Are Recession's Roots in September 2001?

This blog is nominally devoted to IP and Technology law, but anyone who knows me well has had to put up with my frequent rants over the increasingly-intrusive nature of our government’s efforts to secure our country against future attacks of the type we endured in September 2001.

My views are that much of what passes for security is nonsense, or “security theater.” (Yes, I read and like much of what Bruce Schneier has to say on security measures, but I’m not going to presume that he would agree with anything I might do with that information.) Efforts such as random bag checks and heavily-armored patrols in subways, virtual strip-searching and shoe-scanning by TSA personnel in airports, attempted bans on photographing plainly-visible infrastructure such as bridges and trains, and mass information capture and data mining by the NSA do little to help make us more secure, but much to erode our individual Constitutional rights.

One thing I understand is that many of these efforts have been justified as evils that are necessary in our continuing War on Terror. I also understand that many, many people are satisfied with that explanation, and are willing to part with a little bit of their liberty in exchange for feeling a little bit safer. That willingness implies as well that many, many people trust our government to do the right thing, and not to abuse its power even as it intrudes further into our personal lives. For more that seven years, people have been conditioned to leave much of their personal security, and some of their personal rights, freedom, and information, in our government’s hands.

Two columns in today’s New York Times about our current economic crisis have caused me to wonder whether the government’s increasingly-intrusive security measures on behalf of the War on Terror may have contributed to the crisis of confidence that a number of commentators seem to believe is at the root of this recession.

Now I am not an economist, and frankly am a bit mystified (if not terrified) at the strongly-held, often completely divergent solutions economists of differing ideological stripes are advocating as “the way” to pull us out of this recession. But if there is a common theme that runs through any of the pieces I’ve read, it’s that nothing positive is going to happen until consumers begin to believe in whatever solution is implemented, open their wallets, and begin spending again.

In “The Worst-Case Scenario,” David Brooks looks back from a hypothetical future and analyzes what made the recovery efforts fail:

“The crisis was labeled an economic crisis, but it was really a psychological crisis. . . . Essentially, Americans had migrated from one society to another – from a society of high trust to a society of low trust, from a society of optimisim to a society of foreboding, from a society in which certain financial habits applied to a society in which they did not.”

Did that social migration begin with the September 2001 attacks? Just look at how we reacted: after a brief period of collective patriotism, mourning, and general flailing about, we settled in to a steady state of government-sponsored security warnings, threat-levels, illegal surveillance, and all manner of terror-driven searches and seizures. We started and have continued two wars, and have interred and detained thousands of people in the furtherance of the War on Terror. Against all of that, how could we not have moved from a “society of high trust to a society of low trust,” and become a “society of foreboding?”

Our government has repeatedly justified its efforts as necessary, if perhaps unpleasant, if we wanted to defeat our widely-dispersed enemies and assure our national security. We were asked to trust that the little intrusions as well as major incursions were in our collective self-interest. And the economy? Well, that was the least of our worries, of course. The economy was humming along more or less nicely, and could pretty much take care of itself. Those pesky terrorists, on the other hand . . . that’s where our attention should be focused.

So while we were waging this War on Terror, the economy didn’t take care of itself. In fact, it turned out that nobody had really been minding the store, and here we are scrambling. Who could blame consumers for their current lack of trust? Consumers had been set up.

Moving across the Times’s editorial page, Paul Krugman in “Failure to Rise” says that he has “a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach – a feeling that America just isn’t rising to the greatest economic challenge in 70 years. The best may not lack conviction, but they seem willing to settle for half-measures. And the worst are, as ever, full of passionate intensity, oblivious to the grotesque failure of their doctrine in practice.”

Layer that statement over the way that we responded following the September 2001 attacks. We didn’t rise to that challenge either. Instead of embracing the principles of freedom and liberty that built this country and made it great, we showed a lack of conviction. We chose safety and security over our rights and liberties; we settled for the illusion of protection as a band-aid applied over the government-induced wound of a potential future terror attack. We forgot that with freedom comes responsibility and risk; we were unwilling to assume the risk, and preferred instead to yield our freedom. We settled, and got used to doing so. And we may be doing so again.

LegalTech Panel: Adopting Web 2.0 Capabilities Into Your Web Presence

This was a lively panel consisting of the following:

Maia Benson – Director of Search Enging Marketing, Lexis/Nexis

Roland Goss – Jorden Burt law firm. Reinsurance and arbitration blog.

Brian Green – Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge LLP; An insurance/reinsurance law blog.

