Doug Cornelius .com

The most popular RSS Feedreader in October of 2007 was Google Reader in October of 2007. It had the most feeds being added to it during that month. It had 37.4% of all feeds added to a feed reader, according to AddThis.com.

Google keeps its crown for another month, continuing to grow its share. This growth looks to be due mostly to losses by Bloglines and NewsGator. Based on the year to date trend, Google continues to grow its market share.

I have been using Facebook for a few months now. I had heard that millions of people found something interesting in there. So why not try it out. After all it is free, so I all it will cost me is a few minutes of time to set up an account.

I was surprised to find that Facebook is all about communication and sending information. Facebook aggregates and dis-aggregates information in several ways. In your personal mini-feed, there is a history of what you have done with Facebook (although you can suppress items if you want). You mini-feed is aggregated out and combined with other mini-feeds. So your Facebook friends see your updated combined with the updates from their other friends. Updates and notifications have RSS feeds associated with them, so you can get updated in your feed reader, rather than having to go back into Facebook. Essentially, you are mini-blogging.

With the wide range in age of users in Facebook, you get a wide range of information. Those college students really like to put up drunken pictures and say silly things. My fellow knowledge management professionals, attorneys, legal technologists and enterprise 2.0 evangelists put up some really great content. And gives me some insight into what they are doing.

As C. G. Lynch posted in his story on Why CIOs Should Be On Facebook as more “adult” users join and the Facebookers join the workforce, they may start cleaning up their act.

Facebook turned out to be a great tool. Why not try it out. It won’t cost you anything except a few minutes.

Register for Facebook
Add me as a friend

The crew at Common Craft has come out with a great new video: Blogs in Plain English.

Charities should not use a limited liability company to hold real estate in Massachusetts. Robert E. Cowden wrote an article about this in the November/December 2007 issue of the Boston Bar Journal.

The Massachusetts Appellate Tax Board ruled that even though a piece of property was owned by a single member limited liability company, whose sole member was a charitable corporation, the property did not qualify for property tax exemption. CFM Buckley/North, LLC v. Board of Assessors of the Town of Greenfield.

The Third Clause of M.G.L. c.59, s.5 provides for a property tax exemption for a charitable organization, which is defined as:

(1) a literary, benevolent, charitable or scientific institution or temperance society incorporated in the commonwealth, and (2) a trust for literary, benevolent, charitable, scientific or temperance purposes if it is established by a declaration of trust executed in the commonwealth . . . . [emphasis added]

The Appellate Tax Board found that a limited liability company is not “incorporated” and therefore does not qualify for the exemption.

On a similar note, other protections for charitable organizations may be jeopardized if they use a limited liability company to hold some of their real estate assets.

For instance, the Dover Amendment M.G.L. c.40A, s.3 provides that:

No zoning ordinance or by-law shall regulate or restrict the interior area of a single family residential building nor shall any such ordinance or by-law prohibit, regulate or restrict the use of land or structures for religious purposes or for educational purposes on land owned or leased by the commonwealth or any of its agencies, subdivisions or bodies politic or by a religious sect or denomination, or by a nonprofit educational corporation. . . .

Also the charitable liability cap in M.G.L. c.231, s.85K is applicable to:

corporation, trustees of a trust, or members of an association that said corporation, trust, or association. . . .

A limited liability company may not be able to take advantage of these protections.

In my feed from SharePointPedia, I came across a post from Bill Gates on how he uses Office 2007 and SharePoint. Yes, it is a pretty fluffy post about how wonderful Office 2007 is to use.

Mr. Gates points out the ability to use SharePoint as an expertise locater. He also talks about creating internal websites, collaboration and discussions in SharePoint, but never uses the terms “blog” or “wiki” or “RSS.” I find it interesting that he is playing up the social networking features of SharePoint.

In a related note, Mr. Gates talks about using email and outlook as his primary communications tool. Again, he leaves out blogs, wikis and RSS.

I ran across two articles on usury and expect we will see more as the debt markets and foreclosures continue to sort themselves out and more borrowers are faced with foreclosure.

Usury is the charging of excessive interest on a loan. Most states have a law prohibiting usury and defining what is meant by usury. Usury laws were originally targeted at loan sharks. As a result, most usury statutes make the charging of usurious interest a criminal act. They also generally allow the borrower to escape from making the excessive interest payments.

