In the February 14 edition, the Economist printed a special report on how governments are using technology to better communicate with citizens. The report contained a number of fascinating examples of the creative uses of information technology, but highlights the fact that governments are light-years behind businesses in using communication technology to serve people more efficiently.

The report tosses around two key terms: “i-government” and “e-government” . The first refers to the basic process of using the internet to provide information to citizens, while the second refers to providing government services directly to people through the internet.

A second way . . . [more]

First Monday, that veteran academic web journal, has a sustained critique of the web in its current issue. Here are the titles of the articles, linked to abstracts, which will give you a feel:

• Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0
• Web 2.0: An argument against convergence
• Interactivity is Evil! A critical investigation of Web 2.0
• Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation
• The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0
• Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance

All of which is framed by a Preface . . . [more]

From the Torys Speaker Series at the University of Ottawa Law and Technology:

Facing up to Facebook
A panel discussion on social media and social networking

Please join the Law & Technology group as Professors Jane Bailey, Jeremy de Beer, Michael Geist, Ian Kerr, and Valerie Steeves discuss legal issues arising from Facebook and related social media technologies.

Date: Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Time: 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Place: Fauteux Hall, room 351
Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa

Please RSVP to techlaw@uottawa.ca.
Join the Facing up to Facebook event page.

Note about this event . . . [more]

Google has quietly introduced a search feature it calls “teleportation.” They’d cottoned on to the fact that increasingly people don’t bother learning and using a site’s URL, but rather put the site’s name into Google and use the result at or near the top to get to their destination. But often people who do that don’t just want the front page of a site but need to find something on an inside page. So for some big-name sites Google has introduced a search box in the results that will let you search within that site. Here’s a graphic of that . . . [more]

The Canadian Journalism Foundation is presenting Michael Geist in both Toronto on March 6th and Vancouver on April 3rd. The session description:

The Internet and new technologies have ushered in a seemingly unlimited array of possibilities for access to knowledge, creativity, and public participation. University of Ottawa Law School professor and internationally renowned expert on law and the internet Michael Geist will highlight the role that the Internet is playing for new creativity and knowledge sharing, while identifying the business and policy challenges that this creates for journalists and journalism. The talk will be followed by a Q&A moderated by

MTagger is a tool developed at the University of Michigan to let online library users tag various library resources. For instance, a registered user can tag any item from the main catalogue, Mirlyn. Those not logged in can see the tags and the tag-clouds that appear for every item, and can view the resources bearing a given tag. You can see an invitation to tag an item in the image that appears in this post “below the fold.” At the moment there are just under 300 tags in the tag cloud for all items (where “screwball comedy” and “nouvelle . . . [more]

Dennis Kennedy has done his 2008 column for LLRX on legal tech. There aren’t a lot of surprises in “Eight Legal Technology Trends for 2008 – Good Times, Bad Times or Hard Times in Legal Tech?” with the exception, perhaps, of his view that e-discovery has failed to conquer; but there are a lot of wise words. Here are the subheads:

1. Smart Ways to Work Together – Collaboration Tools.
2. Dancing with a Recession.
3. Opening Audio and Video Channels.
4. Going Mobile.
5. The Death Throes for Email?
6. Security Begins to Matter . . . Really.
7. Lawyers Win Round 1 in

Over on his Law Firm Web Strategy blog Steve Matthews announced that JD Supra has been launched. I had a preview of this service back in September, so I had a fresh look am pleased to see the further development of this new service.

JD Supra allows for law firms, law schools and other legal organizations and individuals to share documents. Having a name behind the documents lends credibility to them, while the contributors get to be known for having expertise in their respective areas. This is combined with a profile that will drive traffic back to their websites. A . . . [more]

Log this one into the cool picture category… This photo from the Flickr account of Jason Kurylo shows UBC’s ASRS (Automated Storage and Retrieval System), which allows millions of extra books to be stored in half the space of a traditional shelving.

In unison now… Oooooh, Aaaaaah! :) . . . [more]

A 2.5 million dollar grant is being given to a group of 8 academic researchers by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Announced today, the grant is to be spent over seven years in the study of how and why average citizens are being watched by public and private organizations. The study is being titled “The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting.” Part of the study will be to look at the flow of surveillance information that is now possible with computer use.

From the Queen’s University press release:

The new project will examine

Two weeks ago over on my personal blog I talked about taking part in My ooVoo Day, an event taking place in the new video chat platform ooVoo in which participants could sign up and talk to their favourite new media specialists. I took part in a talk with Joseph Jaffe of Crayon and Jaffe Juice fame.

Last week I participated in a workshop via ooVoo with Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting in Boston in which she taught us how to improve our presentations. I was doubtful how much I could get out of a one-hour session in . . . [more]

Following on the interesting news Steven posted about Quickscibe’s use of RSS feeds, I found this list of 14 “other” ways to use RSS feeds. Some of these are quite specialized.

If you have ‘intellectual property’ concerns about any of these, maybe Cory Doctorow’s recent column in the Guardian will be of interest, though probably not much immediate help.

And then, if you are getting tired of all the options, and you harbor the fear that, in spite of your reputation as a web-efficient techno-savvy computer geek, you will eventually be exposed, perhaps this discussion will be therapeutic. . . . [more]