Microsoft today outlined a new policy framework for content access to its popular blogging and personal publishing service, MSN Spaces. It also called for broad dialogue to produce a set of principles to guide practices in this area.

Speaking before a conference of government officials and community leaders in Lisbon, Portugal, Microsoft Senior Vice President and General Counsel Brad Smith reaffirmed the company’s commitment to blogging as an important vehicle for sharing of information and ideas, and outlined the policy framework that would guide Microsoft in dealing with government orders related to blog content:

• Explicit standards for protecting content access:

“Information in context” is the simplest way to describe our firm’s new portal. There are a variety of contexts – personal pages, practice areas, library services, a learning centre, firm services and departments and clients and matters. Our portal is highly integrated with a number of firm applications, including our document management system and our accounting system. Users access all of their applications and all on-line services from the portal (the portal is the new firm desktop – on the screen 24/7).

I was particularly interested in figuring out how to integrate “external” information into our portal pages. Before tackling . . . [more]

I apologize that this post is focused on Toronto-based readers of SLAW, but I thought some of you might be interested in the various seminars being put on by the Faculty of Information Studies from time to time. Their upcoming seminar sounds interesting:

“Weblogs & Libraries: Communication, Conversation and the Blog People”
Date: Thursday, February 2nd, 2006
Time: 4:15-5:15 pm
Place: Bissell building, 140 St. George Street, Room 728 . . . [more]

Microsoft has released a public beta of IE 7 with RSS built-in.

Robert Scoble has a video interview with IE Team about it, and the comments on Dave Winer’s WordPress Blog will be worth watching.

I haven’t installed it (and not sure if I will), but did do the online tour if that counts. :-) The thing I’m excited about is the mainstream marketing towards the ‘average joe’ RSS consumer. This should make things easier. . . . [more]

Having been reading so much lately about the recent Palestinian elections I tried this morning to see what legal material the Authority had on the Web. I went to Google of course first and looked for the Web-sites of both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas (idly wondering of course whether any of W’s troops were monitoring). Neither appear to have anything much in the way of legislative, court or general government information. The Authority Web site has a lot on the peace process and basic documents, UN resolutions and so forth, but not what you’d usually expect from a government . . . [more]

Blawg Review, the self-professed “Carnival of Law Bloggers” features law blog reviews by a changing kaleidoscope of reviewers. In the current issue, Chicago IP lawyer and blogger Kevin A. Thompson, has just posted a fantastic review of law blogs using Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as the model, hosted on his blog Cyberlaw Central. See what is reviewed under Arthur Dent, Babel Fish, Ford Prefect, and all the rest! Under The Vogons, we even see Patrick Cormier’s recent Slaw post The Uneasy Lawyer and IT Dialogue from Jan. 25/06 mentioned while he’s off somewhere in the sun . . . [more]

Ray Kurzweil’s very much in the air lately. He’s the MIT prof and former successful businessman who has written The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology in which he argues that information technology will overtake us and remove distinctions between human being and machine, and together with other advancing technologies, this leap will ensure us all a rosy future. (He’s not the first by any means to promise that accelerating change will at some point tip over into something completely different and liberating: older readers may have heard of the Roman Catholic priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin who . . . [more]

In addition to its dumb list, Business 2.0 has a smart list this morning, on which Google is the smartest company with four provocative scenarios for the future of Google:

In the first, Google is the Media, Google becomes the media powerhouse and ends up with Pulitzer Prizes as the company capitalizes on Google TV, Google Mobile, and the rise of e-paper. The second is Google as the Internet, in which Free Wi-Fi, a faster version of the Web, the Gbrowser, and the Cube transform the technology landscape and the language. The third is the pessimist’s scenario . . . [more]

Today’s Business 2.0 has its list of the follies of last year, in which I’m delighted to say that the legal fraternity have maintained their places of honour. And Google made the list twice. You can find the full list here, but to whet your appetite:

2. Investment bank error in your favor. Collect an additional $1.43 billion.
The judge in billionaire Ronald Perelman’s lawsuit against Morgan Stanley, exasperated by the latter’s delays in handing over documents, instructs jurors to assume that the firm committed fraud. The bank insists it isn’t stonewalling, just running into technology glitches. The jury . . . [more]

Hadn’t realized just how passionate the anti-blogger movement had become until I read this morning’s Guardian Which some of us old’uns remember as the Manchester Guardian , and read about the distinguished German executive, Jean-Remy von Matt, the head of the leading German advertising agency Jung von Matt.

Herr Matt in one of those felicitous little epithets that male advertising executives are prone toWho could forget Neil French’s outburst at an ad industry event in Toronto when the WPP Group boss said there aren’t more female creative directors “because they’re crap” and they eventually “wimp out” and “go off . . . [more]

A comment in Boing Boing from a correspondent in China claimed that the Chinese don’t use Google but rather Baidu when they search. Whether or not that’s accurate — and whether it says anything about the importance of Google’s decision to conform to the Chinese government’s restraints and prior censorship — it made me go for a look. Chinese is, of course, within an ace of being the major language on the internet, and I’d never even taken their search engine for a spin.

I tested it with Slaw and slaw.ca, plus a couple of other variables, and came up . . . [more]

Two days ago, a colleague and I chatted briefly about this:

“Today…the library is relinquishing its place as the top source of
inquiry. The reason that the library is losing its supremacy in carrying
out this fundamental role is due, of course, to the impact of digital
technology. As digital technology has pervaded every aspect of our
civilization, it has set forth a revolution not only in how we store and
transmit recorded knowledge, historical records, and a host of other
kinds of communication but also in how we seek and gain access to these
materials.” –Jerry D. Campbell, “Changing . . . [more]