Digital discovery - now some lawyers are saying we don't even want to bother with paper; just give us the electronic files.
5:22:13 PM
Bill Moyers Special on Copyright issues - On Friday, January 17, 2003, at 9 P.M., on PBS (check local listings), NOW with Bill Moyers looks into the digital future of intellectual property and the debate that has pit private control against the public domain. Gentlemen, start your TiVos...
5:11:28 PM
Deep linking - last night I was thinking that I hadn't seen any silly complaints by people claiming that they had the right to control whether, or how, they could be linked to. I thought, "well that stupid issue seems to have died down." But then I saw this.
4:27:40 PM
And bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia - Another example (for you poor slobs who lack a news aggregator) of how the news I need comes to me. I just scanned and saw that megnut posted about the availability of Free wireless in Paris. She notes "and on the Paris tip: there's free Wi-Fi (French press release) at the Columbus Café Neuilly in Neuilly sur Seine. While I don't condone going to a Columbus Café -- they're a plague of French Starbucks -- free Wi-Fi is pretty nice."
Why do I care about this? Well my wife and I are going to Paris in April (humming the song right now), and I had on my to-do list figuring out where I could use my laptop + wireless card to jack into the Internet. Well, megnut's post just took that item off my list. This event is what Jenny refers to as the "shifting" of information. More and more I find that information comes to me. Which is a very good thing.
4:17:58 PM
My new song - well I've got the lyrics done, which was made somewhat easier by using the Alanis Morissette lyric generator. I'll try to work up some chords this weekend. God, it used to be so hard to write music.
3:01:40 PM
Revenge of the Philosophy Majors - Okay, my name is Ernest and I was a philosophy major. I have to confess that occasionally, in the privacy of my own life, I still philosophize. And I even listen to, and read, the philosophical discourse of others. There's not much of it on the commercial airwaves. But there is some discussion of it on the Web. In fact, there is even some discussion of the Philosophical underpinnings of the Web itself. I learned today that the Internet is about Truth and the Web is about Morality. No, seriously!
1:50:22 PM
Blawg, the law blog - well it was bound to happen. There is now a site called Blawg, which aspires to be "your source for law & legal-related weblogs." Looks pretty slick, and even has a definition of the term "blawg." But I didn't see any attribution for the origins of that term. Unless I have lost huge chunk of my memory banks, I distinctly remember that it was Denise Howell who coined this term (see e.g. post dated 3/3/2002). I'm sure I will register for the site and join up and all, but I'd like to see proper attribution for the origin of the term "blawg" first. Maybe I'm being too picky.
1:05:00 PM
Blogger Welcome Wagon - I've been meaning to point to another member of the Radio Userland blogging family. Kim Plonksy is a paralegal in our firm's Lafayette office. Kim is extremely tech-savvy and interested in using technology to benefit our clients. She has started a blog aptly titled KiMformation. Check it out.
11:57:57 AM
Bold Predictions - I subscribe a great E-mail discussion group called Technolawyer, and a few weeks ago I responded to the request for top 5 predictions for Legal Technology for 2003. Prediction number two was as follows:
NEWS AGGREGATORS WILL BE DISCOVERED Much was made of Weblogs this past year. Weblogs are fascinating, but they are only the tip of the iceberg. Bloggers get their information from other bloggers and from mainstream news sources, and the only way to efficiently comb through the breaking news is to use an aggregator like Radio Userland's built-in News Aggregator, or Amphetadesk. I predict more news aggregator products will emerge, and the present offerings will improve, as more people discover the world of RSS/XML feeds. The main holdback on the emergence of news aggregators is that you have to use them to understand their power, and you have to be willing to use the Internet to get news. The latter is not a big barrier, but the former is. Still, it is inevitable that people (and lawyers are people) will learn about and use news aggregators.
The editor of the Technolawyer disagreed with my observation, which is admitedly the view of someone who is steeped in the use of an Aggregator and therefore is perhaps overly optimistic that its benefits will be discovered by others. The editor referenced the now defunct Pointcast as an example of the failure of "push" technology. But he did admit that he thinks that news aggregators, unlike Pointcast, won't go away. He just doesn't see the impact of aggregators like I do. Of course, he's in the business of running an E-mail discussion group and collects revenue from ads that he includes in the emails. Why would he want to change his business model? And why would he want to peer into the benefits of XML and RSS? Bottom line: we are both right and both wrong. For now. Let's see what happens down the road.
Oh, I see that Glenn Reynolds has had some thoughts on this, albeit in the context of the old "tragedy of the commons."