Rees Morrison - LawDepartmentManagementblog.com blog

David Gottlieb – Baker Sanders, etc. in Newark. No-fault and CPLR blogs

Roy Mura – Insurance coverage and fraud blog

This was essentially a panel on starting and maintaining a blog. It was well-run, spirited, and informative – even for existing bloggers. Moderator Maia Benson kept the five-person panel on-topic, asking key questions, allowing a reasonable amount of discussion, and moving things along to the next point.

Starting from the beginning, the panel discussed their reasons for blogging and why they selected their particular blogging platform. There are a number of different blogging platforms – Blogger, Wordpress, and MoveableType are several popular ones. For a survey article discussing popular blog platforms, check here.

The panelists each agreed that their blogs consumed more time than they initially thought they would. The general consensus among individual bloggers was that their blogs consumed more than an hour a day on average. Two of the blogs were law firm projects, with teams of attorneys assigned to creating content and editing posts.

The next point was what the panelists considered the value of their blogs to be.

Roland Goss pointed out that the question of value was more properly stated as “value to whom?” His view was that blog value in the firm context can sometimes be a hard sell. Blogs have a connotation to some people as being a loose form of communications. While it is difficult to measure client generations as a result of a blog, his point was that institutional clients are looking for their law firms to provide them value. If you are trying to reach that audience, your blog should target their perceived needs. If you do a good job of identifing your audience, you’ll hit the mark.

In the case of the Jorden Burt firm, when Goss was considering developing a blog, he noted that there did not appear to be a one-stop place for information on reinsurance arbitration. So he built one. In the course of running the blog, analytical tools helped him see that readers were gravitating to law review articles on insurance and reinsurance, so he made that more prominent and easy to find. It helps for people to know that you have timely and deep knowledge in your area.

The next question focused on audience; who is your audience? What value are you trying to give?

Rees Morrison, in a bit of a tangent, made a strong argument on several points: make your header clear; keep your posts “short and sweet;” identify your sources; and back-reference your content. While not strictly responsive to the question, they were good points and are worth keeping in mind.

Brian Green pointed out one dilemma that his firm’s blog faced: whether to write about news developments that affected the client’s industry. He noted that the audience was reading those news posts, so the coverage shifted slightly to include the news. (I will note that Brian and I each work for the same firm, but I have no involvement in the operation of the blog.)

David Gottlieb’s audience consists of attorneys he sees in court. He finds that their feedback is helpful. In addition to legal posts, he includes more personal, perhaps somewhat off-topic posts such as family pictures and workplace commentary – one of his more popular posts was a seating chart showing where the “regulars” tended to sit in one of the courtrooms he frequents. This point echoes one raised in Tuesday’s Twitter panel – to develop a relationship with your readers don’t make your posts completely business. Inject some personality into your blog. (This obviously makes more sense with individually-authored blogs than group or firm efforts, though there is no reason why a firm blog could not include the occasional personal note as well.)

Roy Mura said that he believes that he as several categories of readers, ranging from individual clients to “everyone.”

The next question asked what kinds of feedback or anecdotes the panelists were hearing as a result of the their blogs.

David Gottlieb said that almost everyone who practices in his area reads it, including judges, clerks, and other attorneys. He noted, as a result, that this meant that he had some control over what that audience saw. He warned against using the blog as an advertisement. The goal is to provide value.

Roy Mura could count one discrete matter resulting from his blog.

Roland Goss pointed out that blogs aren’t only about getting new clients. He believes that his firm’s blog provides a lot of value as a cross-selling tool, a good way to show existing clients in other areas what else you can do. The blog is also a good way to increase the knowledge base of your attorney writers – a point that applies both to team-written blogs and single-author efforts.

Rees Morrison pointed out that an active blog is a good resource for creating articles. It becomes easy to put together an article on a particular topic by combinging and editing related blog posts.
The topic then turned to metrics – how the bloggers used various tools to learn more about their audience. Rees Morrison jumped up and ran through a nice set of screens that identified some of the tools he uses to help him with his blogs. These include:

SiteMeter – details re: every visit, can drill down to individual visitor

TypePad – gives some stats for its blogs. Also gives you what search led to view.

Feedburner – tells you how many RSS subscribers you have, how many came directly, how many from searches, how many from another site.

Technorati – how many other blogs are referring to you – find out who is writing about you.

Google Analytics – combines some other data, gives you great info.

Bloglines – helps manage subscribers.

Blogpulse – as a percent of ALL blog posts, what did I account for.

Google Groups – more analytical tools.

