Our Vanishing Internet: Disappearing Data, Paywalls, and Memory Holes

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

Intro: Web 2.0. Innovation. Trend. Collaboration. Metadata —

Got the world turning as fast as it can, hear how technology can help legally speaking, with two of the top legal technology experts, authors and lawyers, Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. Welcome to the Kennedy-Mighell Report here on the Legal Talk Network.

Dennis Kennedy: And welcome to Episode 338 of the Kennedy-Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor.

Tom Mighell: And I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy: In our last episode, we interviewed Natalie Anne Knowlton of A to J Ventures as part of our ongoing Fresh Voices on Legal Tech series. Highly recommend it. Tom has been wanting to do interviews but now that we’ve done a few, he would like to get back to our usual format for a show or two. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our seemingly vanishing Internet. It’s an important and worrying topic for me and it plays right into Tom’s information governance perspective. Do I really need to be as worried as I seem to be? Tom, what’s all on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell: Well, Dennis, in this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report, we will indeed be discussing whether the Internet as we know it and all the information that resides on it might indeed be vanishing, or whether Dennis is being an alarmist and we may see where I fall on that. In our second segment, we’ll revisit our 2023 tech resolutions to give each other a little accountability and encouragement and see what we need to focus on for the summer and as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots that one tip website or observation that you can start using second that this podcast is over. But first up, we wanted to take a look, or maybe I should say Dennis wanted to take a look into whether or not the Internet as we know it is vanishing like the Amazon rainforest. Dennis’ words, not necessarily mine. Are we now in a world of disappearing sites? Are we in a world of removed or inaccessible articles, materials that don’t show up in search engines, Paywall Resources and memory Holes? I will admit, I wasn’t terribly worried about this until Dennis told me that I needed to be. Dennis, what makes you so anxious about this?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, I mean, it really comes down to — I just can’t find anything anymore, whether it’s my own articles, links and things. I’ve captured news, information, people leaving Twitter, people deleting stuff, so much going beyond behind Paywalls. I don’t even know what to expect any more, you know, when I capture something that I’ll ever be able to go back to it and it seems to be happening really quickly and you know, since I started to think about this, the loss of information on Twitter is really noticeable. So that’s what I’m seeing. I don’t know whether you’re experiencing the same thing or not.

Tom Mighell: I have to say, and this is going to kind of be the dividing line for this discussion, I’m not having any issues. I’m not missing anything. I think that the places where I rely on information to be are places that I know I can count on information being in those places, that places that I shouldn’t be counting on, I’m not counting on. I don’t really look for my own stuff to be honest and if it’s out in the world or it’s not and I can’t really guarantee or control what happens there. And frankly, in my opinion, that’s been the way since the Internet started. But I have copies of everything in my own storage, so I don’t know why I need to look for it in other places. I’ve already got it. I don’t have issues finding news. Google search is not as good as it used to be, and I know how far down you’ve been on Google, but I will say that what I use Google for these days, it gets me what I need. It’s not the best in the world, but I’m not really having the same issues here. I’m finding what I need to find.

Dennis Kennedy: So here’s an example for you. So earlier this week, I was actually interviewed for an article by a Washington Post reporter, and as we’re talking, I realized that the Washington Post is so paywalled that I will probably never see that article that presumably I’ll be quoted in and that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about, is that there are stories out there that are kind of moving to these places and then disappearing as things go out of business. Like, I don’t know what happens to all the BuzzFeed articles in their Archive. What happens as these things go out of business and then, I guess, a big one, Tom, since you were on the litigation side during your legal career, maybe I’ll turf some of this over to you but the Internet Archive which is something that we’ve really depended on as being the Archive of everything that’s ever been on the Internet lost a really big case and people have a lot of concerns. I just got a fundraising request to support the Internet Archive because of this litigation.

(00:05:09)

Tom Mighell: Well, so couple of things that I would say are I would disagree with how you frame them. I would agree with you 100% that more stuff is going behind Paywalls than ever before. It’s how companies and people are choosing to monetize the Internet. I think more stuff is happening, but I don’t know that that’s really new and or surprising. I do know that there are several tools that you can use to make Paywalls go away whether those tools are legal or not is one thing, but there are tools out there that I’ve used to be able to bypass Paywalls. But I wouldn’t call that disappearing because I would just say it’s not available. It’s not gone. It’s not gone forever. It’s not accessible to you because you’re not willing to pay for it.

