February 2007

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Conflict aside

27 February 2007 in Law blogs | 2 comments

Legal Scribbles is a great new blog where Martin George, law tutor at Birmingham University, lets off steam and struts his stuff. He’s also General Editor of the Conflict of Laws .net news and discussion portal/blog, but “conflictoflaws.net, whilst very interesting, is not exactly the place where one can post a rejoinder to something [vindictive] that Geeklawyer has said, or discuss something that Pupilblog has raised.” So he begat Legal Scribbles.

Martin seeks to provide answers to such fascinating questions as:

  • Is sex on a plane legal?
  • Why do students hate Land Law? Too difficult? Too boring?
  • Is it appropriate for courts and legal academics to cite Wikipedia?
  • Could private property rights work in outer space?

He answers only one unequivocally – Absolutely not. I’ll leave you to investigate which.

RTFPIFOY

27 February 2007 in Miscellany | 2 comments

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen posits in his latest monthly Alertbox article that what children need is not instruction on how to use Microsoft products (or Google apps or any other proprietary applications); just sit them in front of these and most will grasp the skills themselves far quicker than we can teach them – and many know more than their teachers. Besides, the current versions of these applications will be superseded in a few years’ time. What they need instead is to learn Life-Long Computer Skills. Nielsen suggests teaching them:

  • how to formulate search strategies
  • how to assess information credibility
  • how to deal with information overload
  • how to write for online readers
  • how to make computer presentations (and, no, Powerpoint is not to blame for bad presentations)
  • about workspace ergonomics
  • how to “debug” at a basic level
  • how to facilitate “easy interactions” – problem solving, understanding the relation between concepts, and interpersonal communication

It’s not just kids of course. 90 per cent of the adult population could use this instruction too. But let me slip one basic skill in at the top of the list – how to engage your brain when surfing the net. I am continually amazed at how many people call infolaw up, usually having clicked through from the limited context of a Google result, asking if we can help with this or provide that or comment on the other when the scope and detail of the particular service we provide are well described on the web page in front of them. What they are asking for is clearly not what we provide, but they just don’t read the page or, if they do, think to click back and continue their trawl through the search results, they phone us up instead. I’m tempted to, but never of course do, say – because some of these nice people do turn into customers – “I’ve got better things to do than read aloud to you, mate. Read The F****** Page In Front Of You.”

Things come together

27 February 2007 in Blogging, Law blogs | 7 comments

A number of bloggers have commented on the number of new blawgs that have recently appeared. So we are it seems progressing predictably faster along the lower reaches of that bell curve.

In typical fashion Geeklawyer welcomes more law bloggers … cautiously:

He’s sympathetic to free markets to a point and he welcomes, at an abstract level, competition even while recognising, on the other hand, that it means he has to work harder to keep readers. He’d like to pretend he blogs just for personal release but there is a tiny tiny kernel of ego here: the blog is popular and he wish it to remain so, and while that is not even a large part of why he does it it’s a factor.

One new blogger, BabyBarista, has gained rapid visibility with what Nearly Legal describes as “a textbook campaign”:

As thoroughly enjoyable as the blog is, I think I was more impressed with the stealth publicity campaign, adroitly using the vanity click-back to build up what passes for a publicity storm in the smallish UK blawg world. To which, of course, I [and, of course, I - Ed] have just contributed. It is a very good example of how to work a blog circuit. Of course, it helps if the blog is actually worth reading.

The blog is a fictional diary of a pupil barrister, and – he has to remind one of his commenters who fears he may be opening himself up to litigation – is not based on fact. His expressed aim (tongue in cheek, I’m sure not) is to land a book deal.

All was not as it seemed elsewhere in the blawgosphere. Wilbur Parry of Law andstuff is in fact the alter ego of the young businessman David Mytton who runs Olate, a software development company. An ex- and soon-to-be-renewed law student, he set up Law andstuff to blog about law “without worrying about discussing topics that might offend the readers of my main blog”. This explains why Binary Law and a few other blawgs appeared in his blogroll at mytton.net some time ago. No offence taken, David!

