My friend Doug Jasinski at Skunkworks here in Vancouver spoke on Social Media for Lawyers (powerpoint link) at yesterday’s Vancouver LMA lunch. I didn’t get out to see it, but Doug was nice enough to relay a copy of the slides to me this morning. And I have to say, this may be one of the best slide shows I’ve seen put together on the topic. For not attending, and all… :)

Thanks for the repub permission, Doug. I have no doubt you did a crackerjack job! . . . [more]

Using Twitter for data mining and information gathering isn’t new. Most Twitter users effectively search for key terms using Summize, and for PR professionals this is almost a must-do these days to monitor your brand.

I regularly use Twitter (and other microblogs) to direct my “followers” to stories of interest, which can be pieces I’ve authored or news stories. But I have no idea if people actually like the stuff I post unless I get positive feedback (which I occasionally do). I do know that on sites where I have administrative control I notice a steadily . . . [more]

As per the title of this post: Interwoven Announces Definitive Agreement to be Acquired by Autonomy.

Many law firms in Canada (and the United States) use Interwoven for their document management system (DMS). Interwoven is a very robust DMS that can manage large volumes of documents while keeping good version control and honoring security settings. However, up to and including version 8.2, many users complain that its search capabilities were too arcane (searching has been improved with version 8.3 which involved Interwoven incorporating Vivisimo search technology). Plus, Interwoven’s Universal Search product appears to be getting good buzz.

As such, . . . [more]

Well it is great to see some rational decision making coming out of the Whitehouse these days. Today I note Obama’s Executive Order on Presidential Records has been added to the Whitehouse website.

Hopefully this will help fulfill one of the many things on Michel-Adrien’s Wish List!

Here’s a snippet:

“By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to establish policies and procedures governing the assertion of executive privilege by incumbent and former Presidents in connection with the release of Presidential records by the . . . [more]

Enough doom and gloom already! The New Year had barely started when the business section of my local newspaper offered readers a cynical New Year’s message: “The good news is that 2009 is only 12 months long.”

Many of my friends and colleagues have been remarking that the recession and ensuing panic is only being made worse by the media’s endless barrage of negative messages and news stories.

I have been searching for a positive spin to this negativity and found the answer in a blog post by Marshall Goldsmith, business coach: “We all need to think like entrepreneurs.”

I . . . [more]

Joel Alleyne’s December column: The Need to Forget – Less Is More has been on my mind since reading it, though perhaps this incongruous statement should be “in” my mind. Unlike the individual described in the column, my challenge is more often remembering rather than forgetting.

Specific factors in my organization require me to act as the facilitator of institutional memory:

• I have been with my firm for 10 years and part of our technology committee for the entire time
• The combined longevity of our entire 5 person IT team is about 13 years
• I monitor RSS feeds for others

As we all know, there’s a continuing quest to encompass and, at the same time, tame the spate of information from the internet. Google is the most obvious champion in the quest: all the world’s knowledge … conjured up according to your particular search/need. Without that there’d be simply the blare of everything, which is to say, nothing. Another approach is to filter the flood through others, your friends or people whose judgment you respect: social networks perform this function, of course — Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc. Somewhere in between are those services that bring you streams of everything in . . . [more]

The Human Security Report Project, affiliated with Simon Fraser University’s School for International Studies, conducts research on political violence and makes that research available to scholars and the public generally. The Human Security Gateway is the tool used for dissemination of this material and as well relevant research available elsewhere.

Currently the counter on the site claims 23,701 resources, categorized as News Articles, Factsheets, Reports or Academic Articles. As well, it’s possible to filter the data by topic and region. There are, for example, 2,472 resources under the heading of International Law, Justice and Accountability . . . [more]

The Law Librarian Blog reminded readers today of the public policy statement that the American Association of Law Libraries submitted to the Obama-Biden Transition Team on December 23, 2008.

The policy wish list covers issues relating to:

• public access to government information
• the management of the life cycle of public information
• the creation of a standard method for citing primary legal information in the public domain
• government agency cooperation with the U.S. Government Printing Office’s Federal Digital System that has the capacity to accept, authenticate and provide continuous public access to information from all three branches of government
• protection and

The Globe this morning described yesterday’s events in Washington as the first internet inauguration. According to the story, there was a 54% spike in internet traffic during the speech, and 8,500 people changed their Facebook status through a partnership with CNN’s website as Obama was beginning his speech.

Like many in my office, after finding a site that was not blocked by our filters, I was partly responsible for the first. I had no part in the second, but can certainly attest to its general truth as a lot of my acquaintances contributed their own spontaneous status changes.

For . . . [more]

About three months ago there was a post on Slaw about a decision by a court in Kentucky to seize over 100 domain names used by Internet gambling enterprises, on the grounds that the domain names were illegal gaming devices. The decision has been contested by a number of different gambling websites, including Stranieri.com – Italy’s largest gambling online resource.

This decision has just been overturned by the Kentucky Court of Appeals, which prohibited the enforcement of the order. The reasons for decision (16 pages) are available from the Electronic Frontier Foundation site [PDF] (EFF was an intervenor). EFF’s preliminary . . . [more]

The Globe and Mail has a long and interesting obituary for Glen How, lawyer for Canada’s Jehovah’s Witnesses, who died December 30, 2008, at the age of 89. How will be remembered for a trio of cases involving civil liberties in the Duplessis era in Quebec:

The Boucher, Saumur and Roncarelli cases went to the Supreme Court in the 1950s. The Boucher case [Boucher v. the King, [1951] S.C.R. 265], which used truth as a defence, eliminated an archaic Quebec law defining sedition as criticism of the government and led to the dismissal of nearly 125 sedition