Massachusetts defines interest in excess of 20% to be the interest rate that triggers usury. M.G.L. Chapter 271, Section 49. The 20% threshold also includes any brokerage fees, recording fees, commissions, forbearance or any other amounts the borrower has to pay to the lender.

The 20% rate is prorated for shorter periods of time. Upfront fees can push an otherwise legal loan into a usury loan if it is maid off early. For example, if you have ten year loan at 18%, plus a 3% commission payable at closing, that loan is usurious if the borrower pays it off at the end of the first year.

M.G.L. Chapter 271, Section 49(a) provides for a criminal sentence of up to ten years and a fine of up to $10,000. Also, M.G.L. Chapter 271, Section 4(c) allows the court to void a usurious loan.

Massachusetts has two exceptions to usury. The first is the regulated lender exception in M.G.L. Chapter 271, Section 49(e). Under this exception, the usury statute does not apply to “any lender subject to control, regulation or examination by any state or federal regulatory agency” or to “any loan the rate of interest for which is regulated under any other provision of general or special law or regulations.” This means that banks, credit unions and most conventional lenders are not subject to usury in Massachusetts. However, CMBS originators and investment funds may not fall under this exception.

The second exception is by use of a “leg-breaker letter.” Under M.G.L. Chapter 271, Section 49(d), you can charge usurious interest as long as you send a letter to the Attorney General with the lender’s and borrower’s name and accurate address. This notification is good for two years.

The leg-breaker exception is very easy to comply with. I was surprised to see stories about usury in Massachusetts.

Both stories are about a loan for the development of a 186 home community and godf course in Dracut. Massachusetts Lawyers weekly reported the story: Release Won’t Shield Lender from Usury Claim of Borrower subscription). It reports a story about LR5-A Limited Partnership v. Meadow Creek, LLC, et al. (Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly subscription), with a decision coming out of the Business Litigation Session of the Superior Court. The decision found that a release or waiver of claims for usury is not effective. Usury is a public policy law and cannot be waived by the parties. The case was also reported in the Boston Globe: Usury lawsuit names Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Endowments.

The borrower made notes with an interest rate in excess of 20%. The decision from the Superior Court says it was a 21% interest rate. The Boston Globe story says one of the loans was 42%. The lender was an investment fund set up by Realty Financial Partners. The lender was a non-conventional lender and therefore could not benefit from the regulated lender exception to the usury law. They should have filed a leg-breaker letter. The decision was silent on whether the filed a letter. The Boston Globe story reports that two notices were filed, but that one was filed too early (before the lending partnership was formed) and the second filed too late (after the loan was made).

The borrower goes on to charge the limited partners of the lender violated usury and is trying to bring a claim against them directly. This seems foolhardy from a legal perspective. But it apparently worked from a public relations perspective because he got his name in the paper

The problem I have with the application of the usury laws in commercial financing is that they merely give the borrower an opportunity to wiggle out from their bargain. According to the story, the borrower thought they could quickly obtain development rights and then refinance the loan with a conventional lender at a lesser interest rate. He failed and the lender had to foreclose on the property. The borrower must have thought the interest rate was acceptable at closing. Now that the deal went south, he is trying to apply the law retroactively to get himself out of his bargain.

Disclosure: Realty Financial Partners is a client of my firm.

Law.com’s Legal Technology section has an article by Mark Gerow of Fenwick & West: Implementing Large-Scale Extranets.

Like Fenwick & West we also use Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 as our extranet platform. The trouble with using it as extranet is finding an attorney and finding a client with a matter they want to share information by using an extranet. Although there is a lot of talk about clients wanting extranets, I find it to be more talk than need or desire.

I was surprised to find that we have more extranets for litigation matters than transactional matters. I think the problem is the database style of presenting and holding information in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 . The great thing is that Sharepoint gives you the flexibility to organize and display documents. The bad thing is that Sharepoint gives you the flexibility to organize and display documents. I believe the chronological display of litigation filings breaks the barrier of having to figure out how you want to display the documents.

