Lex Ferenda

The JCER | Journal of Contemporary European Research is pleased to announce that it has published its latest issue. This is a Special Issue on “Media and Communication in Europe: Babel Revisited” and is produced in collaboration with the UACES-funded Specialist Study Group - Media and Communication in Europe.

I played a minor role in the preparation of this issue, procuring book reviews from three smart writers, Patrick Bijsmans, Asimina Michailidou and Oisín Tobin (links are to their reviews). The journal also features a guest article on research into legitimacy and identity in the EU by Michael Bruter, and a range of articles by postgraduate scholars - I particularly enjoyed Aline Sierp’s piece on linguistic minorities and Italian media. Particular thanks go to JCER editor Eamonn Butler and to the Group coordinator and special issue editor Agnes Inge Schneeberger (Leeds).

Tags: jcer, uaces

I took a look at the most popular posts on this blog in 2008, though my data is a bit of a mess as there are various stages where the stats system failed entirely, including for the entire (and merry, as I got hired then!) month of May. Another trend is the increase in people who read on Google Reader (heading for 100) and other RSS-based systems. Anyway, here’s what I came up with…

The old favourites, two 2006 posts, are still the most popular: Travelling between Dublin and London? and Tim Hortons. In Dublin. For real.. The ‘Travelling’ post needs to be updated, and might be moved offsite entirely - it’s really surprising just how popular it is. Quite humbling too that no matter what I do, cheap travel and Canadian coffee will always draw more eyeballs than any ’serious’ posts.

The impact of searching (and Google placement) is quite visible (I don’t consciously do any SEO and in fact use silly titles more often than I should, which is against all good advice). So for example, the most popular ‘real’ post was the last post of the year, where I wrote a quick note and posted the video from IT Crowd episode Friendface. As it was one of the first blog posts on a name that Graham Linehan made up for the episode, it was for a couple of days a top 5 Google result, and got a whole lot of traffic without anyone linking to it. Similarly, an unexceptional post about university lecturers and Facebook, Prof. Facebook has consistently been a popular one, because for some reason it is the first result when you search for ‘facebook’ on Eircom (for this purpose, an Irish ISP/portal)’s site. I’ve never quite understood the people who search for sites that they probably use every day (though one hopes they don’t type Google into Google). A 2007 cyberlaw post about a presentation by Karen McCullagh, (
What Is Private Data?) is also getting good traffic, probably because Karen doesn’t have her own blog (yet)…

Conference posts, which are a lot of fun to write, are consistently popular. This year I’ve seen a lot of traffic on posts about January’s UK Centre for Legal Education conference (Learning In Law: UKCLE Conference 2008) in Warwick (I won’t be there this year, so I’m hoping for other bloggers to carry the baton). Also popular from January (quiet at first but picking up lots of search results during the year) were the two posts on Media Law and Regulation, TCD School of Law Seminar. I also wrote about the BILETA conference in Glasgow. I’d imagine the stack of posts on the Berkman@10 Conference would have figured, if it were not for me messing up my installation and losing most of those stats. Oops.

Bloganna Thar Barr ended up in the top ten because it was the ‘leak’ of an Irish Blog Awards shortlist. So I can’t take any credit for that. Some other high-hit posts are pretty much the result of a link from others, so for example a little post about a Magners ad (Don't blame Father Ted) and the ASA got almost all its traffic via Mulley, and Legal news in Ireland seems only to be popular by way of not one but three links from Cearta. The link I appreciated the most was that from the Today Programme, though!

Quirky stories about law is surely what the Web was made for, and that’s the category that Once you tax, you can't stop (about tax, statutory interpretation and Pringles) certainly fits into. It also drew the response from Lilian Edwards that I am becoming the Charlie Brooker of IT law, which I take as a huge compliment and am considering including on my CV. My own roundup of interesting law posts, Blawg Review #151 had its moment in the sun too. (See Charon QC’s magnificent Review published this week, here).

Although I’m no longer living in Ireland, I still post on Irish developments, and of course I only made that move in the middle of the year. The most popular posts about Irish media and technology law included The Record Companies vs The ISP - in Ireland (written in great haste but relatively comprehensive), and The strange death of criminal libel? (probably helped along by a mention on Cearta). I also don’t post about music here any more (that’s over on Rhymes With Porridge, though quite infrequent), but the most popular musical post was that on the Living Music Festival 2008.

I suppose it’s (barely) acceptable to kickstart the blogging year with a selection of reviews of the year, or those related to this blog’s topics…for reviews of the year more generally, the Guardian has published a review of reviews of the year on its newsblog.

Indeed, the Guardian is a good source for reviews of the year in media, including media gaffes, and a masterful month-by-month report. On the Organ Grinder blog, the list is open for comments too. If we take a more generous definition of review, then there’s also the guide to popular culture in 2009. To show that it’s not just the Guardian, here’s the Huffington Post’s Ten Worst Media Moments of 2008, which raises some serious questions along with the more entertaining ones.

Technology Review reviews the year in technology, with links to articles on social networking, cloud computing and more. Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC has a month-by-month on technology, here, with loads of legal issues included. The Register says it was the year of the little people, and Michael Geist again manages to get a story for each latter of the alphabet, with his A to Z of the year in Canadian technology law and policy

There’s also some lists of books that are worth looking at - Daniel Solove has a list of books about privacy, and John Bracken has crowdsourced the question (sorry) via his blog, LinkedIn profile and more, and has compiled a list of the year’s ‘most influential writing about media’ - how many of them have you read? (I’ve at least dipped into about half of them, and read in full about a third. So many books, so little time…)

That was (a very random look over) the year that was. Later in the week, the most popular posts on this blog.

As a fan of Graham Linehan’s The IT Crowd (showing in the UK on Channel 4 and available elsewhere), I do watch it with half an eye to spotting useful representations or parodies of Internet phenomena. The ‘You Wouldn’t Steal’ insert (watch it here, and compare with the actual campaign here) is a favourite of those who present about copyright and the film industry. (Patricia Loughlan’s EIPR piece from last year (here) has a very good analysis of the language of the anti-piracy campaign, worth reading).

Anyway, from this week’s episode (3×05), here is Friendface. Shows in 60 seconds what takes me about ten pages to write…

YouTube - The IT Crowd | PREVIEW: Friendface | Channel 4

Tags: channel4, facebook, theitcrowd, web2.0

Here are the other, more scattered privacy stories as promised:

1. The Information and Privacy Commissioner in the Canadian province of Ontario, Ann Cavoukian, is organising the ‘Privacy By Design Challenge‘, a workshop and presentations on how technology can be used, and in particular designed, to promote personal privacy. The fact that this event is organised by a statutory privacy commissioner is still quite remarkable (and welcome) and I look forward to finding out how it goes. Spotted via Mediacaster.
2. Another Canadian one: the 2007 and 2008 report of the federal Privacy Commissioner has been published: get it here
3. The Bar Council gets visited by some tea-leafs, who run away with the contact details of all of the barristers in England and Wales, and more besides (BBC News)
4. In related news, the Open Rights Group has a new tool to find out if your data has been disclosed, Who’s Been Losing Your Data? Nice.
5. And finally, unlucky for lawyers: Law firms are expected to register as data controllers in the UK - if not, like these three firms, they may end up paying a fine, and more importantly, probably never get a privacy case again…

Tags: Canada, dataprotection, privacy