These are excerpts from what appears to have been a New York Times column which you can now find at http://www.lexisone.com/balancing/articles/n010008e.html – Why Nobody Likes A Smart Machine – on human-machine interaction.

Dr. Norman, a cognitive scientist who is a professor at Northwestern, has been the maestro of gizmos since publishing ”The Design of Everyday Things,” his 1988 critique of VCRs no one could program, doors that couldn’t be opened without instructions and other technologies that seemed designed to drive humans crazy.

And the worse news is that the gadgets of Christmas future will be even harder to command, because

Okay Mac fanboys and -girls — and you wannabes (you three others can go back to work): the broadcast of Steve Job’s Macworld 2008 Keynote starts today at 9 AM PST (12PM EST). Nothing spectacular this year, so the betting goes. But we’re looking for a sub-notebook, which should raise some interest out there in the world of laptop schleppers like us. There’ll likely be an announcement about renting movies via iTunes, but that won’t be of interest because we won’t be able to get on board here in Canada. (No Netflix, no Amazon movie rental, no Google Grand Central . . . [more]

Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 Blog has a great post about what we will probably see happening in 2008 in the Web 2.0 realm. Here are some of the more interesting predictions:

• As social media begins to mature and new online stars emerge, a new industry of Web 2.0 talent agents and production companies will form to provide professional help. YouTube star Esmee Denters is a perfect example of the potential of online talents.
• Ownership of data contributed to Web 2.0 sites becomes a growing PR issue. I like this quote of Hinchcliffe’s: “the more control you give up, the more

Comcast, AT&T, EarthLink, or whoever you send that monthly check to – could soon start sniffing your digital packets, looking for material that infringes on someone’s copyright.

The New York Times is speculating that the big ISP’s may be getting ready to filter what passes through their server to and from machines in the U.S., at least. Such a prying would place a premium on law firms’ either being their own ISP’s or using encrypted data when moving it via a commercial ISP. . . . [more]

Comcast, AT&T, EarthLink, or whoever you send that monthly check to – could soon start sniffing your digital packets, looking for material that infringes on someone’s copyright.

The New York Times is speculating that the big ISP’s may be getting ready to filter what passes through their server to and from machines in the U.S., at least. Such a prying would place a premium on law firms’ either being their own ISP’s or using encrypted data when moving it via a commercial ISP. . . . [more]

Via Michael Geist:

The CBA is reporting a security breach of their computer system:

An audit of the CBA online web systems has revealed unauthorized third party access to the system during the recent holiday period.

Immediate steps were taken to further enhance the security of the site, and those whose records were potentially affected are being notified of this unauthorized activity.

The CBA takes the privacy of members very seriously and has taken appropriate steps to ensure that this type of incident does not happen again.

Michael quotes them as telling members:

Your records may have been affected

The Law Librarian Blog today drew attention to the relatively new Best Practices for Legal Education Blog, “a site [that] was created with two goals in mind: 1) to create a useful web-based source of information on current reforms in legal education (…) ; and 2) to create a place where those interested in the future of legal education can freely exchange ideas, concerns, and opinions.”

Contributors are from the United States and the UK (or Glasgow anyway – is Scotland still part of the UK? In, out, half in, half out, sovereignly associated with the Brits?). . . . [more]

An interesting article in the NYTimes on the recent health issues of Om Malik. Om, for those of you that don’t follow tech blogs, is a long time industry insider and the publisher of GigaOm.

On Dec. 28th Om had a heart attack, and well wishes aside (I’m a long time subscriber), the combination of the sedentary life style, smoking and scotch (nah, couldn’t be the scotch…), are cited as causes to his health issues. The big kicker for me was the fact that Om is 41! Now that’s a wake-up call if ever there was one. Ouch.

The . . . [more]

Xerox, a company that’s been part of your daily life for seemingly ever, is fed up with our thinking “copy” when we hear their name. (Hell, I still use xerox as a verb.) They do many more things than make copiers and want “a brand identity that reflects the Xerox of today,” as their vice-president of advertising says. So they’ve ditched the capital X and now will use this new logo:

I can’t say I’m impressed by the ball thingy. The 3-D look that’s popular nowadays will soon be out — if it isn’t already — and weren’t we using . . . [more]

Having been trained in the law, we all know better than to just click “I agree” to the next software licence agreement that pops up when you try to install that new widget on your computer. Of course, none of us do actually read the agreement, and the software ends up changing your start page and installing the yahoo toolbar into your browser.

If you have no interest in reading the lengthy contract, but still want to know whether you can expect that widget to also serve you some pop-up ads, the EULAlyzer promises to do the reading for you. . . . [more]

The alpha version is out of Wikia, the search engine from Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame. Note the clean uncluttered Google-look. And note, too, that it quite correctly brings up Slaw first when searching on “slaw.” Apart from that, though, the Wikia team confesses that: “We are aware that the quality of the search results is low…” But they hope to improve them over the next little while.

You can get an account and help out, if you want, in true Wikipedia fashion. Jimmy says:

Right now, the most important thing you can do is help with the “miniarticles”

A link in the Slaw Linkblog points to a Star story that claims Facebook has over a 1,000,000 subscribers in Toronto:

More than a million Torontonians made friends with Facebook in 2007, contributing to the “phenomenal growth” in Canadian users last year.

Toronto was the first city in North America to break 1 million subscribers, a recent study shows.

…The study also found that most Canadians who logged on to Facebook are between the ages of 18 to 34

Can this number of users be remotely right?

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Toronto embraces the entire GTA, . . . [more]