Legal information in the digital age – on the blawg since 2004
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Corporate Blawg UK is “an informal discussion forum on company and commercial law in the UK.”
Law andstuff sells itself in typical student fashion as the “crazy ramblings about the law from the biased perspective of a UK law student … In an attempt to be unoriginal this blog is about law, the internet, student life andstuff.”
I’ve just submitted my feedeback to the SPO on the Statute Law Database as a Public Pilot Phase 2 user. It’s premature to comment publicly in any detail, but here are the substantial points.
Completeness
Some 75 Acts – many substantial – remain to be loaded on the SLD. Further, the effects of much 2002 to 2005 legislation and all 2006 legislation are not yet consolidated. Nor are pre-2001 SIs yet loaded. It is understood this work will be completed by the end of the year when the SLD will be launched. It is not essential that the SLD is complete before launch as it already delivers far more value than the free public access alternatives available. However, if it is significantly incomplete, it is likely to be compared unfavourably with the commercial alternatives.
Hyperlinking
An important part of statute law research is the following up of references to other legislation. The SLD links only a few such cross-references in the annotations (and the criteria for those selected for markup is not clear). It would be a huge improvement if every reference to another piece of legislation were hyperlinked. This need not be a burdensome task: hard-coded links are not required; as demonstrated by a number of publishers (including ourselves), it is possible with a good degree of accuracy to recognise statutory citations and mark them up on the fly.
Addressability
As it stands one can go to the SLD site and find what one is looking for reasonably quickly. However, one of the fundamental principles of the web (one of Engelbart’s Requirements) is that “every object that someone might validly want/need to cite should have an unambiguous address (capable of being portrayed in a manner as to be human readable and interpretable)”. In the context of the SLD such an address would be constructed from the legislation type, year and number. It is currently only possible to address a piece of legislation by its system ID (the Active Text Document ID). So in order to link to a piece of legislation one needs to find the appropriate provision on the SLD and cut and paste the URL including the document ID. But the system can readily map a query for a particular type-year-number to its document ID, and such a system of addressing should be implemented. Then anyone wishing to link to the SLD could do so “blind”.
BTW
Don’t you think eBay is wasting its money here?
Here’s an interesting one.
Kevin O’Keefe (a well-known US law blog champion) comments on Doc Searls (a prolific A-list blogger) who comments on Nicholas Carr (a not-so-prolific B-list blogger) who comments on how to get a link from an A-lister.
As the blogophere has become more rigidly hierarchical … it has turned into a grand system of patronage operated … by a tiny, self-perpetuating elite. A blog-peasant, one of the Great Unread, comes to the wall of the castle to offer a tribute to a royal, and the royal drops a couple of coins of attention into the peasant’s little purse. The peasant is happy, and the royal’s hold over his position in the castle is a little bit stronger.
Bullshit.
Want to succeed in the blogosphere, or the Web in general? Easy. Do search engine optimization. Here’s how:
1. Write quotable stuff about a lot of different subjects.
2. Do it consistently, for months if not years.
3. Link a lot, as a way of giving credit and of sending readers to other sources of whatever it is you write about.
That’s it.
I can’t promise royalty, because there isn’t any. But I can promise a rewarding relationship with the readers you’ll get, regardless of how many there are.
As Kevin says, this is “excellent advice on how to to succeed on the blogosphere”, but I’m sure Kevin also hopes the royal might drop a couple of coins of attention in his purse. Me too.
Update: Well blow me, it worked! A coin in my purse (see the Bonus link).
First published May 2004 in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers.
If you use the web seriously to keep up to date on a particular topic, you probably visit the news pages of dozens of sites and subscribe to a number of email newsletters – and you never have the time to review all of them regularly or in sufficient detail.
But there is a way to keep track of developments, with a friendly desktop tool that enables you to scan only the news that you want to see, without opening a single web page or email: the RSS reader. With one installed on your PC you can scroll through headlines and summaries of news stories, organized as you choose, with views of what’s new today or topic by topic. When you see a story you want to read, you click on it and are taken directly to its web location. Most importantly, an RSS reader checks for new items periodically and alerts you when updates are found, so it’s always fresh and there’s no need for you constantly to check sites for changes.
The RSS reader is undoubtedly the killer application of the moment.
RSS is a data syndication format originally developed by Netscape which has now spun off into several different versions under different control (hence the use of various expanded forms: Remote Site Syndication, Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, depending on whom you ask). In essence RSS is a standard format that enables publishers to produce headline feeds and users periodically to check those feeds for updates using an RSS reader.
Although there is heated debate in the technical community as to the merits of each of the various competing versions of RSS, this need be of no concern to the user, since all good RSS readers will handle all the various flavours. A new format called Atom has more recently been developed, and the popular RSS readers are now being modified to read this too.
RSS feeds are increasingly being produced by major news providers and by other specialist news sites. Below are listed selected sites producing feeds of direct relevance to UK lawyers. I’d suggest you first visit some of these sites to see what’s on offer and then browse your favourite news sites to see if they produce feeds.
