Year: 2013
Is there a dark side of the moon? and other questions
I’ve been trying to get a handle on Google’s new Hummingbird algorithm update, but with so many self-appointed experts spewing out so much tosh on the web, it’s taken a while to gather my thoughts. One of the most helpful pieces I have come across is by Jeremy Hull on Wired Insights, from which (my […]
Never mind breaking bad, don’t be evil!
I’m conscious that I’ve not put a virtual pen to WordPress for more than a month now. Last Saturday a friend asked me where I found the inspiration for my daily blog! Clearly he does not take as close an interest in my virtual presence as I thought. Walter White broke bad early on: series […]
5 social networking mistakes for professionals
You connect with 500+ people on LinkedIn, then spend all your time trying to figure out which of your 75,000+ second degree connections are of any value. You endorse your connections for skills that LinkedIn suggests they possess before realising you should just click Skip every time. You proudly display several skills on your LinkedIn […]
BAILII wins grant from Legal Education Foundation
BAILII is one of the first six organisations to win a grant from the Legal Education Foundation which was launched 10 July. The Foundation is the charity established following the sale of the College of Law last year. It has some £200 million to invest, making it one of the largest foundations in the sector. […]
Justice going digital (2)
You can view the progress of development of GOV.UK’s 25 digital exemplar services, of which 4 are the MoJ projects shown above, from the Digital Transformation dashboard. The Government Digital Strategy and Departmental Digital Strategies commit us to the redesigning and rebuilding of 25 significant ‘exemplar’ services. We’re going to make them simpler, clearer and […]
Justice going digital
Whatever you may feel about some of the cost-saving justice changes afoot, there’s no doubt that the government’s “digital by default” strategy will both help achieve some of the savings they crave and deliver better services. The Justice Secretary in the foreword to the MoJ Digital Strategy believes: It will transform the services we provide, […]
Justice on the move
Interested in access to justice? You bet. I’m not talking here about the withdrawal of legal aid though I urge you to follow #savukjustice and sign the petition if you have not already done so. What I’m referring to is the migration of content from the Justice website to GOV.UK. We’d just got used to […]
RSS – dontcha just love it?
I’m a big fan of RSS and wish it was better understood, after all it’s really simple. But it’s an open standard (like HTML and other geeky stuff), not a sexy platform (like Twitter et al). Like me Dieter Bohn loves RSS. His piece in The Verge on Why RSS still matters is well worth […]
We are all (micro) publishers now
Proposals for incentives as part of a new system of independent, self-regulation of the press have been refined to make sure “micro-business” blogs are outside of the scheme. [DCMS news story] I’m checking out the pretty chart and wondering why this malarky has been made so complicated. Why single out bloggers anyway as you then […]
Simpler, clearer, faster (maybe)
So the the GOV.UK site from the Government Digital Service won the Designs of the Year 2013 award. This is proving to be somewhat divisive: FOR are those designers who appreciate its “agile, user-centred design” AGAINST are those who like a pretty website, and UNDECIDED are those like me who would like to be FOR […]
Give me my life back!
[^ What’s this? ^] Bad news recently … or is it? Google is retiring Google Reader, used by millions of news junkies, including self, but sidelined at Googleplex in recent years in favour of development of Google+. This follows the general trend of users away from feed reading to Twitter and other streaming update services. […]
Precedents on Disk (way back)
Consider the WP scene in the mid-80s when I first produced Precedents on Disk for what was then Longman Law Tax & Finance (since purchased by Sweet & Maxwell). We catered for the most common word processor formats of the day, including dedicated word processors like IBM Displaywriter, Decmate, Wang and Wordplex; DOS (PC) word […]
Outreach
Hi there, [well, hello!] I hope you are well and are having a good week. [you care?] I’m contacting you from xxx, a content agency based in xxx. [content? uh oh!] We came across your site and we really like it [well, thanks!] and in fact we work with a number of clients that would […]
