June 2006

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Anything but easy

30 June 2006 in Intellectual property | 2 comments

Thanks to my fan Charon QC -who crafts his excellent blog without the aid of blogging software -for his kind comments about Binary Law.

In the same post he picks up on Geeklawyer’s rant about Sir Stelios (Parental Advisory: includes **** – look away now) and points to the Wikipedia entry for the said Greek-Cypriot, which includes the following paragraph illustrating how difficult Mr Easy is

He continues to receive unfavourable publicity for a policy of attempting to claim all company names/web URL’s containing the word “easy” for his group of companies, even when the name was already in use. His critics point out that unlike brand names such as Virgin, Easy is a quality that most businesses would aspire to be and it is unfair to hijack the name from the English business lexicon. They also point out that, other than easyJet, Sir Stelios’ other enterprises lack the substance trumpted about in the press. Karl Kahn, the rightful owner of an Easypizza brand established 7 years before Sir Stelios launched his pizza shop selling cooked from frozen pizzas commented ‘We knew we were in the right, we’d had the name for longer and had no intention to copy them or anything about them’ after easyPizza were forced to drop their aggressive case which caused the small business owner to go into debt to defend himself. He described the year spent defending the bullying approach by easyGroup as ‘an absolute nightmare’.

More about this saga in an article on OUT-LAW.com.

This prompts me to investigate who owns the easylaw domains:

easylaw.co.uk
Congratulations Cobleys LLP

easylaw.com(not found)
Commiserations to Wild West Domains, Inc.

Domain Name: EASYLAW.COM
Registrar: WILD WEST DOMAINS, INC.
Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
EPP Status: clientRenewProhibited

Not sure exactly what all that means but it looks bad.

easylaw.eu(not found)
???

Current Law Journal Content

29 June 2006 in General resources, Law publishing

Hats off to Washington & Lee Law School for their fantastic resource, Current Law Journal Content. CLJC provides summary views and feeds for the content of over 1220 law journals, sets up searches for individual articles across relevant web resources and links to full content where available. (Of course, full content is free for only a few; typically most content links are to the publishers’ subscription services or to LexisNexis or Westlaw.)

The database is built from scanned copies of journal contents pages supplied by the University of Texas Tarlton Law Library (694), Washington & Lee itself (93) and other libraries (44), and additional contents pages received electronically via e-mail, websites or RSS feeds (389).

Navigation is not for the faint-hearted. Law librarians and information professionals will love it, but I suspect less experienced users will feel at sea. To browse the summaries, select UK from the country drop-down and then click the alpha letters. The full list of UK law journals totals 149.

You can set up a personal profile to view the summaries that interest you and you can also configure RSS feeds or iframes to deliver them to your reader or website. For example, RSS feed of UK law journal issues published in the last 30 days.

Thanks to Slaw for the link.

No, Stelios doesn’t own “orange”

28 June 2006 in Law blogs, Legal IT

Charles Christian of the Orange Rag (Legal Technology Insider) is blogging. Welcome to the blogosphere.

Syndication, syndication, syndication

28 June 2006 in Articles, Feeds

First published July 2006 in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers

The most helpful expansion of the RSS acronym (there are several) is Remote Site Syndication. In this context, syndication refers to making data feeds available from a website in order to provide others with an updated set of content from it (for example latest news). News and blog sites were the first to offer feeds, but increasingly many other types of information are syndicated.

Support for syndication is now developing rapidly. This article recaps on the essentials of RSS, explains why it is set to become ubiquitous and points you to the many RSS feeds now available for lawyers.

Benefits of syndication

The benefits of syndication are that it replaces the “push and pull” of internet publishing with an open “channel” between you and the publisher. You subscribe to feeds that interest you and are then constantly fed updated information, without any action on your part and without disrupting your current activities.

By subscribing to RSS feeds you avoid the need to visit numerous favourite websites to view what’s new (the “pull”). Nor need your inbox fill up with unread email newsletters which arrive not when you want but when the publisher wants (the “push”) and which contain perhaps only one or two items of immediate interest.

[Updated: A good, straightforward, example of an RSS feed and its benefits is provided by the Ministry of Justice. Visit their home page and you'll see, at the top left, their latest New headlines. Above the headlines is an orange feed icon. This points to the RSS feed for their syndicated News data. By "subscribing" to this feed as described below you will have constant access to these latest headlines without visiting the MoJ site and can simply click straight through to the pages that interest you.]

