Law X.0

Jobs in Social Media

Jobs in Social Media is a social network and job board for those interested in working in the social media industry. Bloggers, podcasters, online community managers and social media professionals are the target audience. Check it out. [JH]

Knight Foundation Awards Timothy Berners-Lee $350,000 for Transparency in Journalism Project

Details on Law Librarian Blog. [JH]

New Practitioner Blogs

Fiancee Visa Blog
http://www.fianceevisablog.com
http://www.fianceevisablog.com/index.xml

Covers fiancee, marriage, immigration and other visa law issues with a focus on Illinois State law. Published by K-1 fiancee visa lawyer Michael F. Roe.

Halifax Personal Injury Lawyer Blog
http://www.halifaxpersonalinjurylawyerblog.com/
http://www.halifaxpersonalinjurylawyerblog.com/index.xml

A legal blog that covers personal injury law, including news, and events dealing with accident and injury law in Canada. Written by lawyers at the legal firm of Arnold Pizzo Mckiggan.

Product Liability Lawyer Blog
http://www.productliabilitylawyerblog.com
http://www.productliabilitylawyerblog.com/index.xml

A legal blog that covers Georgia product liability Law, including news and events dealing with defective drugs, and medical devices. Written by product liability lawyer Sam Levi.

Jacksonville Criminal Lawyer Blog
http://www.jacksonvillecriminallawyerblog.com
http://www.jacksonvillecriminallawyerblog.com/index.xml

Covers criminal law news, cases and issues with a focus on Florida State law. Published by Jacksonville, Florida Criminal Lawyers at the firm of Shorstein & Lasnetski.

Washington Injury Attorney Blog
http://www.washingtoninjuryattorneyblog.com
http://www.washingtoninjuryattorneyblog.com/index.xml

A legal blog that covers Washington injury law, including news and events dealing with personal injury and accident law. Written by the Washington State injury attorneys at the Farber Law Group.

Louisiana Accident Attorney Blog
http://www.louisianaaccidentattorneyblog.com
http://www.louisianaaccidentattorneyblog.com/index.xml

Covers Louisiana personal injury and accident law, including cases, news and issues. From the Louisiana personal injury law firm of Neblett, Beard, & Arsenault.

NFA Gun Trust Lawyer Blog
http://www.guntrustlawyer.com
http://www.guntrustlawyer.com/index.xml

Covers the National Firearms Act gun trust law, news and events dealing with gun trusts law. Written by Jacksonville, Florida Gun Trust Attorney David M. Goldman.

Philadelphia Personal Injury Lawyer Blog
http://www.philadelphiapersonalinjurylawyerblog.com
http://www.philadelphiapersonalinjurylawyerblog.com/index.xml

Covers personal injury cases, news and issues dealing with injury and accident law with a focus on the State of Pennsylvania. From the Philadelphia Workers' Compensation law firm of Mednick, Mezyk, & Kredo.

Alabama Product Injury Lawyer Blog
http://www.alabamaproductinjurylawyer.com
http://www.alabamaproductinjurylawyer.com/index.xml

Blog dedicated to personal injury and accident law, including news, events and information about drug recalls. Published by the Alabama product injury lawyers at the Niedenthal law firm.

SPARQL Tutorial

From the Understanding SPARQL page hosted by IBM:

The Semantic Web, a knowledge-centric model for the Web's future, supplements human-readable documents and XML message formats with data that can be understood and processed by machines. SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) is to the semantic Web as SQL is to a relational database. It allows applications to make sophisticated queries against distributed RDF databases, and is widely supported by many competing frameworks. This tutorial demonstrates its use through the example of a team tracking and journaling system for a virtual company.

In this tutorial. This tutorial introduces SPARQL and the data formats it is based on. It also covers the RDF, RDF Schema, OWL, and Turtle knowledge representation languages. With these languages, you build ontologies or domain models. For the example used throughout this tutorial, you'll build the ontologies and queries for a journaling and booking system to produce semantically tagged twitter-like micro-blogs. You'll query those blog entries to find those in your company with the skills to make up the team for a project that you are bidding for.

When you complete this tutorial, you will know how to produce RDF and OWL ontologies in the Turtle language. You will know how to host the ontologies using Jena and Joseki and you will know how to query them using SPARQL.

