Greetings and welcome to all. This is the inaugural post of Next Generation eDiscovery, a blog that will focus on legal, technical and compliance issues related to the collection, preservation and early case assessment of social media and other cloud-based data. To provide some context, the team here at X1 Discovery is experienced in developing and supporting technology for collecting electronic evidence in the enterprise to meet eDiscovery and investigation requirements. 
Many of us hail from Guidance Software, the developer of EnCase, which is the leading eDiscovery and investigative solution for collecting from hard drives, both standalone and within the enterprise. And now we turn our focus to current trends and the future.
And the future for eDiscovery is about social media and the cloud. In fact, it seems like just this year when social media became a compelling issue in eDiscovery and is reaching critical mass given the level of rising discourse. With over 700 million Facebook users and 200 million people with Twitter accounts, evidence from social media sites can be relevant to just about every litigation dispute and investigation matter. Social media evidence is widely discoverable and generally not subject to privacy constraints when established to be relevant to a case, particularly when that data is held by a party to litigation or even a key witness.
It seems like in recent months there has been much talk in the eDiscovery and digital investigation fields about social media, mostly outlining the scope of the problem and the need to put corporate policies and procedures in place concerning social media. That discussion is an important first step, but it’s time for actual solutions in terms of technical, legal and investigation techniques. This blog will seek to identify and foster discussion points, educate, and even pontificate at times but also learn from our readers, customers and non-customers alike. We look forward to the dialogue.