Roy Mura said that he uses Feedblitz for subscriptions – a vehicle by which readers can subscribe and get an email summary to new posts. Monday night to Tuesday morning is when most people seem to read.

Maia Benson recommended putting a phone number on your blog because it’s tracked. If someone calls you because of the blog, you’ll know it.

One set of concerns – and an area of polite difference – related to whether blogs should accommodate comments.

Brian Green said that his blog does not allow comments because of concerns regarding attorney-client relationships and inadvertent disclosure of confidential information. In the event a dialog takes place, there is a concern that the give-and-take will lead to an inadvertent attorney-client relationship.

Roland Goss’s firm’s blog also does not accept comments, for same reasons. As a firm-authored blog, he pointed out that not having to deal with comments also helps reduce the time associated with managing the blog.

Roy Mura’s blog originally accepted comments without requiring each comment to be moderated. He said that he thought that comments would be an academic exercise, until a completely unacceptable comment was psoted. He now moderates comments, as do David Gottlieb and Rees Morrison.

This panel provided a great overview of issues related to starting and maintaining blogs. It was an extremely worthwhile presentation, and I’m afraid that this post does not do it justice.

LegalTech Panel: Best Practices for Online Networking

I will keep this short.

The best thing about this panel was its moderator, Bob Ambrogi, who made several polite but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to steer the panelists somewhere in the vicinity of their panel's promised subject matter.

Here is what was promised in the LegalTech brochure:

- Opportunities in online networking for attorneys

- Re-energize the traditional, valuable art of networking with tightened budgets, time and resources

- Growth areas, benefits and challenges of online networking

- Best practices on selecting a network

- Gaining the strategic advantage of an online network

Here is what was delivered:

- Martindale-Hubbell Connected, a "gated community" attorney networking system currently in private beta, with features that are yet to be finalized, is going to be the best way ever for private practice lawyers to network and for in-house counsel to get free information.

- Other kinds of networking - the ones where you aren't in a "gated community," apparently - present all sorts of dangers to lawyers, who might inadvertently disclose confidential client information or create surprise attorney-client relationships as a result of said networking.

I had the "if you can't say anything nice, then don't say anything at all" refrain drilled into me as a child, so I won't post the names of the panelists here.

In sum, the panel was a disappointment.

LegalTech Panel: "Five Things Every Practice Should Know About Web 2.0 Technology"

This was an information-packed session presented by Mary Abraham (lawyer and “knowledge manager”) and Lee Bryant (director at Headshift, London). The focus of this presentation was on tools used within the enterprise.

The presentation began on an ironic note – with a wifi signal freely available, no password codes were available for those hoping to live blog. This was not an auspicious start for the first of a set of three presentations focusing on “Web 2.0 Technology.” That said, once the presentation was underway, passwords were distributed to those who were blogging. That said, I couldn’t get my connection going. Perhaps I digress (but please, in the future give all LegalTech conference attendees a strong, free Wifi signal.)

If this session suffered from anything it was information overload. I was very impressed with both panelists; they kept things moving quickly, and each had a lot of information to share.
Some of the points they made follow.

-- Web 2.0 makes sense in a downturn

The recession provides perfect conditions to move forward with these tools and strategies. We have to demonstrate value quickly; but that doesn’t mean a retreat into existing projects or a failure to start new projects. Adding a “social layer” to existing enterprise tools can rejuvinate old, unloved systems. Existing systems can do the heavy lifting well – the data management. What they don’t do too well is the last mile – connecting the information and the users. The new tools should build on the existing systems.

-- There are several levels of collaboration tools. These were presented in the form of a “social stack”:

-- at the base level, these consist of public feeds and flows; RSS feeds, and email;

-- the next level includes bookmarks and tags that create “signals of relevance” for users to share and comment. Clay Shirkey talks about information overload; bookmarks and tags help users filter information for each other.

-- the third level includes blogs and networks, with items or topics shared within networks or discussed in blogs. This information can come from the bookmarks and tags. Professional bloggers typically self-filter this information; they will take in many news feeds, tagging some of them (for later review, in my experience), and then will blog about a lesser number. (Consider the “old” way of doing this, where someone in the firm would circulate an email with some piece of relevant information).

-- the fourth level involves group collaboration – groups or teams that organize knowledge in wikis and group systems, with features such as reviews and voting. The hard part here is getting things started, getting that first draft down. This is becoming popular, with in-firm wikis being managed within groups or subgroups of firms.