Hat tip to LISNews. [JH]

Graphic Design: The New Basics

Need to go beyond cut-and-paste graphic design for blogs and websites? Check out Graphic Design: The New Basics (PAPress, May 1, 2008) by Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips. In The New Basics, the authors refocus design instruction on the study of the fundamentals of form in a critical, rigorous way informed by contemporary media, theory, and software systems.  From the blurb:

Through visual demonstrations and concise commentary, The New Basics shows students and professionals how to build interest and complexity around simple relationships between formal elements of two-dimensional design such as point, line, plane, scale, hierarchy, layers, and transparency. The New Basics explains the key concepts of visual language that inform any work of design—from a logo or letterhead to a complex web site. It takes a fresh approach to design instruction by emphasizing visually intensive, form-based thinking in a manner that is in tune with the latest developments in contemporary media, theory, art, and technology. Colorful, compact, and clearly written, The New Basics is the new indispensable resource for anyone seeking a smart, inspiring introduction to graphic design and destined to become the standard reference work in design education.

Also recently published by PAPress, preeminent graphic designer Abbott Miller's Open Book: Design and Content. [JH]

Simple Spark Catalogs Web Apps

Simple Spark catalogs some 8,500 of the web apps. Each application is sorted by category and subcategory, and displayed with a brief screenshot and description. Users can also add reviews and ratings, and developers (or anyone else) can contribute additional information.

Hat tip to Web Worker Daily. [JH]

Cuba Bars Blogger from Accepting Award in Spain

Yoani Sanchez, creator of a critical blog titled Generation Y that has received over a million hits was awarded a journalism award in Spain but she won't be going to the ceremony to accept the award. Her blog criticism is more generational than political. She expresses the alienation and cynicism shared by many Cuban young people. Listen to the NPR report. [JH]

Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society

Well worth reading. Make no mistake: this is no run-of-the-mill exposé of media bias, but a sophisticated analysis of the ways and means by which lies and distortions do so well in today's fractured, cynical media world. —Todd Gitlin, Professor of Journalism and Sociology, Columbia University

True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society
by Farhad Manjoo

List Price: $25.95 
Publisher: Wiley (March 17, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0470050101
ISBN-13: 978-0470050101

Book Description: In True Enough, Manjoo presents findings from psychology, sociology, political science, and economics to show how new technologies are prompting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact. In an age of talk radio, cable TV, and the Internet—the blog- and YouTube-addled million-channel media universe—it is no longer necessary for any of us to confront notions that contradict what we "know" to be true. Stephen Colbert calls this "truthiness"—when something feels true without any evidence that it is. Here Manjoo probes the cognitive basis of truthiness, exploring how biases push both liberals and conservatives to select and interpret news in a way that accords with their personal versions of "reality."

Why has punditry lately overtaken news, with so many media outlets pushing partisan agendas instead of information? Why do lies seem to linger so long in the cultural subconscious even after they've been thoroughly discredited? And why, when more people than ever before are documenting the truth with laptops and digital cameras, does fact-free spin and propagandaseem to work so well? True Enough explores leading controversies of national politics, foreign affairs, science, and business, explaining how Americans have begun to organize themselves into echo chambers that harbor diametrically different facts—not merely opinions—from those of the larger culture. We meet people who espouse far-out interpretations of reality—about everything from the history of John Kerry's time in Vietnam to the integrity of the 2004 election to the truth about 9/11—and dig into the mechanism by which they came to hold those beliefs.

Coolest Technologies Demoed at Web 2.0

Clint Boulton reviews six of the more memorable technologies demoed at Web 2.0 on eWeek.com. Most are online collaboration tools. [JH]

2008 Webby Award Winners Announced

Here's the complete list. [RJ]

New Law Blogs by Practitioners

Atlanta Injury Attorney Blog
http://www.atlantainjuryattorneyblog.com
http://www.atlantainjuryattorneyblog.com/index.xml

Covers personal injury and accident law, including car accidents, aviation accidents, medical malpractice, with a focus on Georgia State law. Published by Atlanta injury attorney Sam Levine.

Product Liability Attorney Blog
http://www.productliabilityattorneyblog.com
http://www.productliabilityattorneyblog.com/index.xml

Covers product liability law, including defective pharmaceutical products with a focus on Missouri and Illinois State law. Published by product liability attorneys at Carey & Danis.