Dennis Kennedy: Is this what they mean by the semantics web?

Tom Mighell: No. That is not what this –no. That’s no. I see what you did there. But no, you need to make a distinction between links that are lost. And if you get a 404 link because somebody shut things down to a link that still exists and is being kept and maintained, but it is not accessible to you because you choose not to pay for it. Now, I get it that sometimes payment is the point and we shouldn’t have to do that, but there was no one that set up and said the Internet is going to be free forever for everybody and it’s always been with that kind of mentality. Everybody gets what they want to get. But let me move on real quick and talk about the Internet Archive.

You just said that the goal of the Internet Archive is to keep everything ever from the Internet, and I would dispute that they actually can keep everything forever because in preparing for this podcast, I went to go and look for things and part of what the Internet Archive case is about is the fact that the Archive not only is putting up web content, but also putting up book content. That is not web content and that’s what the lawsuit was really about. It’s can they legitimately store copies of books and make those books available to people without running afoul of copyright or without running afoul of whatever rights the publishers have on that information. I would make the argument on the one hand that the Internet Archive was designed to host the Internet’s content and not books and movies and videos. They just decided to be the Everything Archive.

But if we’re talking about that being the Everything Archive, I’ll say I looked for all of my books and one of my books is on there, but why isn’t our collaboration book up there? Or why aren’t all of my iPad books, but I did find one copy of my iPad for lawyers’ book. So I would say not doing a great job. If I had to say, if the goal is to store everything, but frankly, the Internet Archive case and I’ve been talking too long so I’m going to stop for a minute and let you talk is not — in my In my opinion, the Internet Archive case is not about information disappearing. It’s about whether that information really had the right to be where it was in the first place. They posted books and other materials to which they did not own the copyright.

Great resource, yes. I didn’t even know it was there. I didn’t even know they were posting stuff of the books. Great place to find out of print books that aren’t electronic. And frankly, when you talk about reading books, you never mention the Internet Archive, Dennis. You always mention e-books from libraries, but I never even knew that this was out there. So I’m sort of sad that they lost their case. I’m sort of sad that the publishers have won even though the publishers admitted we haven’t lost any money because of this. We can’t actually show damage. So that’s kind of irritating that the publishers still won. But at the same time, I kind of understand it. It’s not like electronic information that is disappearing. This is paper made digital and made available on the Internet, which to me is very different from links breaking and other — your content, your articles disappearing. It’s something that someone scanned into the Internet and put online that they now have been told they don’t have the right to do. So I don’t know, I view that as different. Now, I spent like 10 minutes on that diatribe so now you get to talk for a while.

Dennis Kennedy: That’s fine with me because now I get to be the person who believes in the open Internet and information wanting to be free, and that not having these media companies determine what we can use and block us from all these things which is where I’m at on this. And my concern is that in any of these litigations that if as a result of this, the whole Internet Archive has to be shut down because of the damages and the cost of defending it and the fact that they’re now having to request people donate so they can even defend this case–

(00:10:07)

—then we potentially lose these valuable resources over time. And maybe that’s a natural evolution of the internet. But I think we felt that things were going to be there for a while. And you know, dead links have always been a problem on the Internet. I just feel like there’s more things going on. It’s more pernicious. There’s thing going away like I said Twitter people are leaving and some of that stuff is just going to flat out and disappear. The comments that I have, I have my ABA Journal columns for seven years. I can’t even find them anymore on the ABA’s website.

So it’s like — and I have other things that were published where I was like “Oh, this is great.” I don’t really have to keep a copy of it because it’s on this kind of premier website and now it’s basically gone. And so I do have concerns about that and I do have concerns about not being able to access news, stories and things like that. So I think that is really the problem that’s starting to creep up and I don’t see it getting better. I actually see it worse. And it may take some time and it just maybe like one more step in the evolution of the Internet and one more thing we need to deal with but I think it’s something we have to start looking at.

