I don’t think we’ve mentioned the Yale / Stanford PORTIA Project before on Slaw:

The PORTIA goals are (1) to design and develop a next generation of technology for handling sensitive information that is qualitatively better than the current generation’s and (2) to create an effective conceptual framework for policy making and philosophical inquiry into the rights and responsibilities of data subjects, data owners, and data users.

Much of the material is inaccessible to the average reader because of a high degree of technical material (e.g. On the Implementation of Pairing-Based Cryptosystems or Private Multiparty Sampling and Approximation of Vector . . . [more]

SLAW has been following the progress of the One Laptop program (formerly the $100 laptop program) since 2005. This program is finally kicking off with a 15 day “Give One Get One” (G1G1) campaign. It started yesterday. For a donation of $399 (not including taxes and shipping) you will receive one of these specially designed computers. One computer will also be given to a child in a develping country. $200 of your donation will be tax deductible (less the approximate value of the computer you will receive).

The computer is designed especially for children and is intended to . . . [more]

Hello, my name is Dominic Jaar and I am a crackberry.

I also happen to be a Facebooker, even if I not too active on that front. Nevertheless, on October 24th, I installed the new Facebook application on my Blackberry 8830 to give it a test drive. If you do not want to read through my complaint, let me just tell you that it has been uninstalled… . . . [more]

Well, not by everyone, but by the efforts of thousands of people at least. That’s how the giant Oxford English Dicitionary was created, as pretty much everyone knows.

Reading The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester recently, I was struck by a few parallels between then and now — or, rather, between that and this. One thought was that this is a pretty good illustration of the wisdom of crowds, so popular nowadays. Of course, it depends on the crowd you hang with as to how wise the product will turn out to . . . [more]

The Conference Board of Canada’s report “What Others Think of You Matters: Manage and Boost Your Corporate Reputation Using Social Media” (creating a free e-Library account is required to access the report) discusses the steps involved in creating an effective corporate social media strategy. The steps discussed include:

FIND: Begin with a reputation audit. What are consumers saying about you on Facebook, MySpace, blogs, etc?

LISTEN: Read the online conversations/comments about you.

PLAN: Make the information that you collected in the previous steps actionable. How do you want to position your company/firm? Do you want to develop relationships . . . [more]

Have you seen what Digg Labs are doing with the stories you digg on that social bookmarking service? Seeing is the operative word, because they’re experimenting with a number of ways — four, in fact — to display the weight of stories graphically, and they’re a little wild.

From their main page:

Arc

Digg Arc displays stories, topics, and containers wrapped around a sphere. Arcs trail users as they digg stories across topics. Stories with more diggs make thicker arcs.

BigSpy

Digg BigSpy places stories at the top of the screen as they are dugg. As new stories are dugg, . . . [more]

We are seeing that the social networking tool/virtual world Second Life is gradually becoming more relevant to business as more organizations take the plunge to test it out and market their wares to SL users.

Case in point: Canada Post has just launched Maple Grove, a city in Second Life. It was announced Thursday (see press release Canada Post Leaps Into Virtual World – Nov. 1/07) and the grand opening took place Saturday with a six-hour music festival. Maple Grove includes brand name stores where you can purchase real world items and have them shipped (using, of course, . . . [more]

Just learned that Israel is the latest destination for legal services outsourcing.

Green Point’s Legal Services Division has engaged with one of the world’s largest legal publishers to provide a full range of editing and editorial services, as well as original content creation services. This client joins the growing roster of prestigious legal information providers who have discovered the benefits of Green Point’s dual shore model – legal resources in India, working under the supervision of bar-admitted US attorneys working in Israel. Green Point’s value added legal services, which make US legal talent in Israel available to US law firms

As I take a moment from battening down the hatches here on the East Coast today, I simply want to ask a question of Slaw-ers out there. What is the Quota of your institutional or company email account?

Not your gmail, hotmail, yahoo or whatever interweb service, but the email account supplied to you by your employer or institution. Here at Dalhousie I have a 97.66mb limit and after being on a little hiatus recently, I had to fight to get my inbox under control but also to stay under the quota. So I’m just curious as to what the . . . [more]

In today’s issue of IT Management, an interview with Pamela Jones the editor of Groklaw.

Groklaw is a blog and website devoted to covering and explaining legislative and jurisprudential issues of interest to the Free Software and Open Source communities – Ms. Strong recently won a Knowledge Trust Honors award, which honours the best of the best in information and library science and information technology. . . . [more]

The Web Marketing Association just announced the winners in the 2007 WebAwards for excellence in the use of the Web for Marketing.

The best of the legal category came from Womble Carlyle, which has a wonderful and updated stable of blogs ((Though their podcasts are looking somewhat dated.

For the record here are all the legal prize-winners. . . . [more]

Fast car chases are a staple of every action film ((I leave it to the dweebs to debate whether Bullitt, French Connection or Ronin takes the medal.)) What is unusual is for the US Supreme Court to be confronted with such a clip. If this doesn’t work, try Youtube 1 and Youtube 2

The case was Scott v. Harris

All but one of the nine justices viewed the tape of the chase before the hearing, and they were entranced by it, discussing it for most of the hearing. Most of the court seemed attracted to the plaintiff’s claim he . . . [more]