Nursing Home Abuse and Neglect Blog
http://www.nursinghomeabuselawyerblog.com
http://www.nursinghomeabuselawyerblog.com/index.xml

Covers nursing home abuse, elder abuse, and other elder law issues with a focus on California State Law. Published by attorneys at the legal firm of Walton Barber.

10 Most Disruptive Technologies Through 2012

According to Gardner analysts, here are the most disruptive technologies through 2012. Details on eWeek. [JH]

1. Multicore and Hybrid Servers
2. Virtualization
3. Enterprise Social Software
4. Cloud Computing
5. Mashups
6. User Interface
7. Ubiquitous Computing
8. Context-Aware Computing
9. Augmented Reality
10. Semantic Technologies

What Is Fair Use? Blog

The Chronicle of Higher Education profiles a blog created by Peter Friedman to supplement his legal analysis and writing class at Case Western: What Is Fair Use?

Hat tip to Adjunct Law Prof Blog. [JH]

Top 20 Most Profitable Tech Companies in 2007

Courtesy of Fortune's annual ranking. Here's the top five.

Company	Profit in Billions (% Change Over 2006)	Revenue in Billions (% Change Over 2006)	Profits as Percent of Revenue
Microsoft	$14.1 (11.6%)	$51.1 (15.4%)	27.5%
IBM	$10.4 (9.8%)	$98.7 (8.1%)	10.5%
Cisco Systems	$7.3 (31.4%)	$34.9 (22.6%)	21.0%
Hewlett-Packard	$7.2 (17.2% )	$104.2 (13.8%)	7.0%
Intel	$6.9 (38.3%)	$38.4 (8.3)	18.2%

Other Notables: Google (7th place), Apple (8th), Dell (10th), Nvidia (17th) and Adoble (18th).

Two less recognizable names: MEMC Electronic Materials (16th), manufacturer of polysilicon wafers used to make solar cells and Lam Research (20th), flash memory chip maker. [JH]

12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know

Check out the brief overview at Aviva Directory. [JH]

Berners-Lee Addresses WWW2008 in Beijing

Check out Paul Miller's coverage on his The Semantic Web blog. WWW2008 Conference website. [JH]

Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online

Guest blogging on Mashable, Andy Beal outlines ten tactics that could prevent your company suffering its own online reputation meltdown. [RJ]

This is sure to become the definitive guide for members of any company or group who want to join and shape the often brutally honest conversation across social media about their brands, products, and people. — Tom Giles, Editor, Technology & Science, BusinessWeek.com

Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online
by Andy Beal and Judy Strauss

List Price: $29.99
Publisher: Sybex (March 4, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0470190825
ISBN-13: 978-0470190821

Book Description: Radically Transparent is the complete resource for monitoring, managing, building, and repairing online reputations. The comprehensive guide provides a full-featured reputation monitoring and management system. It includes practical, step-by-step instruction in four skills for personal reputation construction: public relations, search engine optimization, research, and online content creation. It explains how to apply these skills to create online content for blogs, social networking sites, and text communication (e-mail, text messaging, and so forth). The book provides background information, research results, anecdotal evidence, case studies, and practical strategies. It also emphasizes Internet research techniques for identifying and monitoring online identities and features exercises that reinforce key discussions.

Part I explores this new era of transparency and its implications for companies and individuals. Part II reveals the best online reputation management tools and techniques. It explains the what, when, and how of reputation monitoring and explores how to leverage social media to build positive buzz, use search engines to your advantage, and communicate effectively using everything from emails and IMs to blogs and social networks. Part III shows how to track, manage, and repair your online reputation. It explores various tracking methods, provides strategies and techniques when reputation repair is in order, and concludes with a concrete, seven-step action plan for successful and ongoing online reputation management.

Using step-by-step instruction and tested techniques, the expert authors unveil a detailed blueprint for building, managing, monitoring, and repairing your reputation. They detail important public relations, search engine optimization, research, and online content creation strategies and provide a seven-step action plan so that you can develop the skills necessary to monitor and manage your reputation. You'll learn how to:

• Navigate the new rules of engagement in a transparent world
• Define who you are and develop your personal or corporate brand
• Create positive PR buzz with your online content
• Gain visibility in web search results and harness SEO tools
• Understand the pros and cons of e-mail before you hit "Send"
• Use the latest Internet tracking methods and understand how information spreads online
• Apply solid strategies for reputation repair when things go wrong

Best Legal Website of 2008 Competition

Recent winners of the Best Legal Website Competition

2007: carbonhouse, inc. for Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice 2006: Thomson-FindLaw for Yanowitch Law, P.A. 2005: Frost Brown Todd LLC 2004: Saturno Design LLC for Pierce Atwood - Attorneys at Law 2003: Pepper Hamilton LLP 2002: Lane Powell Spears Lubersky LLP

The Web Marketing Association announces the call for entries for its 12th annual international WebAward Competition for websites. The Association will once again name the Best Legal Website of 2008.

