weblawg.net: Information Society through the Prism of Law Costin on IP, IT, Media, and Business Law

I’ve been critical of the Vancouver Massive Tech Show both here and on Tazzu. I’ve branded it as boring, uninspired, a waste of an afternoon, and anything but either massive or a show.

I’ve been challenged to propose something better, so here I go:

People don’t go to Massive to get names of web designers. They don’t take off their afternoons to compile lists of Internet service providers. And most don’t see Massive as a show of potential clients to whom they can hand their business cards.

People go to shows like this to see what’s new and exciting about the information technology industry. They go to see - and maybe even to try - information society’s potential. They go in the hopes of seeing some ghost of the “wow” of the dot-com-boom era; they go hoping to see that “Web 2.0″ and all the other buzzwords are more than buzzwords.

I’ve compiled a list of 12 concepts and issues that could deliver the wow. I’ve also started thinking fo activities that would engage the guests while presenting some of those concepts and issues - better than could be done by this year’s mechanical bull, Dance Dance Revolution, and Guitar Hero III.

1. Content Management Systems

Forget SEO. Think CMS. SEO is a publicity strategy. CMS is a paradigm. CMS is the idea of separating design and content for a website. It then incorporates the easy maintenance of the content and the modification of the design into the administrative tool. It is modular, scalable, and very flexible. Examples of CMS are Joomla! and Drupal.

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Posted under Business Law, Communications, Information Technology, Privacy, Video Games, Virtual Worlds

I’ve mentioned before (Joomla Demo Camp) that to call oneself an expert or specialist or otherwise claim to consult to a particular industry, one must keep up to date with that industry itself, not only the law, or accountancy, or whatever other profession is one’s link to that industry. In my case, that industry is Information Technology. Keeping up to date with developments in intellectual property and privacy law, et cetera, is not sufficient.

Example: I know a bit about privacy law. There are statutes, such as PIPEDA; there are concerns, such as unmitigated constitutionally guaranteed free enterprise in the United States; and there are workarounds, such as Safe Harbor. A few weeks ago (a week before the Massive Tech Show in Vancouver), I was invited to the pre-launch party for a local company with global ambitions called “Goodboog“. Knowing something about IT allowed me to ask questions at the party about the location of Goodboog’s servers, in order to address potential privacy concerns of their clients. (They are located in Canada, so their customers can rest a little bit on the security of their personal and corporate data.)

See what I’m getting at? Knowing privacy law wasn’t enough. I had to know about servers, virtual hosting, and a bunch of other techno mumbo-jumbo. I don’t know enough to run my own Goodboog-like company, but my techie knowledge is not so feeble either that my eyes glaze over when an IT company discusses what makes it tick. More importantly, I keep my techie knowledge up-to-date so that I know which questions need to be asked. In other words, when the party was over, Michael-James Pennie (Goodboog’s head honcho) and I had a meaningful conversation about the great directions his company is taking.

Fast-forward one week. I went to Massive, billed as Vancouver’s premium exhibition for the IT industry. I hadn’t gone to anything like it since the days of Comdex, and I was optimistic. Comdex had once been a great show, an opportunity not only to pick up demo-CD-ROMs of new software, but to see what trends are emergent in the industry. Everyone used to want to tell you about what they do and what’s going on in IT. They used to volunteer information, and fairly often, it was useful, even educational. Eventually, Comdex collapsed, and Massive arose from its ashes.

I had been away for a long time, mainly due to being in school studying literature and then law. I got back into the tech community through Tazzu, Vancouver’s top online forum for technology and technology business (and much more). Well, the place to stay up to date with the industry is Tazzu, not Massive. Here are some [edited] excerpts from a discussion on Tazzu about Massive (I was not surprised to find that my disappointment was shared):

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Posted under Business Law, Information Technology

Just thought I would cross-post them. They are at Tazzu as well.

For those who don’t remember, I was at the Vancouver Joomla! Demo Camp last month, and posted directly from there.

My notes are in point form. Click below to read them.

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Posted under Communications, Information Technology

I am spending this evening at the Joomla! Demo Camp at The Network Hub in downtown Vancouver.

Joomla! is an open-source content management system (CMS) that makes creating sophisticated websites with dense, extensive, and/or media rich content as easy as posting to a blog on Wordpress. The presented/educator of the evening is Vancouver’s own Joomla! developer and scholar, Rastin Mehr.

I could go on about everything I am learning about using Joomla! and improving costinmedia.com to be media-rich and regularly updated, but here are the points of relevance to the weblawg:

1. Just like everything else I do with Tazzu (this event is sponsored by Tazzu, of which Rastin is one of the owners; the other, Jeannette is in the seat next to me at this event), this is a networking event. Networking within the local business and technology community is not an occasional activity. Tonight I have met, and been met by, members of that community who are not members of Tazzu (or at least not active members whom I’ve met before).
2. This website is about an information economy, and the intersection of information economics with law. Joomla! is about information management and dissemination. So is this community.
3. Keeping up with new information technology is essential to anyone who intends to work in the business and law of information technology. We are dealing here with the integration of multiple technologies and sources of information - the aggregation of multiple data sets (with all of their unique quirks and traits). Can you begin to imagine the legal issues that arise from this much rapid integration? I’m beginning to…

Attending developer forums like this is not only a requisite for developers. It is a requisite for anyone with practical interest in the industry; familiarity with emergent information technologies is as necessary for practitioners and academics in IT Law as reading biotech journals is for patent lawyers.

Incidentally, Joomla! is fantastic. Great presentation, Rastin!

Posted under Business Law, Communications, Information Technology