Subscribe to multiple feeds from diverse sources that interest you and all your current awareness requirements can be met in this manner, from a single point of access on your desktop.

How to read web feeds

Until recently you could read web feeds only with a dedicated desktop reader, via an email or browser add-on, or using a web-hosted service.

The first feed readers to be developed were dedicated desktop applications and these probably still provide the most comprehensive support for managing and viewing feeds. There are many free and low-cost readers, including RSSReader, FeedReader and NewsGator. Once installed, you add feed URLs to your reader and assign the feeds to user-defined folders. You can then browse the latest headlines and extracts provided by the feeds and need click through to the web only to view the full articles. Most importantly, the reader fetches new feed data at user-defined intervals and alerts you when new items are found.

Email and browser add-ons have also been developed, extending the features of Outlook and Internet Explorer to bring feed data within the ambit of applications you use all the time.

Web-hosted services such as MyYahoo and Google’s personalized home page enable you to manage and read feeds without installing any applications locally. If you use Yahoo or Google as your “gatekeeper”, as many of us do, then maintaining a personalised page incorporating your favourite feeds makes some sense, even if you also use another method to read feeds.

While each of these options has its merits, and none is difficult to implement, the vast majority doesn’t want to be troubled with yet another application. The new open-source Firefox browser and Release 7 of Internet Explorer (currently in beta) will change that. Both have feed support built in: in IE as an extension of Favorites, and in Firefox as part of its equivalent bookmarks functionality. Both browsers automatically “discover” feeds on web pages. You then save the feeds to your favorites (bookmarks) and when you click on a favorite, the live headlines from the feed are displayed.

Adoption of Firefox as a preferred browser is on the increase, but IE still dominates and so it is with the full release of IE7 that feed reading will become second nature to the majority and an explosion of ever-more useful feeds will ensue as users discover its benefits.

What feeds are available

There are already numerous feeds published of direct use to the UK lawyer and the number is now increasing rapidly. However, even for the initiated, discovering them is somewhat of a treasure hunt. Fortunately, I’m doing the work for you and you’ll currently find over 110 feeds, classified under subject headings, in the infolaw Lawfinder Feeds catalogue.

Feeds are of value for any time-sensitive data. The vast majority are of news items. As well as numerous, broadly-classified national news feeds, there are now general legal news feeds, for example from The Lawyer and The Times and also specialist legal news feeds from industry magazines such as Contract Journal (construction law news) and Personnel Today (employment law news) and several from Pinsent Masons’ excellent OUT-Law.com IT and e-commerce law site. Some Government Departments are now offering news feeds and feeds classified by subject are available via the info4local service.

Finally, there are of course blog feeds, delivering news and comment from several of the expanding number of law blog sites.

Feeds are valuable also for distributing other types of information, for example, for conveying abstracts of the contents of the latest issue of a journal (eg OUP’s Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice), for posting a jobs board (eg Jobs in Law from www.jobs.ac.uk), and for notifying the latest accessions to any type of database (eg SOSIG’s What’s New in Law?).

To discover other new feeds for yourself, on news pages and elsewhere, look out for links that say RSS, XML or Atom feed, or more commonly the orange buttons such as or [rss], or increasingly the “live bookmark” icon . In fact, as mentioned above, Firefox and IE7 automatically discover feeds that are linked on a web page, displaying the live bookmark icon in the URL address bar.

There is no real limit to the type of data that can be syndicated with RSS, and as feed data can be repurposed and (copyright restrictions permitting) republished, the uses to which it can be put go far beyond simple feed reading.

A half tonne of bloggers

23 June 2006 in Blogging, General resources

I’ve just chanced upon the new Guardian site Comment is Free as it has hit the ether. Must be brand new as Goog has only one result for it.

Comment is free is a major expansion of Guardian comment and analysis on the web. It is a collective group blog, bringing together regular columnists from the Guardian and Observer newspapers with other writers and commentators representing a wide range of experience and interests. The aim is to host an open-ended space for debate, dispute, argument and agreement and to invite users to comment on everything they read.

The Guardian has already won plenty of awards for its website, and at first peek this new site has raised the bar even higher.

What they have done is technically quite simple, but with tremendous results. All comment and opinion articles are treated as blog posts, tagged with contributor name and also by subject. You can view the “blogs” by contributor (I count 551 of them, each effectively with their own “blog”) or by subject and there are of course, most popular listings etc.

The Grauniad is not strong on law, but even so, Marcel Berlins makes regular, quality contributions in his twice-weekly column, now on his “blog”.