The WebAwards is "the standards-defining competition that sets benchmarks for 96 industries," including legal web sites, based on the seven criteria of a successful website. The deadline for legal websites to enter to be judged is May 31, 2008.

Best websites are selected by judges who review the entered websites using the seven criteria below:

• Design
• Ease of use
• Copywriting
• Interactivity
• Use of technology
• Innovation
• Content

Competition guidelines and entry form at the WebAwards 2008 site. [JH]

Trademark Metadata Can Violate Lanham Act When Used By Competitors

Mark Giangrande (DePaul), editor of Tech Law Prof Blog reports:

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a company who uses meta-tags of their competitor's trademarks in their web site violates the Lanham Act.  The case is North American Medical Corp. v. Axiom Worldwide, Inc., ___F.3d___, 2008 WL 918411 (CA 11, April 7, 2008).  The case involves multiple issues, including false claims Axiom allegedly made about North American Medical products.  The use of trademarks, however, is the more interesting issue.  The District Court found that Axiom's use of North American Medical trademarks as meta-tags violated 15 USC §1114(1)(a) by using them "in commerce" and causing a likelihood of confusion.

Read more about it on Tech Law Prof Blog. Here's the text of the opinion (pdf). My initial reaction: people are still using metadata! [JH}

What Can You (Legally) Take From the Web?

Interesting post from IEEE Spectrum describing how copyright applies to bloggers and webmasters. Check it out! [RJ]

Student Speech Rights in the Digital Age

In Student Speech Rights in the Digital Age (SSRN) Mary-Rose Papandrea (Boston College Law School) takes a close look at all of the various justifications for limiting juvenile speech rights and concludes that none of them supports granting schools broad authority to limiting student speech in the digital media, even with respect to violent or harassing expression. She argues the tests that most courts and commentators have applied to determine whether student speech falls within a school's authority to act grant schools far too much authority to restrict juvenile speech rights in general. Papandrea's article concludes the primary approach that schools should take to most digital speech is not to punish or restrict such expression, but instead to educate their students about how to use digital media responsibly. [JH]

Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2008 Starts Today

The four-day Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2008 starts today [website]. Check out the Annotated Schedule of Programs and the offical Web 2.0 Expo Blog. Information Week will be providing on-going coverage of the event here. Follow news and blog coverage: Google News Search | Google Blog Search [JH]

Feedback Sought on Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers

W3C's Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group has released a stable version of its Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers, and has sent an invitation to the community to share reports of browser support and other feedback on the test itself.

Check out Web Worker Daily for a survey of mobile web browsers featured on various smartphones. [JH]

Niche Social Networks Gaining Traction

Check out MySpace, Facebook: Big Not Always Better on CNN. The story notes that huge social-networking sites are losing people to smaller, specialized sites.

Professor Kagan observes on his A Little Class on the Internet blog:

An intriguing question is whether the next phase in social networking will be a migration to micro-interest sites. For now, FB and MS are permitting these niche sites to build widgets that integrate into the larger sites, so that users can keep tabs on all their social networks from a single location. But will that be enough as FB and MS users realize that the high-quality information and truly devoted hobbyists/interestists on niche sites exceed the lowest-common-denominator status that comes with having a truly immense user base?

Seems inevitable to me. [JH]

Undercover GAO Investigators Purchase Sensitive and Stolen US Military Items on eBay and Craigslist

On April 10, 2008, the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform investigated the sale of sensitive, in-demand military technologies and supplies on Internet sites such as eBay and Craigslist. Specifically, the Subcommittee heard the results of an undercover Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation. The GAO team showed the Subcommittee the items they were able to purchase online and explained how the deals were consummated. Here's the GAO report (pdf).