The law wiki dream

27 February 2007 in Articles, Wikis

First published March 2007 in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers.

Solicitor Steve Butler, who produces the UKLawyers legal newswire, has changed his former opinion that a grand centralised law wiki could be an enormously valuable resource. Having previously been impressed by Richard Susskind’s comments in this vein, Steve now believes that unpaid volunteers cannot be expected to compete with the commercial publishing efforts. There being no contractual obligation to provide the information, there is no guarantee that it is right, and the lack of resources means that they will never be good enough for the greater public good.

But should we write off the law wiki dream? I think not.

Enough contributors?

I agree with Steve that “maintaining a law wiki is hard”. Indeed, at the time of his original piece, I argued that 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.

Steve reports that Andrew Keogh, who maintains WikiCrimeLine, “is now seven months into his wiki and he is not as excited as he had expected to be. There are only a very few regular contributors and even he finds little time to make additions to the site.”

But what if the potential contributors were not limited to those responding to Andrew’s promotional efforts? What if the world were Andrew’s oyster?

In recent forays on Wikipedia I have been amazed to find how many UK law-related articles have acceded and how much obvious effort many of these unpaid volunteers, some from the most unlikely of quarters, are prepared to put in. Wikipedia has, even now, achieved a sufficient number of contributors in the field of UK law for it to start to become a useful resource.

Good enough?

Again, I agree with Steve that a law wiki could not compete with the commercial publishers because it could not be relied on to be accurate. But in answering his own question “at whom are the wikis aimed?” he dismisses the entire market by assuming that use implies reliance. Consider Wikipedia. It does not pretend to compete with the commercial Britannica on Britannica‘s terms. Certainly it is relied on by many who don’t or should know better than to rely on it, but it is also used very effectively by many others in full knowledge that it should not be relied on. It is a fantastic resource, not because it is unquestionably accurate, but because it is much more accessible and eminently good enough to expedite whatever further research is necessary.

In some spheres Wikipedia is arguably more comprehensive than and almost as accurate as any commercial offering, as Susskind reported in his article.

Editorial quality review and article improvement procedures are in place on Wikipedia that a specialist wiki with limited resources would be hard-pressed to emulate. In addition, specific fields have their own specialized and comprehensive supervisory projects. Specifically, the WikiProject:Law is aimed at creating a greater consistency among the law related articles.

And we now have the Citizendium project, started by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, which aims to improve on that model by adding “gentle expert oversight” and requiring contributors to use their real names.

Viable?

Can a specialist law wiki be viable? Someone like Andrew Keogh would hope to cover his costs. But his direct overhead costs and also most of his indirect costs (his time) relate to the fact that his wiki is hosted on his server, configured by him, managed by him, moderated by him and promoted by him. In contrast Wikipedia is a hosted “service”, configured, managed, moderated and popularised by others. Its specialist editors are free to devote all their wiki time to editorial issues. The advantages of using a “full” Wikipedia shouldn’t be underestimated.

The answer?

I do not suggest that the answer is simply for everything to be authored on Wikipedia (or Citizendium for that matter). I do not either suggest that the answer will necessarily be a wiki as we now know it. But consider the resources we already have:

  • we have “open access” primary resources such as the Statute Law Database
  • we have other freely accessible primary law databases such as BAILII
  • we have specialists such as Andrew Keogh already authoring expert wiki articles
  • we have enthusiasts contributing law articles to Wikipedia
  • we have a growing number of law bloggers, some of whom provide succinct, expert commentary
  • we have many others who publish articles, updaters and guidance for free (and sometimes open) access on their websites
  • and finally we have technologies that enable (potentially) all these sources to be interrogated, aggregated, “mashed up” and repurposed – and we have many who are willing to apply these technologies for no commercial gain

We have the resources and technologies now to achieve something that is good enough to be getting on with; in time this could evolve into “a corpus of English law like no other”. The dream is ambitious, but it is not pie in the sky.

