There I am banging on about losing the I from IT, when it seems IT is losing the plot altogether.
LegalIT, from LegalWeek has disappeared; the nearest equivalent on the new LegalWeek site is the Management & IT section.
The Legal IT News blog from Legal IT Forums (legalitforums.com) has also disappeared.
Legal IT Forums is no relation to Legal IT Forum (legalitforum.com) (“The most important Legal IT event of the year strictly for IT Directors and Senior Professionals worldwide”), nor I think to Legal IT Forum (legalitforum.co.uk) (“a free forum dedicated to Legal IT Professionals”).
[Updated following clarification from OUT-law: see comments] On a more positive note, selected OUT-law.com articles are now blogged in the ITproPortal Legal IT channel. ITproPortal aims to “bring together the latest articles for the best IT websites into one central site … our information channels make it easy for you to focus on your areas of interest.” I can’t find a link to this from the OUT-law site. It’s aimed at a different market, but you’d think there be some mention.
The only consistent legal technology news sites are Charles Christian’s Legal Technology Insider and sister blog The Orange Rag. Astutely he never adopted the I.
And finally … a useful feed or two would be nice, indeed expected, from the SCL site, an association dedicated to “IT law and IT for lawyers”. Does anyone use the SCL feed? I’m sorry to say it’s a joke. It is billed as bringing you “links to news, events, articles and news items posted over the last seven days.” In fact at present it’s a feed just of SCL event details; the feed description is “Some descriptive text”; the items are undated and they appear in apparently random order (presumably the date added to the CMS). We deserve better.
For avoidance of doubt, ITproPortal was given permission to reproduce a certain number of OUT-LAW stories per week. The material they use is already on OUT-LAW.COM. It is not an OUT-LAW blog.
Struan
Editor, OUT-LAW
Struan
Thanks for the clarification. So ITproPortal select from your news items and post them with your by-line? I appreciate this is not a blog per se, but functionally it’s the same and I used the term in that sense.
Nick
I will certainly look at ways of improving the SCL feed. It is not true that the SCL feed only gives details of events – or at least not if linked to effectively. All items posted should be available on the SCL feed – for example, today’s (29 Jan) on Point v Focus and, if you have your RSS feed set properly, you should earlier this month have got the first news of the Baker Robbins acquisition by Thomson through SCL.
But if you happen to check it while the Web editor is on holiday (as I was last week), you will get a slightly slewed idea of what it produces.
Laurence
I’m not sure what “linked to effectively” and “if you have your RSS feed set properly” mean.
I’m reading the feed http://www.scl.org/rss.asp with Firefox and a custom feedreader. Neither of these stores the history, so I’m just looking at the current feed.
As there are only 5 items in the feed and the items are not dated, I’ve no idea how many items are added nor with what frequency. It’s likely I miss items as will others, so simply increasing the number of items in the feed would benefit.
It’s true the Point v Focus news item is in today’s feed, though when I’ve checked before all items have been events, so the news content is fairly light and I’ve never seen an article linked in the feed.
Nick