The purchased items include:

• Two F-14 fighter jet components. The United States has retired its fleet of F-14s. Only Iran is currently using them.
• Night vision goggles specially made to military specifications that allow the user to identify U.S. troops at night.
• Nuclear and biological chemical gear that could be reversed engineered to develop countermeasures
• Body armor plates currently used by troops in Afghanistan and Iraq

Prepared statements from Tod Cohen, Vice President, Government Relations, eBay Inc., Jim Buckmaster, CEO, Craigslist.org plus others are available on the hearings webpage. [JH]

OMB Progress Report on E-Government Act Implementation

From the White House: "This is OMB’s fifth annual progress report on implementation of the E-Government Act of 2002 (Pub. L. No. 107-347; Dec. 17, 2002) (the “E-Government Act”) as required by 44 USC 3606. This report describes activities completed in fiscal year (FY) 2007, and is among a series of reports produced by OMB to describe the Administration’s use of E-Government principles to improve government performance and the delivery of information and services to the public."  [RJ]

Just Released, Managing Online Forums

Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards
by Patrick O'Keefe

List Price: $24.00
Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: AMACOM (April 10, 2008)
ISBN-10: 081440197X
ISBN-13: 978-0814401972 

Book Description (from the book's website): In this book, Patrick O’Keefe, owner of the iFroggy Network, shares his experiences in a straight forward, honest fashion and shows readers how to make the right decisions about every aspect of their forums, including:

• Creating an organizational structure
• Designing and launching their community
• Deciding on user options like avatars and private messaging
• Promoting and attracting members
• Utilizing technology to their benefit
• Developing and enforcing guidelines
• Choosing and managing moderators
• Shutting down users who disrupt and harm the community
• Involving their users and keeping the site interesting and inviting
• Generating revenue

What is talked about this book is not hypothetical - it consists of in use, battle-tested theories and solutions, making it so that when you must deal with these issues on your forums, you will be better equipped. Real life examples are cited throughout, including the actual user guidelines, staff member guidelines and more, from real communities.

Breakthrough of the Podcast Authors

Check out Mike Musgrove's Washington Post article about the growth of book podcasting. He reviews developments in mainstream book publishing and mentions obtaining some free, downloadable books from Podiobooks, a service new to me. See also the company's blog, Podiobooker. [JH]

New Book on the Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering

Access Denied provides the definitive analysis of government justifications for denying their own people access to some information and also documents global Internet filtering practices on a country-by-country basis. This is timely and important. --Jonathan Aronson, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California

Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering
Edited by by Ronald J. Deibert, John G. Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski & Jonathan Zittrain.

List Price: $20.00
Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press (February 29, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0262541963
ISBN-13: 978-0262541961

Product Description: Many countries around the world block or filter Internet content, denying access to information--often about politics, but also relating to sexuality, culture, or religion--that they deem too sensitive for ordinary citizens. Access Denied documents and analyzes Internet filtering practices in over three dozen countries, offering the first rigorously conducted study of this accelerating trend.

Internet filtering takes place in at least forty states worldwide including many countries in Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. Related Internet content control mechanisms are also in place in Canada, the United States and a cluster of countries in Europe. Drawing on a just-completed survey of global Internet filtering undertaken by the OpenNet Initiative (a collaboration of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, and the University of Cambridge) and relying on work by regional experts and an extensive network of researchers, Access Denied examines the political, legal, social, and cultural contexts of Internet filtering in these states from a variety of perspectives. Chapters discuss the mechanisms and politics of Internet filtering, the strengths and limitations of the technology that powers it, the relevance of international law, ethical considerations for corporations that supply states with the tools for blocking and filtering, and the implications of Internet filtering for activist communities that increasingly rely on Internet technologies for communicating their missions.

Reports on Internet content regulation in forty different countries follow, with each country profile outlining the types of content blocked by category and documenting key findings.

Contributors: Ross Anderson, Malcolm Birdling, Ronald Deibert, Robert Faris, Vesselina Haralampieva, Steven Murdoch, Helmi Noman, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, Mary Rundle, Nart Villeneuve, Stephanie Wang, and Jonathan Zittrain

Pay-Per-View Webcasts of Funeral Services

And now for something a bit offbeat...

Wesley Music is webcasting funeral services in Britain so mourners can pay their last prespects via the Internet. The pay-per-viewer cost is about $150. Story on MSNBC. Hat tip to Wills, Trusts & Estates Prof Blog. [JH]