Michael Idinopolous says that it’s best to leave knowledge workers “in the flow” of the information to make it easier for them to share useful information. We shouldn’t workers to step “out of the flow” if we want them to share. Our systems should try to make it easy for people to share, and to see what’s been shared. Asking people to share day-to-day just for the heck of it is not going to work.

-- the fifth level: personal tools allow people to organize their own information by tags, or a portal, or a newsreader (for example).

(I wonder whether the fourth and fifth levels should switch places. It seems to me that group collaboration is some higher order byproduct of the use of Web 2.0 tools, sort of the ultimate goal here, the most focused result of the use of the other tools.)

There are many tools available for this. Reading, writing, collaborating, messaging, sharing, and some all-in-one.

-- How to make the business case.

The fact that the tools are relatively cheap and easy to roll out make it easier to sell. They can replace expensive systems (for example, the typical “intranet project” or CRM tool can sometimes be replaced with cheaper, more effective tools).

The key is to select the right tools – many of which are open source. Mallesons in Sydney is an example of a firm that has done very interesting things using social networking tools. There were failures, but they used cheap tools, rolled them out quickly, integrated user feedback, and worked fast.

-- Some examples are as follows:

-- Internal wikis allow multiple users to view, comment, and modify the same document: using something called “Confluences” – seeing hundreds of edits a day to wikis, 1000 page views.

-- Social tools are not about personal blogs, what you’ve had for lunch, etc. Often a group blog is adopted. Freshfields has adopted groups of wikis; only certain people have permission to edit. Trusted editors are a premise behind much social software. You have to trust people to act in a responsible manner. Many existing systems are built on a platform of distrust.

Lawyers don’t seem to be so worried about sharing knowledge; it’s more like projecting ego. It does depend on the context – internal sharing is going to see much more sharing than external.

There was additional discussion of some of the tools available to help implement these projects. Frankly, this moved a bit quickly for my notes. Suffice to say there are more than a few layers of collaboration tools available to those seeking to increase the level of internal collaboration.
This was an excellent session, with more information presented than your humble narrator was able to repeat. My takeaway point: it is past time to begin thinking about ways to manage information flow. The technology is now at the point where it is feasible to start implementing some of those “gee, wouldn’t it be nice if . . .” projects from the past.

LegalTech Panel Report: "What is Twitter and How Can I Use It?"

I attended an excellent LegalTech panel discussion yesterday titled “What is Twitter and How Can I Use it?” Bob Ambrogi introduced the panel (each introduction done in 140 characters or less), which consisted of Kevin O’Keefe (@kevinokeefe), Matthew W. Homann (@matthoman), Chris Winfield (@chriswinfield), and Monica Bay (@commonscold).

Monica, who is the editor-in-chief of Law Technology News, moderated the panel and opened by noting that she was a very reluctant social networker who finally gave up (particularly when she took the post at Law Technology News), and was instantly hooked. She is actively participating on a number of social networking sites, and has three Twitter accounts. She offered an example of using Twitter to troll for story pitches for her publication, and was impressed with how quickly she received substantive proposals from contributors.

Chris Winfield, president of 10e20, a social media marketing consultancy, spoke next. He provided a thorough overview of what Twitter is, starting with the signup page and moving through the various user features that the basic Twitter site offers.

He noted that Twitter is essentially a communications tool – it’s about talking and communicating. I think that this is a great point that is sometimes lost in the back-and-forth questioning of what Twitter is. Just as the telephone can be used to deliver messages ranging from the most trivial to the most important, so can Twitter. It’s up to the user to decide whether and how to use Twitter.

Chris highlighted Twitter’s search function – which has improved over the past couple of months – to highlight how flexible it is. Users can search for specific terms within tweets, or for specific user names.

As a demonstration of Twitter’s utility, Chris showed how he used it to help him create his presentation. A few days before the panel discussion, he tweeted three questions for the presentation and in short order received 135 responses, saving him a lot of work. The questions, and my favorite responses, follow:

- How would you explain Twitter in 140 characters or less? “A social conversation tool that allows people to connect within communities.”

- What is your MUST have Twitter tool? Answers ranged, but included the search feature; Tweetdeck; the Twitterfon application for iPhone; and EasyTweets.

- How could a lawyer or someone in the legal field use Twitter effectively? Answers included using it for education; to answer client or potential client questions; for personal branding; to help with relationship building; to interact with a community; to make connections, to keep up with people in a particular field or industry; to gain insight by using polls.

Matt Homann is the founder of LexThink LLC and writes the [non]billable hour blog. His experience with Twitter is similar to mine, in that he had been on Twitter for a couple of years, but only started using it regularly during last 6 months. He made the following excellent points about the Twitter tool:

- Twitter is easy to learn to use.