The subject tagging clearly needs more effort as there are precious few tagged “law”.

My only quibble is that they claim this is a blog: it is not, though it could easily move closer to being so. There are only two essential attributes of a blog: a reverse chronology of posts, and a means to browse the archives by date. Bloggers expect these, rely on these; without them you don’t have a blog. Comment is Free displays chronologies, but only of very short extracts and these are insufficient to capture the attention in the way a blog page does; and it does not provide browsing by month. Fix these two things and they will have their blog.

Falling out of love with Google (2)

23 June 2006 in Search

Blogoscope’s Devil’s Guide to Google suggests how you can contribute to the spam fest.

Clocking on

22 June 2006 in Fun

Looks like Feedmelegal is back from sabbatical.

Centralised or distributed (law) publishing?

20 June 2006 in Blogging, Law publishing, Legal web, Wikis

Steve Butler at UKBlawgers argues for “a central source of legal information which is available to all at a very low price” and suggests a sort of grand law wiki as the solution.

Now the wiki is certainly a neat collaborative publishing tool and has many advantages over more conventional publishing systems and many valid applications. But a wiki of the type envisaged would be an ambitious project requiring a huge amount of time from a driving organisation and a team of editors, promoting the concept, establishing the guidelines, moderating the contributions and generally keeping it in shape and pointed in the right direction. It is not often recognised that the success of the best-known wiki, the Wikipedia, is as much down to the selfless effort of the founding fathers and the thousands of specialist editors as it is to the contributions of the millions of individual article authors.

In contrast to the wiki as a centralised source, the blogosphere is a collection of millions of disparate blog sites, bloggers and commenters. Each blog has its own identity and agenda, but all are linked together via the links in posts, in comments and in blogrolls. So communities of those with shared interests quickly form through these “conversations” and a shared source of information and comment emerges.

I’d call the blogosphere and the web in general “distributed publishing”. That does not seem to be a term widely used, but googling it I came across this abstract of an article from a physics publisher, written in 1998, which neatly summarises the concept:

No one publisher or content owner can ever hope to service all of a given user’s information needs. Thus a distributed system of publishing, whereby each publisher ensures that each “knowledge pointer” in their content links to and from all the other important knowledge pointers in given subject areas, ensures that users can go on “information trails”. These trails become a voyage of discovery and the junction points on these trails can often be databases, which aim to provide some comprehensive cover of a subject.

The problem with the large law publishers is that they do attempt “to service all of a given user’s information needs” in the legal domain. But the centralised source, however large and impressive, does not satisfy. We each like to pursue our own voyages of discovery. The same goes for smaller publishers attempting to cover more limited domains. There will always be good stuff out there that they don’t control and of course a vast corpus of public sector information that they would be foolish to republish.

There is no shortage of willing authors out there, but most like to do their own thing. Making sense of this widely distributed information and forging online communities is the focus of most current web development: search, syndication, aggregation, tagging, social networking …

InsideoutLegal

15 June 2006 in Law sites

InsideoutLegal is an innovative new web servicefrom Richard Best (of PharmaBlawg fame) making the most of all new technologies.

InsideoutLegal enables inside counsel to benefit from the legal and practical knowledge that outside counsel choose to share with them, whether in writing or spoken word. That shared knowledge can take the form of links to content on their own websites, or updates, articles and digital audio files posted to InsideoutLegal itself, all of which can be subscribed to by RSS or email.

Inside counsel can also be informed of forthcoming firm and chambers events and learn about outside counsel’s own online legal services. Further, inside and outside counsel alike can scan forthcoming conference listings in a snap and everyone can keep track of what’s happening on InsideoutLegal by subscribing to our blog.

Outside counsel eligible to post to the site are those in The Lawyer’s EURO 100 (2005) or Bar Top 30 (2005). For an introductory period all postings from signed up outside counsel are free. From August the posting of links to the “From around the web” section will remain free, but the posting of other content will become a user-pays service.

Falling out of love with Google

15 June 2006 in Search

I’m a big fan of Google the search engine. Always have been. But like many others, last year I started falling out of love with Google the business. It’s just too big, too powerful and its ambitions too great. It hasn’t abandoned its “don’t be evil” motto, but it defines evil for itself. It has largely retained its focus on search, but it defines the scope of search itself. It developed the brilliant Adwords scheme which was the source of it’s staggering success, but has now polluted the internet and encouraged rampant copy theft and spam through its Adsense scheme.* It knows everything about you but will reveal little about itself. In short Google is the new Microsoft.

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