practicehacker

In “How Twitter is Changing the Face of Media” @Mashable guest poster @SorenG shares his take on how the micro-blog phenom is affecting the 5th Estate. In his estimation the big changes brought about by Twitter are

• Our News – items get around via reTweet – more immediate than RSS or Blogs
• People Power - “news” is no longer just what “they” say it is; now it can be what the mob says it is
• Competition – just because it comes from a given source doesn’t make it news; everyone is a source today
• Personality – news is more pesronal when it is local and affects your narrow interest or interest group
• Interactivity – reaction and interaction could be more important and interesting than the story itself

I should be all for these changes. Strangely however, I’m on the fence. Here’s why. People-powered information sounds great and has the potential to be much better for society than information being in the hands of the newserati. But when it comes to us in an immediate, raw, unfiltered feed, news still should be vetted and processed before it is trusted. The alternative could easily be panic caused by a cascade of misinformation.

Still, that’s the democracy of Twitter – everyone has a chance to succeed and an even bigger chance to fail.

People are getting way too excited about this. It’s just a dashboard!

Another day another buzzword. Today it’s the real-time web - one in a series of recent developments making the web more useful. Now the web

• travels with our handheld devices (mobile web)
• alerts us when something happens (web of things)
• keeps us informed as things happen (real-time web)

Much high-quality writing about this comes from Read/Write/Web, host of the Real-Time Web Summit going on right now. Here are some of the companies they’ve featured thus far:

• identica.ca: open-source twitter client like status.net (formerly laconi.ca)
• superfeedr.com: real-time parsing of RSS feeds
• waze: crowd-sourced traffic tips and directions
• zensify: social network topics via weighted tags
• allvoices: distills input from citizen journalists
• pachube: the www connected to your house, etc. (my addition to the list)

While the legal applications for these developments are virtually limitless, even day-to-day applications are intriguing.  At last my refrigerator can call, IM, or e-mail with a reminder to go grocery shopping; or it may just transmit a pre-programmed list to the store based on the fridge’s lastest contents (adjusted for plans to have the neighbors over). Events that I upload from my phone to my calendar are communicated to the refigerator which can remind me to buy party supplies, etc. The list goes on and on.

Now if you don’t mind I’m going to tell my house to raise the room temperature in time for my arrival this evening.

get on with it already

Has Google’s marketing department been co-opted by Lucas Studios?  I’ve been angling to try Google Wave, the much-touted “next generation” communication platform, for a year. Thus far nothing. This is the longest I’ve waited for a promised payoff since the first Star Wars prequel. And we all remember how that turned out … so make with the Wave already.

Prism Legal‘s Ron Friendman liveblogged (a/k/a real-time blogged) Richard Susskind’s discussion of the future of the profession at ILTA 2009.  Here are the Top 10 disruptive legal technologies on the list:

Document Assembly. Has already changed markets. Providing document assembly online allows for economies of scale. Charges and hours don’t have to relate, making this technology “disruptive.

Always on Connectivity. Lawyers can, and are expected to, be on call 24/7.  Deal with it.

Electronic Legal Marketplace. Your value in the  a frictionless marketplace. Clients can select legal services in the electronic marketplace and even choose to go with non-lawyer alternatives.

E-Learning. Law schools have long been falling down on the job. The Internet can revive learning with realistic simulations.

Online Legal Guidance. Interactive advice systems in the “latent legal market” (see Suskind, The Future of Lawyers). Sounds like self-guided document automation.

Legal Open-Sourcing. A la Wikipedia. Crowd-sourcing communities of interested individuals can result in better answers than throwing the problem to a single individual.  Consumers more likely to talk to friend with similar problems than a lawyer.

Closed Legal Communities. See Legal Onramp. Clients and In House Counsel can pool legal information and check a common knowledge-base before consulting pricey outside counsel.

Workflow and Project Management. High volume, low value work can be made into off-the-rack solutions; making certain lawyers into de facto project managers. Project management requires significant training, but lawyers aren’t getting any. This is a disruptive trend because it highlights the fact that as efficiency increases, billable hours decrease.

Embedded Legal Knowledge. In the future legal knowledge will be built into compliance systems making the contributions of highly-trained counsel less necessary except for unusual assignments.

Online Dispute Resolution. Dispute resolution as a service. Services like CyberSettle versus time spent in Court or in the arbitration system.