- It can be hard to understand why Twitter should be used– why do I want to follow people, why would they follow me?

- Twitter is a “kool-aid technology;” once you get it, you can’t stop telling other people about it.

- Twitter’s greatest value comes from knowing what people are thinking (not what they’re doing). It’s a form of “instant anthropology,” allowing you to plug in to what people are discussing all over the world. He highlighted the “Trending Topics” posted on the Twitter search page as an indication of what Twitter users were talking about at any given point in time. This can provide Twitter users with faster news, particularly about breaking stories.

- To effectively use Twitter in a work context, it’s important to be yourself. Use your name, or your company’s name, if you want to build relationships.

- If you fear that Twitter will interfere with your ability to get your work done, you’re not afraid of Twitter, you’re afraid of doing your work. He made an excellent point that you don’t have to use Twitter all the time, but can “dip in” to the Twitter “stream” whenever you have the time to do so. This makes most sense when you use enhanced search tools such as those available on Tweetdeck that allow you to view multiple search results on one screen.

- To use Twitter most effectively, you should integrate it with you phone. This doesn’t necessarily mean tweeting from your phone; it means bridging the gap between communicating with people via Twitter and then picking up the phone and calling them in person. This is the best way to use Twitter to build client and personal relationships. The successful Twitter user is one who turn Twitter friends into real-life friends.

- Matt described Twitter as being like a networking meeting on steroids – though the conversation’s better and there’s a lot fewer insurance salesmen in the room. From my perspective, the unfiltered feeds can sometimes resemble an Internet chat room, with multiple cross-conversations going on simultaneously. This is why effective use of search tools is so important.

- Finally, Matt noted that the number of followers you have is far less important than the number of followers you deserve. You should always work to deserve more, by contributing to the conversation and building your community.

Kevin O’Keefe is the CEO of LexBlog, Inc., and the author of Real Lawyers Have Blogs. His points were as follows:

- From a big picture perspective, Twitter is a great tool, but sometimes dangerous.

- Kevin provided a number of examples of ways that he could trace new business to his use of Twitter. What I liked about these examples is that they each involved a personal tweet – a comment about a ball game, or a poll-type question about whether a golfer was going to make a putt – that connected with a client or potential client and generated a follow-up. The takeaway from this – and it was a point that Matt raised as well – is that at least some of your tweets should reflect your personality.

- Kevin firmly believes that social media, such as Twitter, is more important than maximizing the hits on your blog or website. Twitter is a tool that allows your message to spread not only to those who follow you directly, but virally as well. People who re-tweet messages help spread your word beyond your immediate network.

- Twitter is not a kids’ tool; its demographics are strong. There are a lot of well-educated, forward-thinking adults using Twitter.

- In Kevin’s personal experience, nothing has had the impact on his company LexBlog quite like Twitter. He’s seen this happen just in past six months. He quoted Guy Kawasaki: Twitter is the single biggest branding tool since TV. Kevin is convinced that Twitter is here to stay.

- He suggests using Twitter to discover people you’d like to get to know and would like to have a conversation with.

- Kevin tweets things that his target audience is interested in; he tries to make his tweets relevant to his target audience, and includes some personal items (within reason).

- He pointed out how his company is helping law firms use Twitter to develop micro-blogging site pages that show what firm lawyers are doing or have to say on a particular topic.

There were a number of questions after the presentations; one that stuck with me was about fair use copyright issues. Presumably this relates to re-tweeting of tweets. My immediate take on this is that one of the things you consent to when you submit a tweet via Twitter is to the re-tweeting of that tweet. While I could see there being an issue if someone were to aggregate multiple tweets in a book or article. I’ve commented on this in the blog post context elsewhere.

Takeaway points:

1. Take advantage of Twitter's search features, particularly those available on Tweetdeck, to receive up-to-date news and information on topics that matter to you from people all over the world.

2. Contribute some of your personality to your tweets. Don't be a corporate drone all the time; occasionally reveal your interests and show that you are a real person.

3. Twitter relationships are a start. It's up to you to take them to the next level.

Good Discussion on Invention and Education

Woody Norris is a serial inventor. In this TED Talk, he discusses one of his recent inventions -- an "acoustic cannon" -- as well as his thoughts on the connection between invention and education.



TED is a great source of interesting discussions on all sorts of topics. It's fun to listen to Norris take the invention at the core of his talk and riff on its many potential applications.

Martindale-Hubbell - Big Plans for Lawyer Ratings?

