Articles Posted in Social Media

It’s February 1st, and we at Justia are happy to report that in January members of our Onward and Facebook communities not only stopped by to visit us, you also liked us, and sometimes, you really, really liked us.

Our heavy hitter in January on the Onward Blog in terms of visits was Courtney’s post on the Online Blue Book – looks like there are more than a few people out there who like to get their inner citation geek on. I encourage anyone who hasn’t already to check out Courtney’s analysis and review of The Blue Book’s online features and also catch a glimpse of one of our Justia pugs, Sheba, giving a shout out to vendor-neutral citation.  Other popular posts this month included our Legal Predictions for 2011 and some thoughts on our shock over California’s new menu labeling laws (note: watch out for the 400+ calorie scones at Starbucks).

On Monday, Gabriel Saldana offered some social media privacy tips for stalking victims. His advice about quitting Facebook is on the mark, and not just for people victimized by stalkers. While Facebook is a popular gateway into a virtual world of friends, status updates, and likes, it may also serve as a social engineering Trojan horse for those seeking to do you harm.

Consider the following security questions that banks and other financial institutions often use to safeguard your account?

Comedians, satirists, and Fake Steve’s everywhere, take note: under California’s new anti-Internet impersonation law, you want to make sure that you show your intent to tickle your reader’s funny bones on the Web.

That’s because under California Penal Code Section 528.5, someone who “knowingly and without consent” uses the Internet to “credibly impersonate[] another actual person” with the intent of “harming, intimidating, threatening, or defrauding another person is guilty of a misdemeanor.”

Some high-profile personalities and companies in California could put the new law through its paces in court. Here’s why.

Happy New Year to all our Justia friends!

As Courtney wrote in her year-end review, one of the big trends of 2010 was the emergence of social media and its integration into the work of legal professionals. While I’m sure many of our readers may already have a blog, a Facebook page, LinkedIn Profile or Twitter account (to name but a few of these types of tools and platforms), many folks may still feel a bit unsure how this all works. For that latter group, we’re going to post articles on Onward throughout the year that provide basic social media “how-tos” and resource links to help you get started. This post is going to focus on Twitter and also briefly cover Justia’s Twitter community Legal Birds – a place we hope that those of you who are already in the social media mix might join up and participate in.

British authorities arrested Wiikileaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange on Tuesday based upon a Swedish warrant charging him with sexually assaulting two women there over the summer.

Assange’s arrest, along with decisions by technology companies, finance companies, and banks to distance themselves from the document-leaking web site he founded, have placed Wikileaks in a difficult position. Will the site remain under constant threat of being booted off the web?

Probably, but that just doesn’t appear likely to happen. Once Wikileaks started sharing documents with journalists around the world, it guaranteed that removing the diplomatic cables would be impossible.

Amazon evicted Wikileaks from the company’s servers, telling the group to look for hosting space elsewhere.

• Free Law – Justia truly believes that the law belongs to the people. It was created for us, by us. That is why we are thankful for Law.Gov, the brainchild of passionate Government open source advocate Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org.
• Google – We are thankful for Google and its continued support of free law by awarding the non-profit Public.Resource.org a $2 million grant to jump-start the Law.Gov initiative. The grant was one of five awarded to Google Project 10^100 winners, a contest to help as many people in the world as possible.
• Facebook – We are thankful for Facebook because we really like making friends. 🙂
• Twitter – We are thankful for Twitter. We love tweeting about the law like little birdies 🙂

If you’re a regular reader of this blog or follow Justia on Facebook or Twitter, you may have noticed that in October we really picked up the pace on the Justia Law, Technology & Legal Marketing Blog. In the past, we used the blog to make announcements, cheer on fellow free law advocates, and occasionally talk about legal issues. This month, with a concerted effort and lots of whining about deadlines [me], we have been blogging daily, and covering a pretty wide range of issues and ideas. We’ve reviewed apps, movies, and judicial decisions. We’ve gone from Dora to DADT. We even got shout-outs from the Library of Congress and the ABA Journal.

It’s election day and all of us here at Justia hope you get out and vote! Given that we’ll have a new Congress at the beginning of the year, we’d like to point you to some iPhone apps you can download to keep informed on what’s going on in the U.S. Senate and House.   Note: All of these apps are FREE.

C-Span Radio – Listen to Congressional hearings along with audio streams of public affairs programming from C-SPAN Radio, C-SPAN and C-SPAN2.

Sometimes people mistake Justia’s mission, “To advance the availability of legal resources for the benefit of society,” as being only about advancing the availability of legal resources for lawyers, but society is much larger then the legal community. This week’s App of the week is free for the iPhone and iPad from our friends at Nolo, and it’s geared at making the often confusing landscape of legal terms easier to understand for everyone.

I am not a lawyer myself, nor have I gone to law school.  I came to Justia as a programmer.  While I have learned much about the law since I started working here in 2006, I still find myself constantly coming up against legal terms that I don’t know.  There are a few places I turn to find out what those words and phrases mean discreetly so when the lawyers in my midst say them I can pretend I knew what it was all along, and one of the best sources I’ve found is Nolo’s Plain English Legal Dictionary available for free at nolo.com/dictionary.

OnGuard Online, a website by the Federal Trade Commission, urges people to exercise discretion when using social networking sites. While their advice is targeted towards parents of young children, it applies equally to people of all ages.

In general, the FTC cautions people to only post information to social networking sites that they are comfortable with others seeing. While the FTC recommends the use of privacy settings to restrict access to your social networking profile, we would add that once you send an e-mail or post a message or photo on your social networking page, this information can easily be viewed by or forwarded to persons outside of your intended network, regardless of your privacy settings.