Feeding the five thousand (and more)

26 February 2007 in Feeds, Information management | 3 comments

There’s a gathering clamour amongst law librarians for publishers to provide new book title information via RSS feeds.

Connie Crosby’s call is echoed by lo-fi Librarian and James Mullan at LI Issues.

This is not perhaps the most exciting type of current awareness information that might spring to the creative minds in the publishing houses, but it is bread and butter information about their product needed by all law librarians, law booksellers and so on. It is essential information often provided at present by archaic means: via snail-mailed print fliers, static pages on websites, or spreadsheets/Word documents, often compiled “manually” and emailed at best monthly. How really, really useful it would be if they would just provide it as RSS feeds instead. And how really, really time-saving for the publishers.

Says Connie in her column on LLRX The Tao of Law Librarianship:

So many publishers already have new titles sections on their websites. It is not that difficult to code these in XML rather than HTML to create a feed. And possibly some are already being fed to their own websites as feeds, so why not make these accessible to the customer? The trick is getting the non-technical people who are in control in the various publishing houses understand what RSS is and how it would benefit both them and their customers.”

That’s it in a nutshell. The techie bit is easy, but the techies need to be told what to do. Those in control just need to sit down for a few minutes in the board room and make a list of the “reports” they currently produce for public consumption and agree that disseminating these using pre-21st century technology is not best serving their customers and agents. Then give this list to the techies saying “Produce us RSS feeds for all these”.

The list would include the called-for information on forthcoming and recently-published titles, looseleaf updates, journal issues etc. Let me suggest they restrict it to that for the first meeting. Then, a few weeks later, flushed with enthusiasm, they will meet again and add many more “reports” to the list.

Providing this information via RSS is a no brainer, but it seems few brains are currently addressing the issue.

Time for a redesign?

14 February 2007 in Design and style | 1 comment

Is it just me or do you think the new Times Online redesign is OVERDESIGN?

Most negative criticism to date has centred on its use of lime green and the fact that their servers were overloaded and things didn’t work for the first day or two. There has been positive criticism – “nice” navigation, use of “new media” blah blah. But no-one saying it is crap.

Sure, it is well-designed at first sight, but look at it for more than a few minutes – if you can. Excluding the header and footer I count at leat 25 panels of information. Relatively few in the left-hand, content column, but many more in the central navigation column and yet many more in the right-hand ads etc column, many illustrated with smart graphics. That’s one hell of a blast to try to take in. Plus the Macromedia Flash Adverts that give me a headache.

Effective web design is not necessarily pretty design. Robert Scoble comments:

ugly designs are well known to pull more revenue, be more sticky, build better brands, and generally be more fun to participate in, than sites with beautiful designs.

Google. Is it pretty? No. Craig’s List? Pretty? No. MySpace? Pretty? No.

I’m not suggesting The Times should go for the ugly, but overdesign is bad design, which, according to a report recently published by the Social Issues Research Centre, causes stress and anxiety:

Some changes in muscle tension were quite dramatic … the participant’s faces tensed visibly, with the teeth clenched together and the muscles around the mouth becoming taught. These are physically uncomfortable situations that reduce concentration and increase feelings of anger.

Quickening heart rate? Increased sweating? Furious clicking of the mouse? Simultaneous clicking and cursing the screen? Bashing the mouse? Welcome to bad design.

The other half

14 February 2007 in Society

Mark Chillingworth, IWR Editor, blogs about today’s headline-grabbing report Child Poverty in Perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries.

One of the difficult to live with, but great attributes of this country is that everything is aired in the open and we don’t live a myth pretending problems don’t exist. But as experts point out, the report uses a wide range of information that is out of date in some areas, which damages the credibility of the report and diminishes the value of information. The report should be welcomed though and action should be taken.