A minor Internet kerfluffle has arisen over the news that Martindale-Hubbell has made redundent, as our friends in the UK say, its staff of "Peer Review Ratings" specialists. The news inspired two branches of discussion: (a) whether M-H was abandoning attorney ratings, and (b) whether M-H remains relevant in the face of recent Internet-based upstarts such as LinkedIn, FindLaw, Avvo, and the like.

M-H has attempted to address both concerns in this blog post, which promises "Big Plans for Martindale-Hubbell Ratings." While admitting, somewhat ambiguously, that its new plans included "a change in the role and responsibilities of the ratings specialists" (which I suppose is one way of describing being laid off -- "I heard you got laid off." "No, my role and responsibilities have changed. I now have no role and no responsibilities.") the post goes on to promise that a changed ratings system is in the works.

I have to join those who have critiqued M-H's post for its unfettered use of marketing jargon-speak to convey little substance about what those changes are and how they will make the M-H service more relevant than other, competing (not to mention free) services. Kevin O'Keefe does a nice job of dissecting the M-H post, and of highlighting its Martin Lukes-like use of marketing-speak to convey more image than substance.

(As an aside, I do miss Martin Lukes terribly. I highly recommend the book he "co-authored" with the Financial Times's Lucy Kellaway, "Who Moved My Blackberry?" for a funny take on slogan-driven management trends.)

That said, while I'm sure that M-H has high hopes for whatever form its ratings system is going to take -- and I wish whoever its new "VP/ Product Champion of Ratings" is all the best -- it will be a serious challenge for M-H to develop a system that is effective, accurate, useful, and worth using.

3 Geeks "Must Read" Blog Posts

Thanks to the "3 Geeks and a Law Blog" blog for including an "Infringing Actions" post among its exclusive list of 173 "must read" blog posts of the past year (or so -- some dip back in to 2007).

Personal pride aside, this is a really good way to sample some blogs that you may not be following.

Report from NYU's ITP Winter Show

I paid a visit to NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program's Winter show last night, and as usual was blown away by the hard work and creativity of many of the projects. The level of sophistication seems to increase from show to show. The folks at ITP provided a handy map to the show that categorized the projects into 11 different general subject areas (sustainable, assistive technology, games, etc.). Very helpful. I took a few short videos of some of the projects. For more, go to the Make Blog's more comprehensive post.

This project is called "Magic Table," by Seung Jun Lee. The screen interacts visually and musically to objects that are passed or placed in front of a sensor. I think this would also make a great video wall installation in some public place.



TwiTerra, by Steven Lehrburger, tracks "re-tweets" -- re-transmissions of Twitter messages -- by projecting the approximate location of messages as they are forwarded from one person to another around the world.



Matt Parker's "Face of the Nation" did a nice job of morphing all of the US presidents and the current president-elect into a looped video that's fun to watch.



"Ballet Dancer," by Ramona Pringle and Xue Hou, projects moving images of a ballet dancer against floating layers of gauze and tulle. It reminded me a bit of something a Disney Imagineer would do.



There were two projects that were similar in that they used a library of captured images to create a moving image, kind of like what Chuck Close is known for doing in some of his portraits. One of these is called "membrain," by Yasser Ansari, Peter Horvath, and Bruno Kruse. A video of membrain appears below. The other is "Video Mosaic" by Meredith Hasson. Here is a short video of membrain:



The show runs again tonight, December 18, from 5 to 9 p.m. There will be another one in the spring.

List of Law and Tech Lists

For you "top 10" junkies, here is a nice compendium of links to law- and technology-related "top" lists, care of the 3 Geeks and a Law Blog.

A Brief Guide to Obama's Change.gov Site

The incoming Obama administration's Change.gov website is taking advantage of a number of standard Internet tools, using them for the first time in such a high-profile way to give citizens a sense that they are participating in the structure of the new administration. I say "give citizens a sense" because it remains to be seen how the citizen feedback will be used and what impact us "ordinary folks" will have on the new administration's policies and procedures.

Here are the tools that strike me as particularly worth talking about:

1. Most of the site ("except where otherwise noted") is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, which permits users to share and adapt the material provided they attribute it to Change.gov. This is probably the highest-profile use of a Creative Commons license to date.

2. A periodically-active "Open for Questions" tool allows individuals to post questions that they would like the transition team to answer. Users can vote on submitted questions, in a Digg-like fashion, a feature that racked up more than 600,000 votes in OfQs first round. The team has promised to respond to some of the "most popular" questions.