But first, how do you recognize an RSS feed? On the news site, look for links that say RSS, XML or Atom feed; more commonly they are orange buttons like this:
[XML] or [RSS FEED]
These links point to the feeds. Click on them and you’ll get a web browser view of the feed: either a formatted page or raw XML source. Don’t panic! Instructions on how to use the feed are under “Getting started” below.
The publishing of online journals or weblogs (or simply blogs) has increased rapidly in popularity. Many weblogs also offer feeds; indeed the increasing provision of feeds generally can largely be attributed to the ubiquity of weblogs. So it’s worth a quick detour here to explain what blogs are all about.
A blog is a reverse chronological list of items or “posts”, with latest posts on the main blogsite page and older posts maintained on archive pages. There are several free web services that provide the tools to produce blogs just by pushing buttons. For the publisher (or blogger) weblogs are attractive as no technical skills are required to publish them. 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 which both curbs the excesses of amateur publishers and provides a familiar environment for the reader.
Blogs tend to encourage personal diaries and the better ones make for compulsive reading. But their application is very much wider. Importantly, the diary format is ideal for current awareness publishing: hence law blogs (also, unfortunately, known as blawgs). Legal blogging has taken off in the USA (too many lawyers?), but in the UK only a handful have so far come to light, including those producing feeds that are mentioned below.
To give you a flavour of what’s on offer, here is a selection of sites producing feeds that should be of interest to the UK lawyer.
The Telegraph produces feeds for each of its main sections. Go to the home page and click the XML link at the foot of the home page to view the list of feeds.
The Scotsman produces a huge number of feeds. Go to the feeds page for the list of feeds. There are many of specific interest to lawyers, including Legal Issues and Privacy Laws.
Moreover is a news feed aggregator, providing feeds on hundreds of general and business news topics: category list.
Downing Street Says is an unofficial weblog reporting “what the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman actually said in response to the lobby’s questioning, rather than what he was reported as saying”. Go to the weblog; the feeds available are listed under the sidebar heading “Syndicate (RSS/XML)”.
Help is at Hand: E-Gov News is a weblog produced by the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta), providing the latest developments and useful information about e-government and e-citizenship. Go to the weblog; an XML button at the foot links to the feed.
The Freedom of Information Act Blog provides news, views and updates on the UK Freedom of Information Act and worldwide FOI. Go to the weblog; the Atom feed button links to the feed.
The UK Criminal Justice Weblog provides the latest news about criminal justice issues from around the UK, drawn from media websites, government sources and criminal justice organisations. Go to the weblog; the XML button at the foot of the right-hand panel links to the feed.
The International Chamber of Commerce produces a number of feeds, covering news, rules, contracts and clauses: list of feeds.
What’s new on the UK legal Web is a weblog I maintain on the infolaw site. Go to the weblog; the Atom feed button at the foot of the right hand panel links to the feed.
The Virtual Chase (US) lists a number of legal alerts and current awareness services with feeds: list of feeds.
To use an RSS feed you first need to install an RSS reader (also known as an RSS aggregator). There are several popular free readers: the one I use is RssReader (download it from rssreader.com). The instructions below refer to that and will be slightly different in other readers.
Next, you’ll add the feeds. To do this, point your browser to the sites you want to monitor and look for the RSS/XML/Atom links or buttons (see “Where to find RSS feeds” above). You just want to capture a feed’s URL, so right click on the link and select Copy Shortcut. Then switch to the reader, select Add, paste in the URL and then continue, providing the desired title and allocating the feed to the desired folder. The feed title will now appear in the folder window and the reader will download the feed which will be displayed in the main window (an integrated web browser).
A feed item (or headline) generally consists of a title, a summary or the first few lines of the full article and a “Read More” link which will connect to the full version of the article (or story) on the web. So you can quickly scan the headlines in the reader and only need click through to the web if a story interests you.
You can create groups (folders) and drag and drop feeds into these, organising them to suit your needs. Clicking on a group name will by default display today’s headlines from all feeds in the group in the browser window; clicking on a feed title will by default display all headlines from that feed. It’s worth pointing out here that the maximum number of items in a feed is limited by number or timespan.
You can set your personal preferences, including whether or not to start the reader when Windows starts (recommended), how often to check feeds for updates (hourly is probably optimal), maximum number of headlines to store, font styles and sizes and so on.
Follow the above steps and you’ll be up and running with your first feeds within a half-hour. Spend the same time each day for a week to select, add and group new feeds and soon you’ll wonder how you ever lived without RSS.
NewzCrawler (PC)
AmphetaDesk (cross-platform)
Radio Userland (PC or Mac)
NetNewsWire (Mac)
It will be apparent from the comments above and the selected list of feeds that none of the leading online UK law publishers produces RSS feeds. Why not? To generate a feed from an existing content management system is quite straightforward and no ongoing overhead is involved. Publishers may believe that users will thus be avoiding their promotional messages, but with a bit of thought this need not be the case. On the contrary, the number of site accesses by feed users, and hence the opportunities to grab their attention, will actually increase substantially. In my personal experience, since starting to use RSS feeds I click through to the sites many times more than when they simply sat in my favourites folder. It’s clear that the publishers actually haven’t yet given it much thought and that supply will only follow demand. So why not get yourself started, discover the joy of RSS and demand the feeds you want now?
