Jay Parkhill September 5th, 2007
Sometimes napkins make good visualization tools too. No animation in this one, but patent lawyer Erik J. Heels did a bang-up job simplifying a complex topic to a single sheet of paper (it might not have actually been a napkin). 
Erik explains it all here.
Jay Parkhill August 9th, 2007
Someone pointed me to this interesting column on the inner thought process of developers- the tension between building an application to fail fast or fail slowly. Here’s an analogue from the legal world.
One type of language I have seen a bunch of that drives me crazy is “by way of example”. Sometimes certain ideas are hard to capture precisely and people fall back on “by way of example” to help add clarity, such as “by way of example, during a leap year Februay 29 will not be considered in accounting for . . .”I don’t like this. My goal in drafting any document is to capture the meaning simply and clearly. That’s not to say I succeed all the time and occasionally ideas are so complex that a good example can paint the picture that replaces 1,000 words. It’s a tool to use sparingly, though- not a shortcut or a substitute for clear drafting. If I find myself reaching for the “example” too often, I must not be putting enough effort into capturing the ideas properly.
Leaving out the example with inexact language may be like failing quickly- though the consequences may be litigation rather than restarting the program. Undesirable either way. Adding the example may let the agreement fail slowly- getting the language right and using examples sparingly where really necessary let the agreement be flexible enough to accommodate changes in user circumstances.
Jay Parkhill August 8th, 2007
I recently tuned in to Barack Obama and John Edwards’ Twitter feeds, which offer somewhat interesting, informal glimpses of the candidates. Shortly after, I discovered what is really a fake Bill Clinton Twitter feed. Someone reserved the BillClinton user name and posts asinine garbage that might be malicious if it actually had any relevance to anything.
Still, this got me thinking about “user name squatting”. It is pretty well established that someone with a “famous” name can oust a squatter from a domain name, but I wonder if they same is true of user names on social networks? If I went around and registered “RudyGiuliani” (to pick a famous and unusual name), would he have rights against me? My gut tells me that the larger the platform, the more likely name-squatting would be deemed impactful on the famous person (e.g. Mr. Giuliani). I also suspect that the nature of the platform would be relevant as well- fake Rudy Giuliani on MySpace is potentially more damaging to the candidate than fake Rudy Giuliani on Digg.
I’m going to poke around a little on this one to see if anyone has actually tried to bring “user name squatting” actions. I’ll update if I find anything interesting.