Month: October 2007
Blogs v websites (with RSS)
Banging on about the benefits of blogs is not the sole preserve of Binary Law. Kevin O’Keefe, leading US champion of blogs for lawyers, does it constantly and persuasively. Today he succinctly summarises why large law firm blogs beat law firm websites with RSS feeds.
Campaign for law publishers’ RSS feeds
Steve Matthews of Stem shows “how useful RSS can be outside the personal reader” with LegalPubs.ca, “a one stop showcase of the products offered by Canadian legal publishers”. Using RSS technology, I have mixed the 10 latest items for each of the publishers … Each entry is passed along unmodified from the publisher’s original feed, […]
Susskind 2.0 – the digested read
In the second extract from his forthcoming book, The End of Lawyers?, published in Times Online, Richard Susskind revisits his predictions in 1996’s The Future of Law: I argued that … many of our fundamental assumptions about the nature of legal service and the nature of legal process would be challenged by the coming of […]
Feeding the five thousand (2)
Lo-fi librarian bemoans the lack of RSS feeds for new title information from the law publishers. Feeds for new titles and editions is such a no brainer, in my view everyone would benefit, there is less chance of a new text being overlooked and ordered late so the user is happy, the librarian saves time […]
Lawyers not necessary shock
Times Online publishes the first of several excerpts from Richard Susskind’s forthcoming book, The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the nature of legal services, due next May from OUP, from which: the law is not there to provide a livelihood for lawyers any more than ill-health exists to offer a living for doctors. Successful legal business […]
Navigational search
Navigational search – gaining access to a specific site or page by searching for the actual web address or a portion of it – is common, not just amongst the uninitiated (who you might say do it out of ignorance), but amongst the web savvy. Jeremy Crane at Compete: It’s actually astonishing how often people […]
CaseCheck
Here’s a great new Law 2.0 initiative. CaseCheck, headed by Stephen Moore, offers case summaries from the Scottish Courts and EAT, delivered latest-first and also categorised, with RSS feeds. Selected committed users author the summaries; all users can add comments. Does that sound like a familiar formula? Yes, it’s built with an open source blog […]
Thought leadership through blogging
Steve Matthews posts a considered article on Slaw on Thought Leadership – the selling of ‘expertise’ that has always been a crucial element to legal marketing – through blogging: The results that can be achieved … have been repeatedly demonstrated with current blogging leaders, and are difficult to refute: Increased media exposure; A devoted referral […]
Google – the only law firm directory to bother with?
Larry Bodine thinks so: Clients use Google to look up phone numbers and addresses, so law firms can cancel their yellow pages ads. When clients want to check out your firm, they are not going to call up to get your printed brochure, they will look you up online. Kevin O’Keefe agrees but sees the […]
Free access is not open access
I highlight again a single point from para 87 of the Power of Information review from my acronymically-entitled previous post PSI4U: It is relatively easy to suggest changes that would give citizens and organisations better access to information held by government. These include … republishing information in open standards or as web services. Let’s look […]
Assault and battery
Information Overlord thinks the look and feel of the redesigned Lawyer website is “just nasty“. That’s harsh, but it is certainly a brutal assault on the senses: hundreds of info fragments dressed up with red and blue all over and replete with the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes (and token green and orange […]
Opening up the social graph
Francis Irving of the Open Knowledge Foundation posts about how Brad Fitzpatrick, ex Six Apart and now with Google, plans to open up the social graph (the connections between people that build social networks). Currently the now numerous social networks all operate as walled gardens; the ultimate goal of Brad’s project is, via a a […]
OPSI Legislation – heading towards the semantic web
The OPSI Report on Public Access Scheme Funding 2006/07 gives a good summary of recent and planned improvements in the OPSI legislation site. (See also my earlier post on improved access.) Here are some extracts from the (pdf) report: Over the last year and a half the Office of Public Sector Information has used funding […]
IHT – die happy
Time to mention the blogs IHT Solutions and Law and Death and Taxes who both post about the death of the nil-rate band discretionary trust. IHT Solutions: You could certainly call the government politically cynical but for once, one can be magnanimous and simply accept that the government have listened to the voices of “middle […]
