Google Group for Blawgers
Aug 31, 2005 Noticias
Via Alex Scoble & also the Law Firm IT blog, a new google group for blawgers is now available! Good stuff.
Rethink(IP)
Aug 31, 2005 Noticias
Rethink(IP) is a product of the collaboration of three intellectual property attorneys from three different firms. J. Matthew Buchanan, Stephen Nipper, and Douglas Sorocco originally met in the legal section of the blogosphere — they each maintain an intellectual property blog of their own — and quickly became friends over countless e-mail messages and chat sessions.
And then there was Techshow.
The trio met in person for the first time at last year’s ABA Techshow. Over drinks and several late night conversations with leading thinkers from the blawgosphere and legal technology industry, they detected similarities in their approach to professional practice and knew they had to do something together.
Nipper is credited with the original pie-in-the sky idea: “Let’s make the practice better.” He uttered those words so simply and so matter-of-factly.
After 2 AM, with drinks in hand, the three bloggers created Rethink(ip) on a cocktail napkin in the hotel bar. They’ve been striving to “make the practice better” ever since.
The guiding principle of the collaboration is the need for a rethinking of the practice of intellectual property law. Each of the rethinkers believes that there is drastic room for improvement in the practice…and that the answer does not lie in an increase in billable hours.
Since its launch in April, the blog has included quick tips for improving day-to-day practice, thoughts on improving client relationships, and personal accounts relating to the general concept of “rethinking” a topic.
Their efforts to improve the practice have recently expanded to include new tools designed to improve the practice. As of last week, subscribers can get news from the Patent and Trademark Office delivered via RSS and e-mail — a service the Office has shown no sign of providing.
The rethinkers see their mission to “make the practice better” as a long and winding road and plan to use the rethink(ip) blog to document the journey.
On Monday, September 5, the Carnival of the Capitalists for business bloggers is being hosted at Rethink(IP), so these rethinkers are encouraging all law bloggers who mean business to submit a post there, as well as to Blawg Review this week.
What’s this you say? Lawyers hosting a business blog carnival? Sure, lawyers are capitalists too. For a couple of great examples, check out the Carnival of the Capitalists at ProfessorBainbridge.com and, more recently, at Law & Entrepreneurship News.
If you want to showcase one of your law blog posts on a subject of interest to business bloggers on Carnival of the Capitalists, just use this handy CotC Submission Page this week, or any week in fact. It’s good for business.
PLEI Launches New BC Legal Website Search Tool
Aug 31, 2005 Noticias
[Link via BCCLS What's New!]
With what looks to be created using Google’s API, “The British Columbia Public Legal Education and Information (PLEI) working group has introduced a specialized Internet search tool to help you find information about the law in British Columbia. You can now access this tool through the LawLINK website. ”
Direct link to the British Columbia Courthouse Library Society
An excellent new tool!
New UBC SLAIS Peer Mentorship Program
Aug 30, 2005 Noticias
From the online flyer:
“The Peer Mentorship program is designed to help MLIS incoming students make a smooth transition to the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies (SLAIS), the University of British Columbia, and the city of Vancouver. Incoming students who wish to participate in the program will be paired with a continuing student based on the availability of volunteers. The peer mentorship program offers a unique opportunity for incoming students to learn more about student life at SLAIS and for all participants to make a valuable social contact in both their personal and professional lives.”
This program is run by the BCLA/CLA Student Chapter, and was started for the incoming class of Fall 2005.
Update 09/20/05: I signed up, and have exchanged a few emails with my new mentee! It’s very exciting to meet new enthusiastic professionals… I’m really looking forward to this!
New Cyberlaw Prof Blog
Aug 30, 2005 Noticias
Picked up via BoleyBlogs…
An interesting new blog by Lydia Loren, called LC CyberBlog! Ok, the name’s killing me - ‘cyber’ is so mid-90’s, and LC … well… some Library culture things are just ingrained. BUT, the blog is pretty impressive, and looks to have a very ‘real’ voice (I also like the limited legalese).
Welcome Lydia, and best of luck!
Time for UK Librarians to jump on the Blog-wagon?
Aug 30, 2005 Noticias
In a new post (full text pdf), Scott Vine is making a similar call to UK law librarians that Connie and I made to our Canadian colleagues back in February. Scott presents a nice overview of blogging and blog styles, and covers some of the benefits to being a blogger.
Connie Crosby, Steven Cohen & Jenny Levine are all quoted in the article. And my favourite quote (via the Shifted Librarian herself):
“If you find yourself writing email rants that you send off to a select group of people, you could be a blogger. If you’re always sending links to people, you could be a blogger. And if you’re at all opinionated about a specific topic, you could be a blogger”.
(don’t insert ‘redneck’ for blogger, it only get’s confusing ;-> )
BTW, the Information Overlord is also a blog I highly recommend (rss feed here).
Library Wikis
Aug 30, 2005 Noticias
Around for a few years now, Wikis are finally being embraced by smaller groups outside of the technology’s biggest success Wikipedia. A couple of important uses that I foresee are Associations or professional group collaboration (in cases below, Library group collaboration), and second, behind-the-firewall corporate content collections (eg. procedure manuals, or best practice collections).
Here are two excellent examples of Library Wikis I’ve come across recently:
Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki
http://www.libsuccess.org/
Introduction: “Welcome to Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. This wiki was created to be a one-stop-shop for great ideas for librarians. All over the world, librarians are developing successful programs and doing innovative things with technology that no one outside of their library knows about. There are lots of great blogs out there sharing information about the profession, but there is no one place where all of this information is collected and organized.”
LISWiki
http://www.liswiki.com/
Introduction: “LISWiki was established to give the library community a chance to explore the usefulness of Wikis. It is not intended to replace or detract from the Wikipedia library and information science articles (or those in the printed LIS encyclopedias for that matter), but exist as a niche encyclopedia covering library-related issues.”
Google Talk is Developer Friendly
Aug 24, 2005 Noticias
As you may have heard, we’ve released our IM/Voip system Google Talk into beta. Talk uses XMPP for its communications protocol, and the team has a document outlining how to use a standard Jabber client to communicate with Google Talk. This makes for a very nice programmatic interface for IM. There are interfaces in multiple languages, including Python, PHP, Java and C#, and the Jabber Software Foundation maintains a healthy list of libraries on their site. We hope you enjoy our developer-friendly Google Talk.
New Adwords PHP Client Libraries
Aug 24, 2005 Noticias
The Adwords team has released a new way to interface with their APIs via PHP. Previously, our client libraries were available in only Java, so we wanted to make it easier for those developers who prefer PHP. You can check out the APIlity code on SourceForge.
