Miscellaneous E-Things
Email
ALL
CAPS emails lead to woman's firing - 31 August
Vicki Walker was abruptly kicked out of her job for sending
"confrontational emails" with text formatted in a
variety of red, bold, and all caps fonts. Walker had sent the
emails to fellow workers within the company, usually with stern
and detailed instructions on how forms should be properly filled
out. Someone at ProCare didn't like her approach, suggesting she
caused "disharmony in the workplace" and was being too
confrontational via email, eventually firing her without
warning. Walker, however, got the last laugh. She sued for
wrongful termination and won the case, pocketing $17 000 in lost
wages and for other unspecified harm caused due to the firing. -
Yahoo Tech blog
Facebook
Why
lawyers should not "quit" Facebook - 1 September
Facebook is a microcosm of the real world. If you
procrastinate at work by playing online solitaire or doodling
on your notepads, you will waste time on Facebook. If you
think it is extremely tedious to talk to acquaintances at
business functions or school open houses about things like the
weather or the movie you just saw, then you will hate going to
a website where you interact with those acquaintances every
day in a similarly banal manner. If you do not like seeing
advertisements on billboards on your way to work, or in your
magazines, then you are bound to be bugged by the
advertisements along the sides of your Facebook homepage. But
(and this is a big but) lawyers for generations have built
their business through personal relationships. Contracts for
legal services are signed after years of coffee dates and
hand-shakes and "how's your kid?" and
"congratulations on your pregnancy" and "happy
holidays" wishes. Facebook is a fabulous tool to help
lawyers deepen our conversations and relationships with
acquaintances so they can become our friends, and then
hopefully, one day, our business contacts. - Lawyerist
website
Forensic
Imaging
The
death of imaging - 1 September
Lawyers and electronic discovery pundits have argued for years
over the merits of forensic media imaging, or imaging for short,
as a means of capturing electronically stored information (ESI).
Imaging captures the greatest volume of raw data, but it also
dramatically increases the financial burden on the producing
party. The debate focuses on whether and when imaging
should be used for forensic work due to its inherent high price
tag. As I see it, the entire argument is without purpose.
Imaging has its uses, but storage technologies will soon make it
obsolete. Live file extraction will become the de facto
method of gathering ESI. Imaging, as most IT people understand
it, is the only method of value for preservation of forensically
accessible data. Imaging allows recovery of deleted files,
examination of data movements, computer use patterns and so
forth. - EDD Update blog
Google
Books
Turning
the page on Google books - 4 September
Bill Thompson talks to Google to find out more about its
intentions for the proposed book search system. - BBC
News website
Google
modifies Europe book plans - 7 September
Google has offered concessions to European publishers who are
concerned about the Internet giant's plans to put books into a
massive online library. Material which is out of print in the
US, but still available for sale elsewhere, will not be added to
Google Books, unless consent is granted. Google has already
digitised millions of out-of-print titles. The European
Commission wants concerted action to allow more books in
Europe's national libraries to be scanned. - BBC
News website
Google
Books : a metadata train wreck - 29 August
Mark has already extensively blogged the Google Books Settlement
Conference at Berkeley yesterday, where he and I both spoke on
the panel on "quality" - which is to say, how well is
Google Books doing this and what if anything will hold their
feet to the fire? This is almost certainly the Last Library,
after all. There's no Moore's Law for capture, and nobody is
ever going to scan most of these books again. So whoever is in
charge of the collection a hundred years from now - Google?
UNESCO? Wal-Mart? - these are the files that scholars are going
to be using then. All of which lends a particular urgency to the
concerns about whether Google is doing this right. - Language
Log blog
Keeping
Google out of libraries - 2 September
Google is in the middle of a massive project to scan and
digitise every book it can get its hands on, whether old or new,
and if it gets its way then the US courts will soon endorse an
agreement between the search engine giant and the US book
industry that will allow it to do this without fear of
prosecution for copyright infringement. Authors and publishers
will get some money in return, and we will all benefit from the
improved access to digitised books that Google will provide. The
deal sounds like a good one, but not everyone is happy with it.
The Department of Justice in the US has begun an investigation
to see if it is anti-competitive, and last month a number of
library associations got together with Amazon, Yahoo! and
Microsoft to form the Open Book Alliance which argues that it
should not go forward. - BBC
News website
Google
Books settlement and SA authors : deadline is Fri 4 Sep : read
the essential van Heerden/Preller notes - 3 September
Alert! Not to be
alarmist, but tomorrow 4 September 2009 is your last chance to
opt out of the Google Books settlement. Yeeeeaaaauuurrrrgh!!
Wait - don't panic! Author Etienne van Heerden has picked the
brain of legal eagle Bertus Preller and laid out all the facts
related to the settlement in an excellent post published
today at LitNet. More
importantly, van Heerden/Preller have also laid out an opinion
or two. - Book SA News
blog
Social
Networking
Social
networking means 33 million people at lunch - 2 September
Social networking is useful not only for client development, but
also for job searches or to advance your career. However, it is
no substitute for face-to-face interactions. The most common
social networking revolves around LinkedIn, Facebook, and
Twitter. Many lawyers also turn to LawLink and Legal OnRamp, two
lawyer-only social networking sites. These tools allow you to
collect information about the people in the networks you already
have and add new people to these networks at an exponential
rate. By starting with the contacts in my Outlook database and
then working these social networking sites, my contacts have
doubled in three months and spread worldwide. - Article by
Michael Moore on the State
Bar of Wisconsin website
Twitter
Attorneys
finding jobs on Twitter - September
http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs035/1102387444051/archive/1102694536700.html#LETTER.BLOCK5
Should
lawyers Tweet with clients? - 29 July
Lawyers might not be nearly as obsessed with social media as the
rest of the world, but, here and there, a few have embraced some
form of it. - The AM
Law Daily blog
Template
Twitter Strategy for Government Departments
[Directive from UK Cabinet encouraging the use of Twitter]
UK Cabinet
website
Bobby
on the Tweet : British police try Twitter - 27 August
It was billed as policing by Twitter, a first for London's
Metropolitan Police. Environmental campaigners had announced
plans to set up a 3,000-person strong "camp for climate
action" in the British capital on Aug. 26. In the days
leading up to the event, both police and protestors promised to
start tweeting information to ensure its peaceful running.
"We set up a Twitter site specifically," says Chief
Superintendent Helen Ball, the Met officer charged with
explaining the purportedly high-tech, low-visibility operational
policy. "The use of Twitter is within a range of different
communication methods, improving understanding of why police are
doing what they're doing". - Stumble
Upon website
Twitter
is the new RSS - 31 August
After going a full six weeks without reading my blog aggregator,
I have to wonder what's up. What's up, I can tell you, is that
if it isn't hot with my Twitter peeps, I may not see it. Now I'm
the first to admit that this is simply weird. I mean, Twitter is
not supposed to take the place of RSS, but in my little corner
of the universe it has. - Article by Roy Tennant on the Library
Journal blog
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