With all the exposure we get these days – including published articles, speaking engagements, blogs, websites, twitter, facebook, linkedin, flickr, … – when do we actually “meet” someone for the first time?

When we meet someone in person, we may very well have seen them in those places, or even had a conversation with them in those places. And because us humans have imperfect memories, when we “meet” for the first time in person, there can be that puzzling “haven’t we met before” thought, look, or conversation. And perhaps we have met before – but just not in a . . . [more]

I noticed this webinar from the American Association of Law Libraries and thought others might be interested:

How to Train Without Showing Up

Date: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 – register by November 5th.
Time: 12:00 – 1:15 p.m. Central Time

Find out how screencasts and podcasts can be created and used for educational purposes. Our speakers will share how they use screencasts and podcasts in their libraries and will offer you suggestions on how you can use them for training purposes in your own library.

In this webinar you will:

• Get introduced to how screencasts and podcasts are created
• Receive

I wonder how Google is choosing the material that it reports it is OCRing from scanned material save to the web?

In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn’t be sure of their content. We had occasional clues from references to the document– so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes. We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in Adobe’s PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a

For my first post, I’ll keep it brief. We’re in the early stages of planning our second Intranet project, using SharePoint 2007. With a renewed focus on the importance of customization, effective search, intuitive navigation, and metrics, we’re clear on the new direction we want to take. What’s not clear at this point is governance – who should own it? Library/KM? IT? Administration? Everyone? Who “owns” the Intranet in your firm? . . . [more]

As reported on the front page of today’s Ottawa Citizen, the federal government has launched its own internal version of Wikipedia to which all federal public servants will be able to contribute:

“At the annual Government in Technology (GTEC) conference, taking place at the Westin Hotel in downtown Ottawa, federal officials took the wraps off the government’s internal version of the popular online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, which it calls GCpedia.”

“The service will allow federal employees to post, comment and edit articles placed on GCpedia by their peers (…) ”

“For example, information about climate change policies could be posted

In 2009, the Christian Science Monitor will become the first nationally circulated newspaper in the United States to replace its daily print edition with its excellent website; the 100 year-old news organization will offer subscribers weekly print and daily e-mail editions.

It’s always been a thoughtful paper with excellent writing and probing journalists. The title has always been misleading. It’s a website worth putting on your bookmark list.

Agence France Presse draws the dots to Gannett job cuts – it remains to be seen who follows the CSM lead. . . . [more]

For a price-tag of $125 million ((Which must be small change for Google)) Google, the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild resolved a challenge to the Google Books project.

The settlement agreement resolves a class-action suit filed on Sept. 20, 2005, by the Authors Guild and certain authors, and a suit filed three years ago, by five major publisher-members of the Association of American Publishers: McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin Group, John Wiley & Sons and Simon & Schuster. It is subject to approval by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

For . . . [more]

I’m surprised it has taken so long for a Canadian book on the law of something so ubiquitous, email. Lexis Nexis Canada has released the new title E-mail Law by Charles Morgan and Julien Saulgrain, both of McCarthy Tétrault, and General Editor Dr. Sunny Handa. The description of this 188 page book is given here in the Butterworths catalogue. From the McCarthy Tétrault press release (Oct. 24/08):

It includes systematic analyses of current and upcoming trends, cutting-edge information on e-contracts, spam, e-mail monitoring, document retention, and e-mail as evidence.

Designed for legal counsel, human resource professionals and business leaders,

click to enlargeIt’s been a quiet time here at Slaw as far as technology is concerned. But novelty continues even when we’re turned the other way… Fairly new is Inquisitor, an add-on (or perhaps plugin) for Firefox, Safari and IE. Once installed, Inquisitor offers you support in your navigation toolbar searches — i.e. those you initiate from that little text entry field in the upper right hand corner of your browser. Inquisitor will suggest completed search terms, suggest appropriate websites and make use of your searching history to enhance these functions. You can configure it to give you . . . [more]

Benjamin Edelman, who teaches marketing in the Harvard School of Business, has initiated a class action against Google on behalf of trademark owners whose marks have been infringed by typosquatters. (See the story on Arstechnica.) Typosquatting is the practice of registering domain names that approximate the names of real companies’ websites in the hope of obtaining advantage from internet users who arrive there by mistyping (e.g. http://goggle.com/). Edelman claims that Google places ads on these fraudulent sites and benefits from revenue generated when a user clicks into the sites by mistake. Given the number of such pseudo-sites, Edelman . . . [more]

Ideas are certainly a coin of the internet business realm, if not the only specie, and so it’s natural that makers and marketers want to claim and protect them. Since there’s no copyright in ideas, corporations are careful to require strict non-disclosure agreements from those whom they employ or with whom they do a certain business, relying on secrecy (and prompt NDA enforcement) to protect a notion until it can be matured to a patentable or copyright-able form. Apple, for instance, imposed a NDA obligation on anyone who wanted access to that company’s iPhone operating system data in order to . . . [more]

Doug Cornelius–someone whose thoughts many of us have followed through his blog KM Space–is leaving his real estate practice at his law firm in Boston and with it his hard-core legal knowledge management work. That being said, I am still hopeful he will practice what he learned there about knowledge management and will continue (at least a little) to update his KM blog. He had me worried that he wouldn’t.

Doug has joined Beacon Capital Partners, a real estate firm also in Boston, as their Chief Compliance Officer.

In talking to Doug recently, I learned that . . . [more]