The OfQ tool also allows users to "Flag as inappropriate" any question, presumably relying on people's common sense to flag profane or off-topic issues. It appears, however, that the tool was also used to bury questions that were merely "uncomfortable," in particular those that included the name "Blagojevich." It will be interesting to see whether the next iteration of OfQ modifies the "flag" feature.

3. "Your Seat at the Table" promises to publish all materials submitted to the transition team by interested third parties (read "special-interest groups"), which in addition to opening up the lobbying process a bit has probably resulted in a drastic reduction in the volume of written material submitted to this transition team versus what was submitted to previous transition teams. Meetings between interest groups and the transition team are also noted. At the time of this blog entry, the list of submissions runs 22 screen-pages.

Users can both comment on submissions and submit their own documents to be considered in connection with each submission. The entries are searchable, which is helpful given that they appear to be organized chronologically.

4. "Join the Discussion" periodically posts short videos that describe issues, then encourages users to comment. A recent discussion topic was "How is the current economic crisis affecting you?" After comments are received (3,572 in this case) the topic is closed, and the transition team responds.

5. Health care has been identified as an issue of particular concern, because Change.gov gives individuals an opportunity to sign up to host local discussions on health care issues between December 15 and 30. The selected moderators will receive a "a special moderator kit that will give you everything you need to get the discussion going. And Senator Tom Daschle, the leader of the Transition's Health Policy Team, will even choose some discussions to attend in person."

The site also has the usual sort of pages: a blog, a pressroom, an agenda page, a page that encourages people to share their stories and hopes, and a lot more.

The Internet makes this the easiest time in history for individuals to connect with their leaders. It's great to see the new leadership team taking advantage of these tools. The risk, of course, is that peoples' already-high expectations will be heightened even further by this process, and there will be an unpleasant backlash when compromises have to be made for the sake of politics.

A Tale of Connectivity

We live in an incredibly connected age. This was driven home to me during this past week's arocities in Mumbai. As the world learned of much of the early story from Twitter users (see post below), the news media slowly geared up their coverage, much of which amounted to the usual video loops coupled with news anchors mouthing the same script over and over again. This tended to reduce a series of tragic events that effected tens of millions of people in a very deep and intense way to a collection of banal sound bites and video clips.

Occasionally, something new would be added to the mix. A broadcast telephone interview with a foreigner trapped in one of the beseiged hotels piqued my interest, so I "Googled" (I know, it's a trademark not a verb) the man, who happened to be an attorney, and up popped his law firm profile page. I did this partly out of curiousity, but partly because I was thinking of sending him an email.

This was someone I had never met. We shared both a profession and an interest in intellectual property law, but that was about it. Why would I send him an email, and just as important from my perspective, why would he want to receive it?

I tried to put myself in his shoes. If I were barricaded in a hotel room, trapped in a hotel that had been overtaken by terrorists, thousands of miles from home or family, would I appreciate receiving words of encouragement from strangers? That sealed it. I composed a short email introducing myself that I thought conveyed some encouraging wishes, and hit "send."

Ten minutes later, a reply. Short, but polite, thanking me for my note and "kind thoughts." From the Blackberry of a man barricaded in a beseiged hotel in Mumbai, to my laptop in a tourist hotel in Sarasota, Florida, a connection. We exchanged several messages over the next two days, my last to him a note of congratulations on his release and wishes for a safe trip home, and his again-polite response of thanks.

What I found even more heartening was to learn that I was far from the only person who felt compelled to reach out to this man. In a post-release interview, he said that he had received thousands of messages from around the world during the days he was barricaded in his room. The interview gave me the distinct impression that those emails provided him with, if not peace of mind, at least a welcome distraction during his days of captivity.

I often hear people complain that the Internet helps to create islands of individuals who communicate with each other via texts, tweets, emails, and blog posts, and that this is diminishing the capacity for real "human" connection. I agree that it can become easy to use electronic communication as a way of avoiding more personal forms of interaction. On the other hand, it can also provide a new avenue for communicating with people in helpful and meaningful ways. It is our responsibility to be open to those opportunities and make the most of them.

Twitter Comes of Age With Mumbai Attacks

The still-developing terrorist atrocity in Mumbai has seen the communications tool Twitter emerge as means for participants, witnesses, and the rest of the world to report on and react to a breaking news situation in a new and useful way. Reports from the ground in Mumbai via Twitter have been way ahead of both the traditional media -- newspapers and television stations -- as well as even the new media in reporting on what is happening there.