Tom Mighell: So quick question for you coming back real quick to the books. You’d be okay if we publish our latest collaboration tools book and just can I put it on my blog and make it free and available to anybody that wants it because it wants to be free ultimately?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, I just made my innovation book freely available.

Tom Mighell: You’re not answering my question about the collaboration book though.

Dennis Kennedy: Well, you know what I’m trying not to say there are time. But I don’t think there would be a significant economic loss to you and me if that happened.

Tom Mighell: Well, we won’t get into why that is. To me, I don’t think this is any different than in any other time in the history of the Internet. And the reason that this is a problem, the reason that this is an issue is because there is no – despite the Internet Archive, I think the Internet Archive’s intent is great but otherwise, there is no federated effort to collect and curate information that’s on the Internet. This is all decentralized. It’s everyone for themselves. You’ve got to rely on everyone taking the right steps to preserve information. If a company goes down, tweets are disappearing because that company is going to hell in a handbasket right now and people are leaving. I saw a stat that said that readership or viewership was down 7.7% over the last month which is a significant number for them.

And the fact is, everything is different. Companies decide to take their information behind a Paywall. The ABA decides that it really doesn’t really know how to manage web articles. I know I was looking for articles that I wrote for Law Practice Magazine as part of the research for this podcast. I found maybe two or three and I wrote over a hundred articles for the magazine. They just don’t exist anymore online and I think that’s because of bad record keeping practices. That doesn’t mean that the articles don’t exist anymore. They just don’t exist on the Internet. But I think I am accepting of the fate of all of this information because everyone’s different. Everyone has different motives. Everyone has different interests and reasons for keeping information on the Internet and until those interests can align which I would argue will never happen, we will continue to have information going away or not being the same or not being as available as you want or need it to be.

Dennis Kennedy: Well, here’s an example from just today. So FiveThirtyEight.com which did all the election stuff and all these other things over the years, they just laid off everybody. Disney bought them, they’re laying off everybody. So is all that content which is really historically significant in terms of covering the elections during the time that FiveThirtyEight existed, what’s going to happen to that? I mean, is that something Disney is going to decide is not profitable for them to keep? Is it going to go away? Who’s going to be responsible for that if anything? And so I just think we see sections of the Internet starting to break away and you talked about this sort of federation of the Internet and whether it needs to have an Archive or its own Library of Congress. And I think we’ve just been sort of freewheeling for a while and in this period where it seems like we’re losing a lot.

(00:15:00)

And maybe it’s like a step in the path where we take a look at that. We say like, “Mmm, we need to do something about this.” We need to do this in a significant way and it brings us to a better Internet and we need to take a closer look at the things we’re thinking. There’s a ton of content on Twitter, right? And if the government decides to ban Twitter for the whole United States, everybody who made that content, that content is all gone to them.

Tom Mighell: Well, that’s not true because the federal archives is keeping every tweet that ever gets done.

Dennis Kennedy: On TikTok.

Tom Mighell: Oh, TikTok. I would argue that content on — a lot of content on TikTok, I would not be sad if any of that went away. I frankly would not be sad if Twitter content went away too. I mean, you know–

Dennis Kennedy:  I’m only sad, right? Ultimately, I’m sad that my content is going away. But yeah, I think that ultimately the whole idea of the Internet was this kind of open thing and it was like this incredible archive for humanity and this way that we shared information and it was going to be this really great thing and maybe it just gets folded into the new generative AI tools and that’s the next stage of evolution. But I think we’re losing a lot of stuff over time and it’s happening without us really having input on that and I don’t know whether we can get some of it back.

Tom Mighell: Well, you’re right. It was an idea. It was a good idea of the Internet but it was also an idea that was held by a lot of people who weren’t connected to each other, who lacked the means to exercise any control over it. And that ultimately, control over the Internet belongs to the people who own the information. So Disney owns that information. Whatever decision they choose to make, they make of it. If I decide to take all of my blog information off whether it’s worth or not, that’s ultimately my decision and nobody can stop me if I want to do that.

