For those lawyers or small business owners just starting out, setting down roots online can be a daunting process. Not everyone has the budget to hire out a new website construction project, and on the other side, there are numerous sources that will encourage you to DIY – “do it yourself”. What frequently happens though, is the new entrepreneur gets stuck. Do you cobble it together? Or, do you bite the bullet and find the budget?

The following advice won’t be for everyone, but for the soon-to-be business owner, or anyone who’s jumped into business over the past five years, . . . [more]

Google has just released a new search page dedicated to real-time results — those posts that come in typically from Twitter. They’re rolling it out, as they do with all innovations. But if you’re keen, you can get to it via http://www.google.com/realtime?esrch=RealtimeLaunch::Experiment. When it’s otherwise available to you, it will be reachable at http://www.google.com/realtime.

One nice feature is the ability to restrict your results by geography. Thus, for example, I was able to see what people in Canada were saying about the floods in Pakistan. And, as Google suggests, it might be handy to find out what’s going on . . . [more]

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]

Legal Watch blog recently reported that Apple has applied for a patent on technology that, among other things, would allow Apple to identify and punish users who “jailbreak” or unlock their iPhones or who otherwise tamper with their devices against Apple policy.

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

. . . [more]

♫ 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]

Forbes published a story online yesterday about the use of “backscatter x-ray vision” in mobile vans. This scanning technology is the same as that employed at some airports, enabling authorities to see through clothing and luggage. The article features the product being advertized and sold by American Science and Engineering, which has sold more than 500 of the scanners. Their (in my view, creepy) promotional video is embedded below:

The backscatter technology and safety are discussed in the Wikipedia article on the subject.

The use of this technology creates obvious privacy problems, particularly when wielded by or on behalf of . . . [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]

I saw an intriguing tweet from Westlaw today:

@Westlaw: WestlawNext New delivery format: WordPerfect http://ow.ly/2oiFw

Why am I intrigued?

File formats for downloads from free and fee services may seem innocuous, but every change has an effect. For instance, when Queen’s Printers in some jurisdictions changed their format (from HTML to PDF) for publicly available legislation, CanLII had to come up with new collection practices as PDF formats made point in time comparison with existing HTML files ‘difficult’. That is a grand scale example of a file format issue.

A smaller scale example would be rewriting user materials to . . . [more]