October 2006

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Google’s Custom Search

30 October 2006 in Search | 1 comment

There’s a fair buzz going around with the release last week of Google’s Custom Search Engine facility.

It has been possible for some time to place a Google search for a single URL on your site, but now you can create a custom CSE that searches up to 2,000 specified URLs. These can be explicit sites or folders or URLs matched by patterns. Further you can label (tag) each of these with subjects, allowing the user to refine search results accordingly. And you can send the results to a custom page on your site.

We can expect thousands of CSE’s to pop up all over. Here are some likely applications:

  • To add full text search to your own site.
  • To search a single favourite site using Google rather than the site’s own search engine. Not as dumb as it at first sounds. How many large sites have you visited where the SE is less than satisfactory or even worse than useless for your purposes? Set up a Google CSE for the site. Later you can refine it by listing specific folders on the site or URL patterns and labeling these by subject.
  • To search multiple sites in a particular vertical domain. This will be the most popular application, but I suspect most will disappoint. I’ve already noticed that narrowing the domain searched raises unjustified expectations about the quality of the results. Only careful application of the advanced features available will produce a CSE that does the business.

For the time being I’ve knocked up a simple CSE with no advanced features to search all UK law blogs – Blawgle. More will appear on infolaw in due course.

Communicate, share, collaborate

18 October 2006 in Blogging, Information management, Wikis

We talk a lot about public blogs and wikis, so it’s good to get a report of the benefits and potential of their use internally within a large law firm.

In the latest issue of Legal Technology Journal from Legalease (print on paper), Ruth Ward, head of knowledge sytems and development at Allen & Overy, writes about A&O’s experience of developing and using blogs and wikis.

A&O has found [wikis] to be extremely useful tools for project and event management, for conducting surveys and producing reports. …

A&O has focused more on the use of blogs within specific internal work communities. The firm has a standard site template, which comprises both a group blog and wiki pages. …

the ease of use and set-up of blog and wiki technology speaks very powerfully to people who have a desire to communicate, share information or knowledge, or work collaboratively. …

Now seems to be the right time for social software, certainly within A&O, where there is a desire to embrace a more open and collaborative approach to all levels of management, and reflect that in the firm’s internal interactions and communications.

The fact that this study relates to use within a firm should not detract from the main message: with blogs, wikis and other “social media” you can easily and effectively communicate, share information or knowledge, and work collaboratively with others. For most of us the world is our oyster.

Fertile ground for law blogs (2)

18 October 2006 in Blogging, Law blogs | 1 comment

Following my recent post in which I suggested The Lawyer should get blogging, I note that Legal Week has done just that, with the Editor’s Blog and The Daily Diary (your one-stop gossip shop).

There’s lots of good comment in all the legal weeklies, so why not share it with us? You’ll get a result.

Let’s get social

13 October 2006 in Blogging, Information management, Law blogs | 2 comments

Blog software is what is these days called “social software” – software “which enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities.”

Unlike other communities which exist in a particular space (like MySpace, a wiki etc), the blogosphere is a virtual space, created principally by the links to other blogs in blogrolls and within posts. New links, comments and posts are communicated almost immediately to other bloggers with the appropriate setup by what are called “pings“.

A few days ago I was pinged by Batgirl was a Librarian, a graduate trainee (law) librarian in London, when she added Binary law to her blogroll; I’m delighted to welcome her to the UK legal blogosphere.

This welcome addition causes lo-fi librarian to ponder why are there not more Law Librarian Bloggers?, since they “are extra good at sharing their knowledge and expertise via email lists”. I used to subscribe to the JISC LIS-LAW discussion list, but eventually left, unsatisfied by the value extracted/time spent ratio. In fact, there was not much discussion at all: plenty of requests to members for specific items (a missing article here, an elusive case there), but not much comment or debate; and answers to questions were usually given “off-list”, so were no use to the community. In 2006, wouldn’t a group LIS-LAW blog with all its associated benefits (comments, feeds etc) make perfect sense?

Blawg Review #78

12 October 2006 in Law blogs

An overdue recommendation that you visit Justin Patten’s Blawg Review #78. Each weekly issue of Blawg Review is made up of article submissions selected from the best recent law blog posts. The blogger that puts together the Blawg Review carnival each week is called the “host”. Justin does an admirable job, commenting on numerous blogs and giving a good flavour of the breadth and depth of the as yet sparsely populated but nevertheless well formed UK legal blogosphere.

We’ve only just begun

10 October 2006 in Feeds | 2 comments

Steve Matthews of Vancouver Law Librarian Blog has produced a list of Top 10 Uses for RSS in Law Firms. These are all good examples of what RSS can be used for. But my contention is there is no Top 10; it’s horses for courses, and there are an awful lot of courses. RSS is a standard publishing format for delivering latest items from any resource database: date, link, title, description … that’s about it; simple and effective; use it for what you will. Because feeds are delivered in a standard format, third parties can provide countless ways in which they can be consumed: read them, aggregate them, search them, acquire them, republish them. RSS will take over as the preferred means of consuming all those blog home pages, what’s new pages, lists of recent articles, latest additions to x, latest jobs, latest products that fit your enquiry and so on; and feeds will be repurposed and republished …

All you need to know about …

10 October 2006 in Law blogs | 1 comment

New blogger, DivorceSolicitor:

Single mother with 3 children, 2 ex husbands, 1 boyfriend (doubles as ex husband) and 0 pets. Hobbies include cooking, horse-riding, reading, knitting, DIY, dancing, but I don’t have time to do any of these as I spend all free-time socialising with 6 friends (you know who you are). Used to like shopping but, being fashionable, am now bored with consumption, and after failed recycling attempts on ebay now wear white t-shirts, black tops, jeans and black suits for work.