And so I would say that it’s interesting that the concern is coming now because I think that the reason for the concern has always been there. I think at some point in time during the whole history of the Internet 20, 30 years ago, however long we’ve been doing with this, that information has been vanishing at points and we’ve lost sources of information at various points along the way. I don’t think this is any different. It may be happening at a greater speed than it was before but I really don’t see that as any different. We’ve been talking about this a long time and we have a lot more to say about it. But right now, we need to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

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Dennis Kennedy: And we are back. Tom, so let’s get your information governance perspective on this. When you have this massive amount of information that seems to be out of control and some of it might be disappearing and there certainly seems like there could be better ways to handle these things, what can we actually do about this?

Tom Mighell: So I’m actually going to ask you to explain more because I’m going to take the position that this is not actually an information governance issue but I want you to tell me why you think it is first.

Dennis Kennedy: I think if we take the Internet as this vast repository of information that becomes this pool that could be managed in a way and it’s not — I mean, I know you’re going to say there’s not one person in charge but I think that if we look at it as something that was managed in a way that it’s not now, to me that might not be — might be an ideal state.

(00:20:08)

And if it was, what will we hope to do if there were that one company who was in charge of the whole internet.

Tom Mighell: So my argument would be is that this is still not an information governance issue, this is a knowledge management issue is how I would describe this. Now Knowledge Management is an offshoot of information governance, so it’s related, it’s a sibling, it’s a cousin. But information, governance in the way that I’ve described it on this podcast is properly managing information throughout its lifecycle, implying the information is not going to live forever.

Good information governance means disposing of what you don’t need, when you no longer need it. And I don’t — for this purpose because you don’t want that to happen, you want to be able to keep information because it’s sort of that information that I would think you would put as you never know when I might need this information. And so that to me comes properly under the heading of Knowledge Management or Archiving. Let’s put all the valuable information in a place where nothing can happen to it, where no one can delete it, where it searchable forever, and it’s the world’s largest digital library. And what I’ve described is, what the internet archive wants to be, or want it to be before whatever legal problems it’s having. And it’s huge, and it’s great, but it’s not the be-all end-all. Obviously, I mentioned, it doesn’t have all of my books that it had in it. I just did a search for my last name, just to be curious about what came up with it and I was fascinated because it mostly came up with a bunch of papers written by an Australian relative who apparently is an astronomer.

My dad was quoted in two newspaper articles in the 1960s and that got in around the Kennedy assassination. And then there’s my book and that’s probably all there was in the archive about me. So, to me it’s not. That kind of archive is inconsistent. Should something like that exists? Well, why not? I would say. If that’s a possibility to have, then I would say, “I’d love to be able to have something like that available.” I am very skeptical about one, the right group of people with the right motives, with the right money and resources and with the right ability to capture everything can actually swing something like that. But that, I don’t disagree with you, that would be the Nirvana. I mean, that would be what you’re looking for to make sure that nothing disappears is if somehow everything that got put up on the internet was somehow vacuumed up and locked away behind a door, but to me that’s more about managing knowledge than governing information.

Dennis Kennedy: And I guess maybe I’m thinking that less of this internet archive in a sense although, I like the idea that this stuff is just kind of pulled off into an archive where you could maybe, like go down in the basement of the internet and find things if you wanted. And I think it of more like the library notion where it’s sort of managed and — I mean, I hate to go back to the pre-Google days in some sense, but Google is such a disaster for me these days that those attempts to organize the internet, the yahoos, and the other things are actually kind of attractive to me now.

So maybe there’s this librarian function that could help us. I also like what you’re thinking of saying that maybe this information does need to disappear, or it does have a lifespan, and that’s what we need to do and I would argue that kind of effectively Google search engine is doing that for us because it’s priority on recency, so it’s really hard to find stuff that’s old. But it seems like if we took advantage of some sort of library type of approach, like the librarian approach then we could come up with a better way of doing this.

Again, it’s conceptual, right? The internet that is so huge, right? It is so expensive to do this, so maybe it’s not realistic, but if we could do things that were — some of the things that you’ve talked about, but if we said things had a lifespan or it was tagged, so it could be, kind of, set aside or other things like that. I think that would actually be really useful. I just worry about this stuff that’s just flat-out disappearing.