Where [this] and many international reports add to the problem is that they add to the perceived image of the UK being rich. Yes we are rich, when compared to Bangladesh. But to pretend that there isn’t poverty, severe poverty, in this country is a major failing. In my living memory there has been rampant unemployment, severe social issues between races and a clear north/south divide that is only just beginning to be erased. Yet these issues are ignored and instead we waste information and talk up a few acceptable train and road delays because of ice and snow as if it’s a catastrophe.

Sadly the news agenda that follows reports like this are quick to blame the government of the day, despite one of the authors pointing towards child poverty from 1979. The report makes some very good points about families not eating their meals together and a number of basic problems in our social outlook. These are not problems caused by a government alone, we are all personally responsible for our daily lives and cannot blame everything on Whitehall.

We, the privileged, look around and compare ourselves to the other privileged – and we often find ourselves wanting. But we are seeing only half of the population. According to National Statistics, the other half of the population of the UK owned just 5 per cent of the wealth in 2001. This compares with 8 per cent in 1976. Though we have made progress in the last century: it is estimated that the richest 1 per cent held around 70 per cent of the UK’s wealth in 1911, compared with 23 per cent in 2001.

In the world as a whole, the richest 2 per cent own more than half the wealth, according to a study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER). The study also reports that the richest 1 per cent own 40 per cent of global assets, and that the richest 10 per cent 85 per cent. In contrast, the bottom half own barely 1 per cent.

In a world (and a country) where so much is owned by so few, is it any wonder that much of the “other half” don’t aspire to further education or skilled jobs or eat with their parents?

Google is illegal says Brussels

14 February 2007 in Copyright, Search | 1 comment

Struan Robertson analyses on OUT-law.com the Court of First Instance ruling in favour of newspaper group Copiepresse that Google News and Google’s caching of web pages infringe copyright.

The Belgian court … ruled that it cannot be deduced that the absence of technical protections [the robots.txt and NOARCHIVE protocols] is an unconditional authorisation. Google’s method of storing copyright-protected work in its cache and granting access to the internet user without transferring the user to the original site is an act of unauthorised reproduction and communication to the public, contrary to Belgium’s copyright law, it said. Google’s situation was even more reprehensible, the court reasoned, because Google News went further than indexing and caching: it reproduced a headline and extract from a third party site.

… This case was more about money than the technicalities of copyright law. Copiepresse made clear that it wants [to be] paid for its content appearing in Google News. I can’t see Google paying up. So Copiepresse wins a moral victory but its members will surely have lost considerable traffic and consequent ad revenue that Google News brought to their sites. Users will lose access to some news and the use of the cache function. I can’t see how anyone wins here.

Google has pulled the plug on Copiepresse content. But Copiepresse wants to be indexed by Google and for Google to comply with its copyright policies. This is not possible with the current, simplistic protocols. A more sophisticated protocol, ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol), is on the table. Meantime, Google is technically illegal says Brussels. We already knew that, didn’t we?

More law blogs

14 February 2007 in Law blogs

Thanks to Pupilblog I’ve discovered a couple more law blogs.

Legal Beagle is “a barrister’s cynical take on that hotbed of scandal and controversy, the Criminal Justice System”.

John Flood’s Random Academic Thoughts is “a legal academic commenting on the strange worlds of law, legal profession, bureaucracy, universities, and globalization.”

Reminder: You can browse all UK law blogs at Lawfinder: Blogs and subscribe to the latest additions feed.

Another faux trainee blog

7 February 2007 in Blogging | 1 comment

This time from Winckworth Sherwood.

In its loosest sense a blog is simply an online diary with posts presented in reverse chronological order. On this definition, this is a blog. So why do I take issue? Because 55 million bloggers define a blog as much more than this and you do yourself no favours by pretending you have what you have not.

It is, frankly, embarrassing that well-paid marketing people should suggest to the firm that such a page be called a blog; it is even more embarrassing that the firm should go along with this.

LawCareers.net tellingly describes it as “very voguish“. Halogen.no also has something to say about it, but I know not what.

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