Good stuff, undoubtedly, but could you pick a new template so we can read it?

Democratising law publishing

5 October 2006 in Blogging, Law publishing

Jordan Furlong, who edits the Canadian Lawyers Weekly, posts on Slaw about how blogs and RSS feeds will democratise Legal Publishing in the 21st Century:

Legal publishers need to understand that the number of competitors [in legal news publishing] is not going to shrink – it’s going to multiply tenfold. And these competitors won’t have overhead, distribution, payroll or marketing costs to deal with – they’ll write when they want to, promote themselves by word of mouth, sell as much focused advertising as they like, and establish themselves as individual brand-name forces. … blogs are going to create thousands of expert media outlets with a total staff complement of one. It’s already started.

What does this have to with you, the 21st-century lawyer? Two things. First, the day is soon coming when you won’t have to accept whatever the legal publishers decide you should know about. You can order tailored, in-depth legal news delivered to your desktop, be it through RSS feeds from the local courthouse, Yahoo! legal newsgroup postings, or a free e-newsletter from a sole practitioner …

Second, you should take the opportunity right now to become one of those publishers. … All you need is excellent knowledge of your subject area, a real interest in talking about it, and a ten-minute introduction to blogging.

100 per cent agreed on that.

In the comments section of the post Jordan is less sure about the effects on online legal information publishing:

I keep wondering myself when the online providers like QL/Lexis and Carswell/Westlaw will be affected by the democratization of legal information on the Internet. I get the sense CANLII [in the UK, read BAILII] has taken some of the market share (I’d be interested in knowing how much), and full RSS update capacity in every court would take some more, I imagine.

But until someone like Google creates an advertising-based free-access legal research functionality – which seems plausible, at least – the online providers should continue to do alright.

I agree the incumbents are not going to wither any time soon, but the freeing up of legal information (through BAILII, the Statute Law Database, HMCS and the public sector in general) will begin to have significant impact when the potential for leveraging and adding value to that information is better understood. At present LexisNexis and Westlaw win and retain business not just because they provide comprehensive access to up-to-date law, but because of their valuable added commentary and other gizmos. Marry the increasing amount of independent commentary from the web with the free comprehensive and up-to-date source materials and they will start to hurt. It’s not rocket science.

Don’t break it when you fix it

5 October 2006 in Government, Intellectual property

Time was (last millennium) when every new government department / agency website was newsworthy whatever its utility. Then lots of content was added and content management systems were employed to structure browsing and search. That was all good stuff but with plenty of room for improvement. Many are now repainting their frontages and making those improvements. Unfortunately such improvements often involve not only moving the furniture about but also reshuffling the filing cabinets without much thought to how this affects their established “customers”.

IMPACT points to criticisms on IPKAT of the new Patent Office and Information Commissioner’s websites. One of the main beefs is that they have moved/removed pages thus thoroughly confusing established users and breaking thousands of useful deep links into their sites.

Users comment:

I find it incomprehensible why all previous links to pages have now changed.

[we] are left with broken links all over the place and no systematic way of referencing documents.

Meanwhile over on the Parliament site they are taking it one step at a time. Thus far “a more professional, modern design applied to the homepage and some top-level pages and a simplified navigational structure.” Thankfully, at present most of the underlying pages remain as before.

A wiki law trawl

5 October 2006 in Wikis

WikipediaHead on over to the Wikipedia and you’ll find that there is developing a very useful corpus of entries on UK law.

The United Kingdom Law page indicates the scope of the contributions thus far, though you’ll find the structure predictably chaotic.

However, there are some more structured starting points – list maniacs are at work. There is a comprehensive List of Acts of Parliament of the United Kingdom Parliament from the year dot (1707), also ASPs and ANIPs and pre-UK Enlish, Scottish and Irish Acts. There are also lists of SIs from 1948.

All the Act entries are linked, though red links lead to the “Article not found” page. Links in blue are to articles that do exist – and there are a fair number, though of course variable in quality. See, for example, the article on the Gambling Act 2005.

The lists were created by one David Newton whose main passion is lists of things military.

There is also a List of House of Lords cases (from 1997) started by Samuel Buca, a final year law student.

Articles on cases are scattered around the Wikipedia. One useful list is of Landmark decisions, with a UK section. User BD2412 seems to have started this. His profile led me to the Wikipedia:WikiProject Law page. This Wikiproject is aimed at creating a greater consistency among the law related articles. Key areas of concern include consistency in defining concepts across multiple jurisdictions and proper categorization of articles.

So I revisited two independent UK law wiki projects: WikiCrimeLine and Wiki Mental Health. They both seem to be growing and developing apace, but is there scope for these projects to feed off the Wikipedia and vice versa? I don’t know enough about the mechanics of it, but would be interested to learn.

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