Tom Mighell: Well, I mean, the archive is the way to do that, but I’ll come back and say, “you can see a value to putting a lifespan on certain types of information, but the value of that information may be different for every single person in this world, is that what you find can go away after a while is somebody else’s, you know, what your trash is somebody else’s treasure.” And so, who gets to make those decisions? I think this is a fascinating theoretical discussion to have about how we would do it but and I would love that idea to happen.

(00:25:03)

But even the company that should be doing it and I think the internet archive comes the closest to doing it, they’re failing because the laws of the land that currently exist, don’t permit them to do it in the certain area that they’ve chosen to that certain area of books that they’ve chosen to collect is that “until we can get everybody to agree on what this archive needs to look like.” That’s what really has to come first. What does it look like? What lives in it? How does it live in there? I think it’s a fascinating thing but I think it’s a dream is my opinion unfortunately.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah and I think the thing is, we’re also as we look at the big tech companies and the responsibilities you will want to put on them. I’m kind of like, “well, why isn’t Google doing this already? Shouldn’t this be part of their obligation in exchange for all the profit that they’ve taken off the internet?” Isn’t it should they have some responsibility that comes with that? Absolutely, that’s a big question.

But I think that as we see things disappearing and like I said, sometimes historically significant things not being it made available anymore. I just think it’s a good time for us to start thinking about it. And also, with the AI tools that we know have been trained on, obviously. We can talk about our books and stuff, but the articles and everything that we’ve done are certainly part of the training of the AIs and we’re not being compensated for that. But I do think it’s maybe a good time to rethink the internet and what it needs to look like and maybe we just don’t let it, we just don’t leave it in the hands of the whims of the owners of the big tech companies.

Tom Mighell: Well, I am a very cynical person when it comes to hearing the words corporate and responsibility in the same sentence. Those things don’t often happen all that often. And I think that using Google is the example. Go0ogle is a money-making company. They’re not focused on being stewards of information and doing the right thing for it.

And so, I think that the more successful approach unfortunately is we’re going to have to be our own internet archive. We are going to have to keep our own stuff. The stuff that is important to us, because when you talk about the we, we need to do this, we need to do that.

Who’s the we? I mean, to me, that’s still a pie in the sky. I don’t know who that group is and how do we get started. If it’s just you and me than I am very, very deeply cynical for how that winds up skeptical for how that ends up. But I see a lot more success in our personal curation of information. The stuff that happens to be interesting to us, you mentioned in the notes here. Your second brain project, the fact that we are capturing information and keeping what is important to us there. I see that as the value. Let’s keep our own archive, let’s keep our own information what’s useful for us to go back and look over time as a treasure trove because I don’t believe that we can rely on anybody else to do exactly what we think needs to be done.

Dennis Kennedy: Right. And to wrap it up time, I think that that is a big driving force behind. For me, especially the second brain project and part of the thing that got me thinking about this was that I was effectively pulling information out of Twitter in the way and using it as a link blog into Feedly and other things, and then Twitter broke the APIs, and I’m like, if we’re going to have these things and people have these big companies and we’re relying on them to certain extent that you shouldn’t break fundamental APIs. So, now I had something to work really well and I have to go back and reinvent it.

So Anyway, I think it’s an interesting topic to think about. It’s like by AI and law class with lots of questions, totally no answers whatsoever and the problems just seemed bigger and bigger the more you think about them.

Tom Mighell: Well, I will say that all of these things or things that have been happening and, if you think back over time, the world’s knowledge and information has always been catalogued, it’s always been kept, just not for free where anybody in the world can access it. The internet was a promise of something different that’s turning out to not be what we hoped it would be. Just because it’s disappearing from public view, doesn’t necessarily mean that someone doesn’t have it someplace else. And I would just say finally, there was never a guarantee or a promise that the internet would be the forever place of all information. I don’t know where that promise was ever made, but I just don’t expect that it’s happening and we’re just going to have to figure out how to get around that and learn to live in spite of that.

