansas, the chair of the Judicial Conference Committee on Court Administration and Case Management, told the nation’s judges in a Jan. 28 memo that the new jury instructions ‘address the increasing incidence of juror use, of such devices as cellular telephones or computers, to conduct research on the internet or communicate with others

. . . [more]

Jurriaan de Reu recently mentioned the implications of Google Social Search for SEO. The new Google feature will provide higher results based on the reviews and commentary of your friends on various social media platforms.

Essentially this is the same concept as the traditional word-of-mouth marketing, but conducted online instead. When someone mentions their experience with a specific product, brand or service (including lawyers) on a social media platform, their contacts will get those informal reviews at the top of their searches when looking for similar topics.

A video of how it works can be found here.

The feature . . . [more]

Two weeks ago, while watching the NFL playoffs, I upgraded the OS on my home laptop (a Lenovo T60p) to Windows 7 Professional from Vista Business. 

The upgrade went quickly, smoothly, and without a hitch. I haven’t had a problem since. The screen image from the instructional video – which I have yet to need – was captured with the Windows 7 native screen capture tool, called the “Snipping Tool”. It’s very easy to use.

When will I recommend that move at the office, where all of our machines run on Windows XP? Where the common core of all of . . . [more]

Susan Cartier Liebel has written a thoughtful blog post on the high prevalence of depression in the legal profession.

The ABA reports that “about 19 percent of lawyers experience depression at any given time, compared with 6.7 percent of the general population. About 20 percent of lawyers have drinking problems, twice the rate of the general population.”

The Lawyers Assistance Program of BC states that “research shows law to be the occupation most susceptible to clinical depression. Legal professionals are now three times more likely to be diagnosed with depression than the general population.” Further, “substance abuse among lawyers is . . . [more]

While doing my monthly domain name shopping, I stumbled upon what might be an interesting blog: http://www.ontariorulesofcivilprocedure.com/ It was created only 3 days ago and has no content, except the logo of the law firm behind it: Fraser Milsner Casgrain. Can someone tell me what is the big red square on top of their logo?

.♫ Copycat, copycat, copycat
copy copy copy everyone else….♫

Lyrics by Dolores O’Riordan and music by Noel Hogan and Dolores O’Riordan, recorded by The Cranberries.

Anyone who places content on the web should be concerned with detecting the unauthorized copying of their content. Certainly anyone with a blog would not want others taking their original content without their permission. This actually happened to my own blog just recently: www.thoughtfullaw.com. In my case it was simply someone who was unaware of the rules around copyright.

But there was a case in Victoria British Columbia where a law firm . . . [more]

This week in biotech was all about lines. Not any kind of illicit lines, and not the most direct route between two points, just your traditional figurative delineations:

Line drawn: Since 2004, there have been increasing numbers of instances where pharma companies have compensated generics manufacturers in settlements of patent litigation initiated by the pharmas. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC, tasked alongside DOJ with enforcing antitrust law) in general, and its current Competition Bureau Director in particular, does not like these settlements. This week, the FTC published a report that claims that these settlements result in substantial extra delay . . . [more]

In response to my query in my earlier post on Fee Fie Foe Firm from a short while back in which I wondered how there could be 1,500 Canadian law firms targeted or searched by their custom search, I have had an update. Damien McRae, a knowledge consultant from Australia and founder of Fee Fie Foe Firm, has confirmed to me in an email that his site does in fact search/target 1500 selected Canadian law firms (as opposed to using some sort of automatic scraping of URLs).

Although I had meant to add some better refinements to my Custom . . . [more]