Yahoo is rolling out a brand new search engine today, with its own index and ranking mechanisms, casting aside its long-standing use of Google-powered search results.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February 2004.
In its quest to offer new services for web surfers Google quietly launched but then dropped a WHOIS lookup service on the search site after Network Solutions blocked most of the queries. WHOIS allows you to find out who is responsible for a website or other internet address. NSI argues that the number of search requests surpassed its daily limits which are designed to deter spammers.
The ODPM has announced it is establishing an integrated programme to bring together a whole raft of projects and initiatives, including the Planning Inspectorate’s Planning Portal, designed to drive forward the e-planning agenda. In the forefront of progress now is the government-funded Planning and Regulatory Services Online national project (PARSOL), one of the 20 or so projects for local e-government funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. PARSOL aims to help all councils build online access to planning applications at all stages of the planning process as well as advice and answers to questions about planning.
Centaur Communications, the publisher of The Lawyer magazine and TheLawyer.com, has been sold for about £130m to stockbroker Numis Securities, who plan to float the company on the junior Aim market. The acquisition by Numis has sparked some controversy and may yet result in an investigation by the Financial Services Authority. Meanwhile back at the coalface, TheLawyer.com is expected shortly to relaunch LawZone, the legal community website it acquired last year from Sift, as an aggregator of articles provided by law firms and chambers. Using the Sift technology Lawzone will draw together articles published by firms and chambers and provide links from the text to free and paid for services (such as Context and LexisNexis). In addition to the main site, the site will be structured around over 20 specialist zones focusing on a range of practice areas and supported by generalist and specialist newswires.
LexisNexis is launching the first release of a single global technology platform that will deliver its information products and services in the US and worldwide. The new single platform is intended to make it easier for lawyers or other professionals working around the world to obtain information relevant to their home country or to other countries. Customers in Australia and France will be the first to benefit from the new platform when LexisNexis launches enhanced online legal research products in these countries early in the first quarter of 2004. In addition, LexisNexis is to begin releasing enhanced news and business research and business intelligence products on the new platform to companies and information specialists in Germany in early 2004. The job of rolling out the new platform in the UK at the end of the year and migrating existing LexisNexis customers (who will have to learn how to use the new system) goes to Helen Mumford, LexisNexis UK’s new MD, appointed last year from the IT research and consultancy specialist Gartner Group, supported by Dominic Riley, strategic marketing director, who was previously involved in the launch of bbc.co.uk and consumer portal handbag.com. Mumford and Riley are clearly well placed to face the full force of BIALL and to counter any threat posed by Westlaw who will no doubt want to make the most of their arch rival’s potential vulnerability.
Following research into the issues surrounding e-mail usage within the legal industry and the associated risks, the Legal IT Innovators Group (LITIG), an organisation specifically for senior professionals involved directly in all aspects of implementation, use and support of legal IT systems in the UK, has created two Good Practice Guides on Acceptable Usage Policy (AUP) and User Good Practice. These documents are available for any organization to adapt for their own usage. The LITIG team working on this project included Rosemary Kind, Director of Business Support IT & Finance at Shoosmiths and David Coates, IT director, Bond Pearce.
LITIG Good Practice Guides [updated]
The Department of Health (DH) relaunched its website on 16 February 2004. The site has been completely redesigned and restructured. The new site is intended to provide improved navigation and a more powerful search engine, and will also help the DH meet government standards on accessibility and targets for electronic service delivery. Content is now organised around ‘themes’ and much out-of-date content has been removed. But the site’s domain address has changed from doh.gov.uk to dh.gov.uk and has rendered many deep links obsolete. The current site consists of more than 100,000 pages, and search tools show that there are around 300,000 other pages on the internet that link to somewhere on the site. The DH has set up redirects for key areas of the site. In all other cases, if a doh URL is used, users are redirected to the home page where they must conduct a search to find the relevant documents. The web site is the first outside the Cabinet Office to be underpinned by a content management system developed by the Office of the e-Envoy for public bodies. The system, known as Delivering on the Promise (DotP), is a central building block in the OeE’s strategy for ensuring that all departments meet the 2005 target for all services to be available online.
In anticipation of the Money Laundering Regulations 2003 coming into force on 1 March 2004, the Law Society has published fresh guidance for solicitors on the effect on them of the latest legislation. Under the new regulations most solicitors’ practices will fall into the regulated sector for many areas of legal work, including property transactions and much company and trust work. The new failure to report provisions in the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA) will apply to this extended sector. The guidance has been published in pilot form so it can be revised in the light of comments from solicitors and developments in the enforcement and interpretation of the legislation. A revised version is likely in 6 to 12 months time. The Institute of Chartered Accountants has also published guidance for its members.
Law Society guidance[updated]
The new communications regulator Ofcom, with responsibilities across television, radio, telecommunications and wireless communications services, took over the functions of the various previous industry regulators in December 2003. The Ofcom website provides a wealth of information for practitioners and consumers, including sections on codes and policies, competition and complaints bulletins, consultations, research, consumer information, industry groups and information, licensing and numbering and the legacy regulators.
Blogging – the publishing of online journals or web logs – has increased rapidly in popularity and is now starting to penetrate the consciousness even of lawyers.
For the publisher (or blogger) weblogs are attractive as no technical skills are required to publish them: with a blogging service provider such as Blogger, you can set up an account and publish your blog within minutes, just by “pressing buttons”. But there are enough amateur publishers out there on the web already and you may be forgiven for thinking that blogging is just adding to the mayhem. However, blogs have a standard structure – a reverse chronology of items (or postings) comprising date, title and body – and standard methods for maintaining archives. So a standard format is established and the reader quickly becomes familiar with it.
Blogs tend to encourage personal diaries and musings and the better ones make for compulsive reading. For a sample of quality blogs see the Guardian Online article on The best of British blogging.
The diary format is also ideal for current awareness publishing and this tends to be their application in the better law blogs (also, unfortunately, known as blawgs). Legal blogging has taken off in the USA (too many lawyers?) – see The Blogbook for a listing – but in the UK only a handful have so far come to light, including:
- Keeping Legal – Legal issues affecting the information profession.
- Freedom of Information Act Weblog – news, views and updates on the UK Freedom of Information Act and worldwide FOI
- IPKat – intellectual property news and issues, particularly from the UK and Europe
- Law and Support’s Local Government Update – with roots in a newsletter intended for members of the Association of Larger Local Councils
- UK Criminal Justice Weblog – latest news about criminal justice issues from around the UK
- Bournemouth and Poole 6th Form Law Weblog
Law blogs are of various quality and utility. I’ll leave you to make your own mind up about the ones listed above; their only distinction is that they are the first. And, of course, some of the best specialist legal news sites are not blogs, though they share similar hallmarks; see, for example, Out-law.com’s IT and e-Commerce News.