(00:30:00)

Dennis Kennedy: That promise was made to me, Tom. But unfortunately, it disappeared off the internet.

Tom Mighell: All right, and with that, I think we’ve said about as much as we can on this topic. Before we move on to our next segment, let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsors.

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Tom Mighell: And now, let’s get back to the Kennedy-Mighell Report. I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy. Summer is actually approaching, and I thought it might be a good time to revisit the status of our 2023 tech goals. Both for accountability and for encouragement, it took some effort to convince Tom. This is a good topic in part because he views our resolutions. Not as goals, but as a competition. And it’s easy to get frustrated with your progress on resolutions and not want to look at them again, although, what I find is often that when you do look at them, you’re doing better than you’ve thought.

So, I think it’s better to pull the band-aid off and see where you are and congratulate yourself for what you’ve done and make any needed adjustments. And that’s actually easier than ever this year because so much is happening now in tech. It was barely on the radar at the beginning of the year and everybody is behind. So, Tom, do you want to lead us off?

Tom Mighell: So, Dennis, I don’t know what kind of bizarro world you’re living in, but you’re the one who views this as a competition, because I really think that you’re choosing the topic to prove to the world how much better you are at resolutions than me. Because what I’ve learned that to be successful at resolutions, you need to actually have time to work at them. And if it doesn’t help, if your current work situation has you working nights, weekends and all hours, which has been my experience the past few months. In hindsight, I think my resolution probably should have been to find a way to work less. But, alas, here I am.

Needless to say, I have made much progress. I haven’t made any steps with getting better at audio or video or redesigning my home office. So, it was more video friendly. I haven’t started any deep dives into collaboration tools. I have resolved to improve my content consumption workflow in that area. I have done something. I haven’t actually been able to consume any content fairly, because I’ve been working too much. And frankly, Twitter has taken away a lot of the content consumption issues, because I’m not spending as much time over there as I used to.

The one area I think that I’m probably making any marginal level of improvement isn’t getting better at notion, but that’s less about second brain which is where we’ve been talking mostly about and more about using notion to plan my upcoming Scandinavian vacation this summer. I created a database of restaurants to consider in Copenhagen Stockholm. Now, I’m creating an itinerary system that has every part of the vacation plotted out with walking tours and maps, and copies of all the documents I need. If you can’t tell, and I’m a compulsive vacation planner, you probably know that by now.

Anyway, I am excited for the progress I’m making. I’m designing databases. I’m designing all sorts of connections in there. When it’s time for a new vacation next year, whenever I take the next vacation, I’m just going to be able to click a button in notion and will immediately pull up all the forms that I need to plan it and create an itinerary, and make that itinerary easy to use when I’m actually out and about on my trip this summer. I’m excited for this progress but I will admit it is modest progress. All right, Dennis, time for your not so humble brag.

Dennis Kennedy: So, resolution one was making significant progress on second brain to the next generation and learning more about notion, which I’ve made significant progress. But I’m sort of laying out what the next generation is going to look like. But I’ve really found some features of notions like a brain, I like, and I’ve just started diving into notion AI, which is incredibly promising to me. And maybe we’ll talk about it in the future podcast.

(00:35:09)

Second one was practical applications of generative AI. This is really driven by my AI and law class. We actually spent a whole class playing which at GPT with the students so we see what it would do. And I really found some uses that I think work for me. I also really see the constraints and so, there’s some things there. So, I give myself actually probably pretty close to an A on that one.

The third one, I’m kind of — where you are, Tom on a couple of yours and I call it the post Twitter approaches. So, being more intentional about news and social media consumption, deciding what I’m going to do if I leave Twitter and developing communities in many networks, and basically, I’ve kicked the can down the road on those to the fall. So, that’s one of one of the ways to deal with the resolutions.

And then I had this idea that I was going to make 2023 a hardware year, and then se Apple pencil in the Elgato Stream Deck, and that’s still on the drawing board.