One way I found to leverage the Sharepoint structure was to host the contracts be transferred under an asset acquisition agreement. Representing the seller, we published each of the contracts to the extranet site and tagged each entry with the corresponding item reference on the disclosure schedule to the asset purchase agreement. When looking at the schedule you could see a lease referenced as item 12 on schedule 1 of the disclosure schedule. You could then turn to the extranet site, quickly browse to the schedule 1 section and look on the list for item number 12. Then you can pull up the contract. The extranet was a great tool for use to organize the documents for our client and allowed the purchaser easy access to the documents.

I was surprised to hear that Fenwick & West automatically creates an extranet for each matter opened. Granted, the information for a blank Sharepoint site takes up little memory and space. Unless their extranets are widely used (and I have found few firms that widely use extranets) you end up with lots of dead extranet sites.

As a follow up to my post on Connectbeam, Chuck Pendell VP of Sales and Puneet Gupta CEO and Founder of Connectbeam spent some time showing me their product in more detail.

They are positioning the product as a social software application for information access and discovery. The goal is to provide good content by adding attributes to make the information more useful. It ends up being a blend of del.icio.us, Facebook and LinkedIn within the enterprise.

The Connectbeam appliance combines social bookmarking with social networking. It uses bookmarking as a proxy for expertise and information interest. So if I have a bunch of bookmarks on “knowledge management,” I presumably have some expertise in knowledge management or at least have some interest in knowledge management.

The product is an appliance so it should be easy to deploy and setup. It allows each user to import bookmarks from del.icio.us or a web browser. When you add a bookmark, you can decide to make it open, publish it to an open community, publish it to a restricted community or keep it private. They provide a toolbar with the button to create the bookmark and add the tags.

They also allow an integration into an internet and/or intranet search. Then the tagging from Connectbeam is combined with the search results. In the demo they used their Google appliance search, combining intranet and internet web search into a single result set. The bookmarked websites with the tags that matched the search terms were presented first in the search results, pushing those sites that were bookmarked the most to the top of the search results.

The community aspect of Connectbeam allows you to create ad hoc communities that are either open or restricted. I could create a community for my knowledge management team and publish bookmarks to that community. I could keep the community open so that anyone in firm interested in knowledge management could see the bookmarks published to that community. Or I could keep it restricted so that only certain invited people could join the community and see that community of bookmarks and their tags.

Connectbeam associates each person’s bookmarks and communities and produces a user profile based on that information. I really like the concept of the tagging information being added into the profile for a person.

I see a tremendous value in adding the bookmarks and tags to enhance search results. It is a great way to cull out good content. If someone went through the trouble of bookmarking and tagging a site, it has some higher value for them. By combining multiple users bookmarks and tags, the better content bubbles to the top of the search results. In return, each person has a catalog of their bookmarks to browse and search through.

With Connectbeam the bookmarking and tagging enhance the findability of information used by the enterprise and the findability of expertise within the enterprise.

The weakness of the Connectbeam system is that it relies on bookmarking. Therefore you need a discoverable, unique URL to create the bookmark. For my firm, that ends up leaving out our document management system. Without being able to pull in documents it ends up not being a good solution for my firm. Maybe they can create an integration with Interwoven, but in the meantime the value proposition for Connectbeam is less apparent for my firm.

The Law Blog on WSJ.com posted a story on Mark Pettit at the Boston University School of Law: The Minstrel of BU Law School. I am a big fan of Professor Pettit. His contracts class was my first class in law school.

I was nervous about the Socratic method and what I had gotten myself into. Contracts was the first class on the first day of law school. The first case was Hawkins v. McGee. Professor Pettit was quizzing my classmate about what went wrong with the plaintiff that they ended up in court and suing their doctor. My classmate was stumbling. Professor Pettit reached into his desk and pulled out a plastic hand with a piece of thick fur attached:

“Dr. McGee promised Mr. Hawkins that he would make the hand a hundred percent perfect hand using skin grafting. But instead Mr. Hawkins ended up with a hairy hand that looked like this.”

The prop was a great icebreaker for a classroom full of nervous students. With the sometimes (oftentimes) boring caselaw study of contracts, his songs always livened up class and got us to focus on the substance of the case.

The lesson for knowledge management is the power of being able to wrap more information around the subject, giving it more meaning for the viewer. Professor Pettit’s songs and props were all metadata we could wrap around the caselaw in helping us to understand it and put it into context.

I cracked up when I saw this video:

Did you recognize all of the video games?

Thanks to Gaming with Baby: Coolest. Halftime. Ever. for pointing it out.