Year: 2009
More on Legal Opinions on Google Scholar
From the Law Librarian Blog on a one and a half hour interview with Google engineer Anurag Acharya on the Law Librarian Blog Talk Radio looking into Google Scholar Legal Opinions and Journals: Google designed this for people who know how to use Google at the very least, and to be successful with mining cases […]
Can Google tame the law?
I recently posted on the FreeLegalWeb blog about Legal Opinions on Google Scholar. This was principally to question the assertion that the new service will empower the average citizen. But there are bigger questions to answer about Google’s ability meaningfully to address the needs of legal researchers. For Google, scale is everything: index everything, analyse […]
Why pretty print is bad for the web
Here’s another of my beefs: publishing PDF on the web is lazy, bad practice. PDF – portable document format – what does that mean? It means, here’s what you want to print … in a file. It’s a portable print format; not a native web document format and not an open document format. It looks […]
eLawtric Books anyone?
Jason Wilson explores the pros and cons of what he dubs “eLawtric Books“. In a series of posts he (for the most part) counters Eugene Volokh’s thoughts on the future of electronic books and the law. His view, with which I agree, is that ebooks a la Kindle et al are not the future of […]
Supreme Court judgments – where to read the full story
Thanks to Jennie Law for pointing out that the new UKSC needs to get its publishing act together. It’s been in existence for almost four weeks now and has the most advanced court technology in the world. It delivered its first judgment on 14 October, yet no cases yet appear in the Decided Cases section. […]
A letter
Today I received a letter! Not a love letter*, nor a middle class thank you note, and not an impersonal business letter, but a thank you letter which sought to maintain and progress a business relationship. What a pleasure! Anyone else remember the days when tweeps and other peeps wrote letters? * Weren’t the 60s […]
Is the law a can of beans? (reprise)
Way back in 1999 I wrote a piece on the commoditisation of legal services which still resonates today. Some lawyers are still arguing that there are so many potential pitfalls in using commoditised online services that the customer should always seek legal advice. For example, Angela Davis of Nottingham law firm Berryman warns that DIY […]
The end of BigLawyers – does the rest of society care?
Having just penned my previous post on BigLaw, I browsed the latest issue of Legal Information Management and was riveted not by my own article therein :=), nor by any of the many other worthy articles, but by the Book Review at the end in which solicitor Gillian Bull rather comprehensively disses Susskind’s The End […]
Are we (still) in thrall to BigLaw?
Jordan Furlong bemoans (on Slaw and Law21) the fact that the legal media focus on BigLaw, because BigLaw makes a lot of money, so they’re attractive both as subscribers and as advertising targets. It’s not good for smaller practices, which count the majority of all lawyers among their ranks, that they don’t get to hear […]
Sidewiki – bad idea
Google Sidewiki has got many excited, not because it is neat or cool, but because it is a bad idea – something that feels instinctively wrong and that, after not much further thought, clearly is wrong. Sidewiki installs on the Google Toolbar and allows anyone to comment on any web page, displaying ranked comments in […]
Never mind the content … (2)
Paul Graham, an essayist and successful entrepreneur, pens a very interesting piece on Post-Medium Publishing which is worth reading in full (hat tip John Naughton). He opens: consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books […]
Meta keywords are a waste of time
Google has finally officially confirmed what the SEO community has known for years: it “disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking”. So, don’t waste any more time on them and don’t be impressed by anyone who suggests they matter (including would-be plaintiffs). Meta descriptions, on the other hand, […]
Social business design
“Social business design” is a term you’ve probably not encountered before. I was introduced to it last evening by social computing expert and entrepreneur Lee Bryant at Headshift where I attended an event to explore the themes covered in the report Social Networking for the Legal Profession authored by him with Penny Edwards. I don’t […]
Search engine optimisation – a holistic approach
First Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, September 2009. Most users don’t look past the first two or three pages of results returned by a search engine, so understanding and implementing search engine optimisation (SEO) is critical. SEO is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search […]
Never mind the content, feel the packaging
So, Rupert Murdoch has declared that News International sites will all start charging for content by next summer. What he actually said was he was satisfied that News International could produce “significant revenues from the sale of digital delivery of newspaper content”, that “we intend to charge for all our news websites” and “make our […]
