I’m not one to take work with me on holiday and, while I class blogging as fun, I’m nevertheless throwing the switch for a couple of weeks.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2006.
A lot of misinformation flows in the current debate raging on network neutrality. It is this says Tim Berners-Lee (and he should know):
If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.
That’s all. Its up to the ISPs to make sure they interoperate so that that happens.
Net Neutrality is NOT asking for the internet for free.
Net Neutrality is NOT saying that one shouldn’t pay more money for high quality of service. We always have, and we always will.
For more, read:
- TBL’s thread on Policy and the Web
- Lawrence Lessig’s Blog category NetNeutrality
- a good but lengthy article on WikiPedia
- the FAQ on Save the Internet.com
Unfortunately Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee considering net neutrality in the context of the US Communications Reform Bill, just can’t gets to grips with the concept. Listen to his blather via this post on Public Knowledge and see it lampooned by John Stewart on YouTube.
Probably not in there with your Dan Browns, but here’s a some webby books I’ve read recently or plan to (listed oldest first). You could do worse than feed your brain with one of them this Summer.
Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace (Paperback) by Lawrence Lessig (August 2000)
A Brief History of the Future: Origins of the Internet (Paperback) by John Naughton (October 200)
The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (Paperback) by Lawrence Lessig (August 2003)
Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (Paperback) by Lawrence Lessig (March 2005)
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (Hardcover) by John Battelle (September 2005)
Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers (Hardcover) by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel (January 2006)
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (Hardcover) by Chris Anderson (July 2006)
and to come:
Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0 (Paperback) by Lawrence Lessig (December 2006)
In a post questioning the value of the the traditional website, Kevin O’Keefe neatly summarises how to network effectively on the net:
Law firms and professional service firms network to get work. To network, you need to listen, engage in the discussion, and pass on information others may use in referencing you. …
- Find the discussion via a search for Blogs and Blog discussion – Google and Technorati searches
- Listen to the discussion – use of an aggregator to receive RSS feeds
- Engage in the Internet discussion – comment on another’s blog or post on your own, preferably responding to what you’ve heard
- Empower others to reference you as a reliable and trusted authority – share good content on your blog that will be cited elsewhere on the net
I’m interested in HIPs for two reasons: (1) some of infolaw’s bread and butter is the supply of forms and precedents to lawyers; and (2) HIPs are an example of government regulation which should achieve a social benefit – less delay and hassle in buying a home, one of the most stressful “life events”.
There are many stakeholders with interests in the changes HIPs will enforce and each has its own particular concerns which may or may not be adequately addressed by the Regulations as now enacted. But there is the dry run to sort those out or at least achieve a better compromise.
To my mind HIPs must be a good thing. Yes, there will be imperfections and there will be some losers, but on balance surely it is a good thing that the paper-pushing that is conveyancing will become more standardised. This standardisation can only lead to efficiencies as more of the process can be computed and less is therefore subject to the administrative competence of the individual conveyancer.
I concur wholeheartedly with Nick Stace, campaigns and communications director at Which?, in a recent article in the Observer:
Over the years, trade bodies representing solicitors, mortgage lenders, surveyors and estate agents have all taken part in working groups to assist in drawing up the details of how the packs will work. … it’s difficult to see why some of these people are the same ones who are also busy scaremongering. There is a pilot scheme in operation to iron out any practical issues, so it really is time to set the record straight and give people the facts about HIPs. … The information in the pack is exactly the same that buyers would currently get after they make an offer. The only difference is that with a HIP, they would get it up-front, so would be aware of any potential issues before they proceed too far down the line. … while certain industries may have pocketed millions out of the current process, it’s safe to say that many of us have found the process far from perfect. The time has come to try to fix this mess, and the HIP is the perfect way to start.
I’ve been running Google Adsense on Lawfinder for a few months now – mainly in the interests of research, though it does become seductive. I’ve also followed up on some of the research, blogs and forums about it. Here are my findings:
The vast majority of Adsense accounts earn less than $50 per month and the average is less than $20. There can be no business case for such a pathetic return (except Google’s business case, of course – Goog earns $100s of millions a month from these pathetic accounts). Even if you’re an impecunious student, there are better ways to earn $20.
To make bigger bucks you need to optimise your site for Adsense – or, to put it more forcefully, to prostitute your site in pursuit of mammon. Optimising for Adsense involves, firstly, placing as many instances as Google allows in optimal positions on your pages, choosing the ad formats and tweaking the colours etc to blend in with your site and maximise the likelihood of an ad click (advertent or inadvertent). Secondly, adjusting the content of your pages and creating additional pages to improve the number of page views achieved and the relevance of the ads served.
If you provide products and services, why run Adsense? Optimise your site to sell your own products and services, not to earn pennies advertising others’ products and services.
I’d classify those who do make good money from Adsense as follows, though the dividing line between the categories is fuzzy at best:
(a) You create lots of great content and generate good traffic from that. Good luck to you. Advertising is a valid and perhaps necessary way to support your service.
(b) You run a “professional” blog, a review site, a price comparison site or some such, specifically designed to generate Adsense and other affiliate revenue. You are producing something superficially useful but generally derivative and self-serving only.
(c) You are the lowest form of life, engaging in link farming or splogging, polluting the internet and making us wish Larry and Sergey had never been born.
Charon QC has just moved his blog to a new home on WordPress. He asks me what is this mysterious thing called atrackback? To I quote from the currentWikipedia article:
TrackBack is a mechanism for communication between blogs: if a blogger writes a new entry commenting on, or referring to, an entry found at another blog, and both blogging tools support the TrackBack protocol, then the commenting blogger can notify the other blog with a “TrackBack ping“; the receiving blog will typically display summaries of, and links to, all the commenting entries below the original entry. This allows for conversations spanning several blogs that readers can easily follow.
… Some blogging tools are able to discover these TrackBack URLs automatically, others require the commenting blogger to enter them manually.
Now this all sounds like geeky stuff, andof course the technical understandingis, butin practice what it means is this: I link here with my blogging tool (WordPress) to his first post;his blogging tool (WordPress) will automatically discover this link and post it to his admin “dashboard” and also to the comments section of that post. So he and his fans get to know I commented, and the conversation expands.