Nearly Legal offers a thoughtful post on the issues connected with anonymous blogging, saying “What interests me … is the fraught conjunction of anonymity, confessional, freedom of expression, privacy, veracity, self-exposure and unwanted exposure involved here.”
I have just abandoned IE6 at work completely in favour of Firefox, though I’ve been using Firefox at home for some time.
I mentioned in a recent post some weird behaviour in Firefox when a duff URL was linked. I now find this in Firefox help which perhaps explains it:
By default, if you enter a search term in the address field and press Enter, a Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” search is performed, and you’re taken to the first result of that search directly. If you prefer to see the standard search result list instead, add the following code to your user.js file:
// Change to normal Google search:
user_pref(“keyword.URL”, “http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=”);Of course, you could also change to a completely different search engine by changing the string to something else. The default search string is: “http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q=”.
So you don’t need a Google search box anymore.
Sticking with the “Im Feeling Lucky” setting, I threw my name into the address field and was sadly disappointed to find someone else at home:
Nick Holmes, PhD
University Lecturer in Molecular Immunology
Research Interests
My current research interests are in the area of the early events occurring after lymphocyte activation and in particular the role of CD45 in these events …
In an unashamed quest for blog popularity I give you a couple of connections between the movie “Snakes on a Plane”, released today, and the law, thanks to CNN (my emphasis added):
The Internet hoopla started with a single entry on screenwriter Josh Friedman’s blog last summer. …
Friedman’s wildfire spread … thanks to fan-created videos posted on YouTube.com, where anyone can post videos shorter than 10 minutes, and the social connection site MySpace.com, where the mostly young users create individualized pages. …
In the past, media companies have squashed such practices on copyright grounds, but New Line Cinema, the Time Warner Inc. subsidiary that is distributing “Snakes,” has embraced the hype and the producers even included the line in the movies and used it in previews. Time Warner also is the parent company of CNN.
Georgetown University law student Brian Finkelstein, founder of the popular “Snakes on a Blog” Web site was sure he’d be sued. Instead, New Line’s Executive Vice President of New Media Marketing, Gordon Paddison, called to thank him. …
The original blogger, Friedman, gave up blogging about “Snakes” for a while, instead writing about his struggles with cancer …:
“Look, people. I get it. I’m a great disappointment to you all. We had a few giggles, shared some digital sushi and Diet Coke, we made New Line an extra fifty million dollars and had a good time doing it,” he recently wrote. “Cancer can only kill you but a funny blog entry can make Dr. Pepper shoot from your nose.”
Technorati is a wonderful resource for bloggers. If you have not yet discovered it or do not use it much, take the time now to investigate what it offers. It tracks and indexes currently more than 51 million blogs and gives you several ways to discover new blogs and to follow the stats and conversation about your blog and other blogs you follow.
There is currently some debate as to how accurate this figure of 51 million blogs is. Certainly Technorati does not index all public blogs; the actual number of public blogs is far higher. There are also of course millions of private or internal blogs. On the other hand, of the 51 million it does track, many have not been updated for some time or have been abandoned or were set up for experimental purposes or to squat on a batch of sub-domain names, so the number of active blogs is far fewer.
Technorati ranks blogs by authority, calculating the rank for each blog primarily on the number of other blogs that link to it, then I think on a combination of the number of posts that link to it and the frequency and recency of posts on the blog. Check out a few blogs that show “0 blogs link here” and you will find that the rank is the same for each – currently around 1.5 million. This tells me there are, in fact, only 1.5 million blogs that others find interesting. That’s an awful lot of bloggers out there talking to themselves.
Heather Brooke who blogs on FoI issues on Your Right to Know writes today in Technology Guardian about the Statute Law Databaseas part of its Free Our Data campaign under the headline “Access denied to the laws that govern us”.
It’s true the publiccontinues to bedenied access to the SLD which has been some 10 years in the making.That will change with the public release, likely in December. But the DCA is reserving its position on rights to access and re-use the SLD which it regards as a “value added product” for which it must, according to the Treasury, attempt to recoup its outlay.
We’ll have to wait and see what is the “commercial model” it is hatching. It’simpossible to see how it will be able to charge foraccess without incurring the wrath of us all.
What of re-use then? There’s any number of ways theDCAcould charge for commercial re-use. But if the SLD comes up to scratch – ie, as advertised, isthe definitive,reliable, up-to-daterepositary of consolidated primary and unconsolidated secondary legislation – commercial publishers will think twice about substantial re-use and repurposing ofthe data. Instead they will link extensively to the SLD and/or frame SLD provisions alongside their own annotations and commentary. That will be lead to extensive access by end-users via requests from the publishers’ servers.
Wearyconveyancer has found it in him to set up”a blog to rant about all aspects of conveyancing that cause me pain (which to be fair is most of it) and to reflect on 38 years of practising law in a high street environment.”
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