Congratulations to Dave Winer - I'm glad to see he'll be joining the Berkman guys/gals, and I enjoyed this New Year's essay, which I had somehow missed. Glad to see he and Lessig have a good dialogue going. I think 2003 is going to be a great year, for all of us.
5:43:14 PM
Hey, it's a warblogger! - one thing I noticed about the warbloggers is that almost none of them have RSS feeds. So I rarely spot one in my News Aggregator. Instapundit has a an RSS thing (he's got some tech-blogger blood in his veins), and so I catch his feed. That's how I bopped over to Lileks' post on Scorsese & the Iraq war. What a great writer Lileks is! How come I don't read him more often? Oh, yeah, it's because he doesn't have an RSS/XML feed.
2:30:26 PM
What's the problem with Metadata? - "metadata" is, in the parlance of uber-geeks, the way of referring to data about data. In the high-falutin' world of the Internet, these uber-geeks like HTML, but they love XML because it has more potential. It has, to use the today's new term, the ability to carry metadata. Now, let's say you are just the average Joe at a gas station in, oh...maybe Allston, Massachussetts. Does "information about information" come into play in your mundane existence? Yes, apparently so.
2:05:03 PM
Electronic Discovery - by now most lawyers know that E-mails are a wonderful source of information. I was sifting through Emails and grappling with a new case last night and I had a deja vu epiphany about how important it is to go to the emails first to see what happened in a case (assuming that the parties had a significant amount of correspondence by E-mail, which is usually the case these days). But something else hit me too.
Increasingly, it is important to identify the time that a particular E-mail was sent, and when the reply was received. And since people who communicate by E-mail live in different time zones it often becomes important to agree on a particular time zone as a reference point. I noticed this because one of the emails I was reviewing showed up twice with two times (an hour apart). It wasn't an issue in my case so I'm not worried about it enough to futz with now (I know that there are ways to figure this out), but in some case it will be important. Are most lawyers or paralegals aware of this? If you don't know about the issue you will probably ignore it. Perhaps at your peril. Just another example of why it might be useful to understand how all of this technology works.
Oh, and I see Rory also has a nice post about the new skill sets that are demanded of people in the legal profession.
