Steve Matthews has done it again. As announced today on his Vancouver Law Librarian Blog, he’s just created LegalPubs.ca, a website/feed that aggregates Canadian legal publisher RSS feeds for a one-stop collection development shop. Another great project, Steve – way to go!
That’s the question I’m collecting responses to for the 3rd LTAIG Snapshot Survey.
Help me out by taking the survey!
The results of the survey will be announced in a forthcoming issue of LTAIG News.
Big news for one of my favourite blogs: Precedent: The New Rules of Law and Style. Editor Melissa Kluger announced a few days ago that she’s launching a print magazine by the same name. I’m not a lawyer – but I live with one, and work with them all day long, so I’m pretty excited about this news.
Precedent – the blog – has saved me countless times with its Wednesday Roundup – a summary of the Globe & Mail and National Post law pages. And La Fashionista is, as I’ve mentioned before, one of my favourite things about Fridays. Needless to say, I’m sure the magazine will rock, too.
But Precedent isn’t the only new magazine on the block. CLB Media has just announced their new offering, Associates, which targets a similar demographic. It’ll be interesting to see how the two new mags compare.
Another one to watch is the National Post’s relatively new Legal Post blog, called Legal Post Docket. There’s some good stuff on there already. I think it’s important for us non-lawyers to keep up on at least some of the industry news/gossip. You never know when it might come in handy.
I started a draft of a big rant about facebook a couple of months ago, when I noticed myself becoming increasingly frustrated at how facebook was affecting normal social interaction amidst my group of friends. I’d go to parties, and no one was talking about things that had happened in real life; they were talking about facebook drama. No one ever said “I’ll e-mail you about that”, they said “I’ll facebook you” (and we all know how I feel about the use of nouns as verbs, e.g., Google). I even experienced quasi-discrimination because I wasn’t on facebook (”Can you forward the details of this event to Emma, since she’s anti-facebook?”). Whoa!
My resistance to facebook was based on several ideas. The most important one is that although I would like to be on facebook for the relatively superficial reasons of appearing “with it” to my colleagues and patrons, it would be impossible–so far as I can tell–to exist only professionally on facebook. At the root of my concerns there is the fact that I’d like to maintain some distance between my personal and professional lives.
I was also uneasy at how exhibitionist in nature facebook is: like any social network, people can spend a lot of time tweaking and massaging their online selves in ways that they never could in real life. I’ve been there – I had a livejournal for four years. You’re never completely honest, because in part, your existence there is for others’ interest. Like a lot of online forums–my blog included–this one seems to encourages us to become even more self-absorbed and indulgent than we already are. I know that many people don’t take it anywhere near this extreme, but there are still more people than not who do.
But since then, I’ve had discussions with almost every one of my closest friends, and there is this vague sense of unease and resentment present in each of them. They’re all on facebook, but they don’t necessarily like it. They think it’s fun, but complain about how easily they can lose a couple hours to it, when they were supposed to have been doing something else. Some of my more web-savvy friends think it’s lame because it’s a gated community and defies the democratic spirit of the internet. My friends who don’t work with the internet and web apps in their professional lives think it’s boring already and so last year. Mostly everyone generally regards it as a necessary evil.
Me, I don’t know. I know that objectively, I’m on shaky ground when I criticize it, because I haven’t ever had an account, myself. But I am familiar with how it works, having logged on to others’ accounts and poked around (ooops, where did those two and a half hours go?). Maybe I’m making a big deal out of nothing, since “facebook insanity” seemed to hit Vancouver, thrive, and then peter out in fairly short order. It doesn’t really bother me that much anymore. Use it or don’t. In fact, I’m glad that people have strong opinions about it, because it’s interesting to talk about.
I felt a twinge of validation when I read Stephen Cohen’s post about his decision not to sign up for fb. And then I felt stupid for not feeling confident enough in my own instincts and decisions. It’s tricky. I don’t want to turn into someone who refuses to get with the times–for instance, someone who doesn’t “do” e-mail–but I think this one’s not life or death. I am fortunate to have many good friends and colleagues I enjoy being around, and who for the most part, don’t exclude me because I’m not on facebook. I suspect that this will turn out like Friendster and MySpace (both of which I was a member of). I think the popularity of and problems with social networks sites reflect a cultural shift – one that will be fascinating to watch unfold–regardless of whether I’m on facebook!
An excellent one by Laurel over at 12 Hours of Power.
Don’t worry, mine’s coming, too.