Twitter allows anyone with a cell phone or Internet connection to broadcast news to an audience -- sometimes an audience of dozens, but for some Twitterers an audience of thousands. Each Twitter account member can forward messages, which can multiply in a cascading effect the impact of important messages.

I took note of Twitter some time ago, but dismissed its utility for anybody other than the critically narcissistic. Fortunately, others were more creative, and have managed to develop Twitter as an effective means to network and communicate.

In the last month we've seen debates about how we can use Twitter as a marketing and network-development tool. Last week those of us who follow Twitter were talking about Shaquille O'Neal using Twitter to reach his fan base. Next week we'll be discussing how Twitter can change the way people learn of breaking and changing news stories.

The issues with citizen journalism -- accuracy and credibility -- are magnified when that journalism is filtered through a 140-character-limited Twitter post. It will be interesting to see how mainstream journalism adapts to the Twitter challenge.

For more on Twitter, see here.

Update: 15 minutes after I submitted this post, a number of Twitter feeds reported that Indian government officials have asked that the Twitter page for Mumbai be shut down, and that people stop submitting Twitter feeds about the emerging situation. Is this an attempt to manage the situation, or control the dissemination of information? Or perhaps a bit of both? (Or likely just a rumor, though the BBC picked it up and ran with it for some hours.)

NYU's ITP Winter Show Dec. 17-18

Put this in your calendar; the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program Winter Show is scheduled for December 17 and 18, 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at 721 Broadway, 4th Floor, South Elevators, here in NYC. I try to make ITP's winter and spring shows, and love seeing all the intelligent, creative projects brought to life. More info.

(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding?

The Charter for Compassion may seem a little off-topic for this blog, but we all could use a little bit of love these days. It's a project that is attempting to build bridges among religions and cultures based on a common foundation: the Golden Rule, variants of which exist in all religions as well as in almost every nook and cranny of human society.

Conceived by Karen Armstrong, an authority on comparative religions, the idea won the TEDPrize, awarded by TED Conferences. The TEDblog has several posts on the project, including one that embeds a video that is being translated and captioned by volunteers using the dotSUB platform.

TED is a wonderful source for short (generally under 20 minute) videos featuring interesting talks by fascinating speakers that I download to my Blackberry for train viewing. And I've done some work with the folks at dotSUB; they have developed a great tool for translating and captioning video content over the Internet.

Vote -- Even if They Say You Can't

Wired has a useful how-to on casting a provisional ballot, which is what you should do if you (a) are registered to vote, (b) are in the correct polling place, and (c) are told that you are not on the registered voters' list.

So go vote, already!

Lawyers Doing Interesting Non-law Things

From Wired comes a story about a Merrillville, Indiana attorney named James Hough who built his own old-style motorized bicycle from scratch. He cleverly dubbed it the "Houghmade Cycle Works 71," and it is a gorgeous piece of work.



A few weeks ago, the Lexington (KY) Herald-Leader featured a story about Charlie Kratzer, an associate general counsel at Lexmark, who had decorated the walls of his basement rec room using Sharpies. The results are nothing short of amazing. (Go to the story for a panorama view.)

Colorful Gang Nicknames

Some years ago, John Hodgman, the guy who plays the "PC" character in those cheeky "PC versus Mac" commercials, came out with a song titled "700 Hoboes," in which he recited to appropriately bluegrassy background music the names of, well, 700 hoboes. (You can learn more about that worthy endeavor here.)

It seems to me you could something similar with gang or mob nicknames. Take the ones listed in the Mongols indictment (see post below):

Doc
Lil Rubes
Largo
Chiques
Listo
Bengal
Lars
Bumper
Rascal
Hank
Big Joe
Monster
Bouncer
Chente
Al the Suit
Mandog
Stamper
Peligroso
Reaper
Wolf
Scorpio
Risky
L.A. Bull
Solo
Negro
Wicked
Secret
Target
White Boy Jon
Kiko
Big Dog
Bullet
Steaky
Villain
Monk
Grumpy
Socks
Kermit
Speedy
Radone
Yo-Yo
Face
Mouth
Wapo
Suicide
Swifty
Spider
Dago Bull
Sick Boy
House
Serial Sam
Moreno
Danger
Punk Rock
Weto
Violent Ed
Danger (again)
Leatherface

Okay, I may be a bit naive in these matters, but it seems to me that if I was engaged in any type of nefarious activity whatsoever, I would work darn hard to make sure I wasn't called something like "Serial Sam," "Sick Boy," or "Violent Ed," on the one hand, and "Kermit," "Socks," "Grumpy," or "Rascal" on the other.