Author: Nick Holmes
Cool legal info tools
A roundup of recent legal info tools that have come to my attention but not been blogged yet: law.librarians is a group blog set up by lo-fi librarian: A bit of an experiment really. The template for this blog is called Prologue and it lets you (once you are logged in) blog in a Twitter-like […]
IPITevents
Jordan Hatcher has set up IPITevents to “fill a problem” – how to easily keep track of upcoming intellectual property and information technology conferences, events, and CPDs in the UK. As a busy academic lawyer, I found that while there were a few UK blogs and sites that regularly posted interesting events, I either had […]
The Big Switch
More scary stuff. Just 100 years ago larger businesses generated their own electricity. The subsequent development of the electricity grid, delivering electricity as a commodity, profoundly changed business and society. In the same way, argues Nick Carr in The Big Switch, computer utilities will replace in-house facilities and business and society will be transformed again […]
Better than free
David Tebbutt at IWR neatly summarises a hypothesis from Kevin Kelly that in the digital age anything that can be copied and distributed for free becomes worthless and that therefore value resides only in associated non-copyable attributes. Kevin categorises these attributes as: immediacy, personalisation, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment (a non-digital representation, eg a book or […]
Exposing the social graph
With the launch last week of Google’s Social Graph API we can finally start to visualise the “social graph” – the connections between people on the web. It is only relatively recently that the relationships between people have been declared explicitly on the web – on social networking sites and publicly via open standards such […]
Lexblog Q & A
Rob La Gatta, Editorial Manager at Lexblog, has already conducted and published on Real Lawyers Have Blogs numerous interviews with leading names in the field of law firm blogging and web marketing. These Q & As deliver structured, in-depth thoughts on the issues law firms should be addressing with regard to their web presence. Latest […]
DIG it
Further to my last post, here’s a Proposed Compromise in respect of Digital Rights vs. Copyright Enforcement based on “a little education, a little guilt, and a little fear”. The proposer, K Krasnow Waterman, is an independent consultant, advising or providing interim leadership to corporations, government, start-ups and a project building new web technologies at […]
The price of free music
Here’s a couple of truisms in the digital age: once you digitise your content, you have to wave your content goodbye users are willing to pay for digital services that make their lives easier Current attempts to help the music industry dig itself out of its hole seem to ignore the latter, relying on advertising […]
The Future of Ideas
A little bit of a stir erupts as Lawrence Lessig persuades Random House to release his (2001) The Future of Ideas, in which he explores “the fate of the commons in a connected world”, under a Creative Commons licence. But don’t get too excited just yet. It’s currently available only as a single, dumb, 350-page […]
Hats off to Charon QC
I finally succumbed to Charon QC‘s invitation to be be interviewed for his series of podcasts – in Podcast 37, wherein we discuss infolaw, blawging and the future direction of law publishing. One day on and he has already put out another individual podcast and the second of his Weekend Review podcasts in which several […]
Lessons from Facebook
Like many “grown up” commentators, Martin Weller, a Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University, sees Facebook fading away for many of us as we get back to the humdrum of everyday life (Facebook was a holiday romance, not the great love of your life). However, rather than rehearsing the reasons why he has […]
He couldn’t have said it better himself
I came across the following hilarious garbage, scraped from Kevin O’Keefe’s post about my FamilyLawPipe and translated into … what? Family accumulation pipes? Nick Holmes, a business consultant specializing in the UK jural sector, has created a FamilyLawPipe aggregating UK kinsfolk accumulation feeds with character Pipes. From Nick: —Yahoo Pipes is a assist from character […]
On citizenship of a virtual republic
Two different takes questioning why we should want to buy into the virtual republic that is Facebook: Stephen Fry in his Dork talk column: what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago? Is it part of some deep human […]
Pimp your own ride
Steve Matthews believes there will be a big increase soon in the use of blog software to build websites. Agreed. I’ve already said a lot about the benefits of blogging for networking and raising profile. You may not be convinced; you may not see yourself as a “thought leader”; you may not want to hang […]
Law pipes
Well, the cat’s out the bag already. Within hours John Bolch picked up on a FamilyLawPipe I created yesterday with Yahoo Pipes. For those of you who need an introduction, Yahoo Pipes is a service from Yahoo which enables you to take inputs from RSS feeds and other XML etc files, manipulate them (eg sort, […]