I also had this notion that we talked about on a podcast or I mentioned called the appropriate tech. And now, I’ve been thinking about that and I also have a better way of saying it and I think of calling it tech in context. And that’s just an idea I’m rolling around in my head. So, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a big brag time I’ve made progress. It’s been a difficult year for me as well, for a number of reasons. But in the AI stuff, I think I’ve really started to see some things happening.

Tom Mighell: I don’t know. Listen very carefully dear listener to who actually is considering this to be a competition. I think Dennis may have been deflecting on that. Now for the real competition. Now it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip website observation you can use the second on this podcast ends. Tom, take it away.

Tom Mighell: Here’s another Microsoft 365 tool that I have surprisingly found an interest in, and that is a tool called Microsoft Viva Insights. Now, when I first heard about Viva Insights, so I was not terribly interested because it talked about well-being at work. And, although that’s interesting to me, it’s not necessarily about productivity. But I’ve really learned some interesting things about what you can do with Viva. You can use it to set quiet time so that if you have hours that you want to set aside, all you do is you go and set that time. It will automatically block your calendar off and it will stop all notifications while you have quiet time. You can set, and this is one thing that I have done. I’ve set evening hours within Viva Insights so that I get no notifications on my phone between the hours of 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. in the morning, or on the weekends. And I will tell you it’s glorious.

I didn’t even know that I wasn’t getting notifications. It was so nice. I wasn’t even paying attention to it. You can set lunch hours. You can set no meeting day reminders. If you have a day that doesn’t have a lot of work in it, it will remind you that you don’t have much and it will encourage you to cancel what meetings you do have so you can actually get work done. One of the things that I have done is you can set virtual commute hours. So, around 5:00 every day, or you can tell what time you wanted to set it, I get a little notice in Teams that says, are you ready to wind down and begin your virtual commute. And the first thing is, it makes you look at your calendar for tomorrow and see what you need to do. It then takes you to your to-do list which if you use Microsoft to do is a great option. I don’t, so it’s not all part of my wind down, but you can then decide what you need to do.

And finally, it takes you to a selection of head space either meditations or relaxation recording so that you can start to wind down. I really think that it’s a very well-thought-out and very interesting tool. If you want to help, make you more mindful about how you’re working at work. I think it’s all free in their Microsoft 365 subscription. But it’s just it’s there. If you look in Teams, just go look for Microsoft Viva Insights.

Dennis Kennedy: There’s some really cool things that you were just describing. That’s something to look into. Self-care, big topic for me this year. I’ll say again, please don’t forget about what happened at Michigan State in February. As we’re recording, we just finished our last class of the semester and headed into finals. I can tell you, it’s been a difficult and challenging year because of what happened. Remember to connect with the people you care about in your communities. Then, I found this video that I had to share with Tom immediately when I saw it, it’s by a guy who goes by the handle of karma medic and his first name is Nasir. The video is called Notion AI is amazing and it’s how to use Notion AI tutorial and examples, it’s on YouTube. It’s about 20 minutes.

If you want to get an idea of good, practical, kind of small uses of AI that can really help you and see what they might be and just cut through all this hype about AI and replacing lawyers and all these things, and say what can it actually do for me that will help me. This video will blow you away. It is amazing and I’m just trying more and more things with Notion AI in addition to the GPT4 tools. This is the thing I’m going to point people to from now on to say, if you want to do something with generative AI, here are the things that you can do that will actually help you.

Tom Mighell: And so, that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode on the Legal Talk Network’s page for the show. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes on the Legal Talk Network site or in your favorite podcast app. If you like to get in touch with us, you can always reach out to us on LinkedIn. We are periodically on Twitter these days, but you can always leave us a voicemail. We love to get your questions for our B segments. That number is (720) 441-6820. Maybe you’ll leave a comment on whether the internet is disappearing for you as well. Until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy, and you’ve been listening to the Kennedy-Mighell Report, a podcast on legal technology with an internet focus. If you like what you heard today, please write us on Apple Podcasts and we’ll see you next time for another episode of the Kennedy-Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the Kennedy-Mighell Report. Check out Dennis and Tom’s book, ‘The Lawyers’ Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies, Smart Ways to Work Together’ from ABA Books or Amazon. Enjoy this every other week for another edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report only on the Legal Talk Network.

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