The Center for Media Research has released a study reporting that:

“User Generated Video (UGV) scored 22.4 billion views in 2007, up 70% over 2006.”

And are forecasting that number to rise another 52% in 2008:

“The market is forecast to grow at 52% in 2008, and reach 34 billion views, as indicated by straight line linear regression analysis of current market data.”

Hat tip to David Weinberger, who quips ‘That’s a lot of video‘. . . . [more]

My relationship with information technology has gone through at least three phases: 1) the PPP, or Poo-poo phase, 2) the OPP, or Obnoxious and pretentious phase, and 3) the GOWIP, or Getting on with it phase. In phase one, for example, I disparaged the then novel “word processors” by wondering whether we wouldn’t be facing “language spreaders” next. In phase two — which is the reason I mention all of this — I would say to those unfortunates who were in their own phase one that, yes indeedy, the old ways were the best and I’d be right along with . . . [more]

Elizabeth Ellis asked a few posts ago about voice recognition software — whether it was ready for prime time, and what people’s experiences with it were. I’ll be interested, too, in the comments her post gets, because the digital / speech divide is an important one, and one that’s increasingly being bridged by technology.

One example of that bridging is the MIT Lecture Browser. MIT’s famous open access courseware includes a lot of filmed lectures. But one of the problems with such digitized knowledge, as it were, is finding your way into and around it. The Lecture Browser, which . . . [more]

I recently talked to a lawyer at a large Toronto law firm who was happily using voice recognition software to draft initial versions of long documents and to give voice commands to his computer.

Voice recognition technology has been around for a long time – my perception was that it wasn’t ready for prime time. Curious to see the vendor’s view of the software, I paid a quick visit to the website for Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

Has this technology really advanced to the point that it’s ready for wider adoption? . . . [more]

Perhaps the only consolation for going to the dentist is the chance to read a magazine of the sort you wouldn’t normally see. Buried behind sadly outdated copies of Flare and Chatelaine, Sports Illustrated and People, I found MIT’s Technology Review. It’s great. If you’re interested generally in technology, and not just in the information technology that powers much of your legal work, this is the mag for you. But don’t take my word for it — I’m not selling subscriptions. Check it out online.

Three or four fresh stories get posted each day [feed]; there are . . . [more]

Last week Agnese Caruso reported that the Library of Congress is running a pilot project with Flickr to make its photographic collections available over the web. According to the Library of Congress Blog, the response has been tremendous:

The response to the Library’s pilot project with Flickr has been nothing short of astounding. You always hope for a positive reaction to something like this, but it has been utterly off the charts—from the Flickr community, from the blogosphere, from the news media—it is nothing short of amazing.

Let’s start out with a few statistics, as of last night (thanks,

New on LLRX.com is an article by Debbie Ginsberg and Meg Kribble called Social Networks for Law Librarians and Law Libraries, or How We Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Friending. Great title, and a great article to go with it!

I enjoyed their discussion of how law librarians are using social networks to connect with communities and each other. My personal interest is how law firms are using social networks, so I found this little tidbit interesting: . . . [more]

If you read the comments here, you know that I love my iPod Touch (how did I ever live without it??). When browsing the web apps for it, I noticed this one that Slaw readers might find very neat: Lawyer websites for iPhone and iPod Touch is a service that creates law firm websites specifically designed for viewing on iPhone and iPod Touch. Created by Esqs.mobi, information included in the lawyer’s iPhone/iPod Touch website includes practice area, bio, contact details (address, phone, email) and more. . . . [more]

Speaking of Google, as I was in my prior post, a couple of sites are pointing to what seems to be the first outcropping of a new branch of Google, Google Health. The page shown in the photo below is available here; the link to the “tour” gave me a 404 error message.

Can Google Law be far behind? (My proposal for the name: Googlex) . . . [more]

There’s an interesting piece in the January 14 New Yorker for Google watchers: “The Search Party: Google squares off with its Capitol Hill critics,” by Ken Auletta. Essentially, it talks about the awakening of Google’s engineer-founders to the need to have a strong political presence in Washington. Auletta interviews the Google gods and raises most of the tricky issues that face the search giant. . . . [more]

Just a quick note to show off my latest project, the Florida Lawyers Blog Watch.

Working with West Palm Beach attorney Ron Chapman, my idea for this site was to create a web property where anyone, and especially someone who might not be RSS savvy, could watch regional lawyer commentary. Florida is a very good test case because of the quantity of lawyer blogs (36 at launch, and I’m sure there are more) in such a small area.

As most Slawyers can guess, the site is an RSS mashup created with Yahoo pipes. Much like my legal . . . [more]

A number of years ago, “hotelling” was all the rage among managers. Companies were going to save money by taking away employees’ assigned desks or cubicles, giving them laptops (or “thin client” computers) and assigning the company’s office space on a temporary basis to whoever needed it.

Ten years ago, the technology wasn’t quite there yet to support this model. But it’s definitely there today. And hotelling is making a comeback. The Globe and Mail this week reported that IBM is moving to a hotelling model for all of its 19,000 employees in Canada – a major change for the . . . [more]