April 2007

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What’s wrong with this life?

27 April 2007 in Virtual worlds

Last week Field Fisher Waterhouse became the first ever major law firm to open an office in Second Life, the virtual three-dimensional world.

The press and blogosphere have not been slow to pick up on this.

Nearly Legal counsels “Please, No. It’s just wrong.” I tend to agree.

The firm’s argument goes like this. Big brands such as Dell, Nike, Mercedes and Calvin Klein are establishing their brands in Second Life and, according to David Naylor, partner at FFW, “we are showing clients that we understand the business and legal issues involved in working in the virtual world.”

The corporate press release is slightly more expansive, saying:

Virtual worlds offer a compelling environment for communication and collaboration, as well as an important commercial distribution channel. By establishing a Second Life presence, we’re able to interact in new and engaging ways with our clients and the wider community. Businesses are moving increasingly rapidly into Second Life and other 3D internet environments and their advisers should be there with them.

We don’t see city firms setting up on the high street in order better to advise high street retail chains; we don’t see them setting up newspapers in order better to advise the mainstream media. Is the virtual world any different? Well, yes. Second Life and the new online communities in general are new and shiny and firms do not yet have the track record to demonstrate that they understand the new environments. So should they set up shop in the virtual world and what sort of presence should they develop?

Perhaps they should look at the lessons from the blogosphere. A number of big corporates have come a cropper by jumping on the blogging bandwagon, mis-understanding it and and mis-using it. We don’t see many larger law firms blogging, not because some of their (potential) clients aren’t there but because they appreciate the risks of getting it wrong.

By all means experiment on Second Life, but getting it wrong is a distinct risk and there are other ways to show potential clients you know their business.

BTW my own experience of Second Life is fleeting and unsatisfactory. I profess to know very little of what goes on there, save that I have had to adopt a ludicrous surname and don a fancy dress.

A victim of his own success

17 April 2007 in Search

I used to follow John Battelle’s Searchblog closely for news and insight into the web search business. It’s still the place to go and I’m trying to stay interested, but wonder if I should bother. Not if he continues to dish out posts like this:

Bezos at Web 2 Expo….S3 Data

Jeff Bezos just gave out some first look data on his S3 web scale storage business. It’s pretty impressive, if hard to fully grok. He said that S3 has scaled to 5 billion objects stored since inception. His presentation on how S3 and EC2 work together was pretty impressive….at FM we’re scaling servers and dealing with spiky conditions and man, EC2 sure sounds good…

Feed yourself

16 April 2007 in Feeds

Nearly Legal points us to Feedity, a terrific widget that generates an RSS feed from any web page:

Feedity has a proprietary data mining algorithm, which has been designed on the principles of self-learning agents. The native parser performs low-level content analysis, and it picks-up the most “prominent cluster” of hyperlinks. The renderer engine then automatically generates an RSS web
feed for the source web page.

In other words, Feedity analyses the page and picks up the most prominent list of links (whether a list or a series of table rows or paragraphs) and renders these as an RSS feed on the fly. All you have to do is pop a URL in the box at Feedity, or just append one to the Feedity URL in the form:

http://www.feedity.com/?URL

Although it works on any web page, you only get a feed-like result where the page is a classic what’s new or latest articles type page (ie latest-first list of linked items). Sometimes the prominent menu lists etc get in the way, depending on the design of the page.

For example, you can generate a useful feed for SCL: articles (rather than use the composite feed SCL offer) but you don’t get much of a result from News from the Law Society. There is a refine feature but I haven’t had much success with that yet.

Give it a whirl.

Long tails, short change

14 April 2007 in Copyright

John Lanchester in the Guardian writes a lengthy article on the copyright issues surrounding books in the digital age. He concludes with an interesting proposal: let copyright endure for only a reasonably short period but guarantee the creator a percentage from further sales for a lengthier period – a lesser “royalty right”. Makes sense to me. In fact, many copyright owners of less popular works would do well by voluntarily switching to this regime even sooner where they figure that many others could exploit the work more effectively than they alone. You’d think that publishers of such works got the best for their buck currently through copyright licensing, but they don’t. Either the publisher has to make the market or the prospective licensee has to beg the deal. The wider market (the long tail) is not tapped. I’ve recently been declined by a publisher a licence to republish a value-added version of their work – a deal they happily enter into with other, bigger fish – on the grounds that my sales projections weren’t good enough. Good enough for what? Is not 10 or 20 or 30 per cent of something, paid direct to your bank account without you lifting a finger, worth more than 0 per cent of nothing? Clearly not; they had their costs to take into account. And what would they be? Why, the costs of negotiating, drawing up and administering the licence!

Lawyers are necessary shock

13 April 2007 in Miscellany, Trade marks | 1 comment

Thanks to Kevin O’Keefe for pointing us to the Federal Court of Appeal’s decision that Martindale-Hubbell’s lawyers.com domain name is not sufficiently distinctive to qualify as a trade mark, saying:

For better or worse, lawyers are necessarily an integral part of the information exchange about legal services.

See TTABlog for details.

All Blogs at the barcouncil (sic)

13 April 2007 in Blogging, Law blogs | 2 comments

Thanks to the vigilant Charon QC for first spotting that the Bar Council has a blog on its new-look website. That’s to be welcomed; the more conversation the merrier, I say. But I do think the launch of a new blog by such a high profile “corporate” should have been handled with a little more care. The rest of us can afford to just start blogging and iron out the wrinkles as we go along, but the BC should have elicited a bit more editorial feedback before exposing the blog to the masses. We bloggers are a critical lot and news travels fast. They would have been told, for example, that it is not a great idea to entitle your blog “All Blogs”; that the description “All the Blogs at the barcouncil are displayed here” is a tad naff and also contains a significant error; that “powered by [Bar Council logo]” is a bit of a howler; and that the commenting doesn’t work. These things matter.

When all else fails

11 April 2007 in Miscellany | 1 comment

My muse being dormant, I fall back on the blogger’s stand-by, the meta-post:

Following cyber-stalking and death threats directed at A-list blogger Kathy Sierra, A-list blogger Tim O’Reilly and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales came up with a proposed Blogger’s Code of Conduct. What a dumb idea. Whilst I would deplore abusive and threatening behaviour and think it should be taken seriously, don’t you think A-list bloggers, having created their own problem, should deal with it quietly and leave the rest of us to get on with our lives?

Nearly Legal has finally landed that elusive training contract. About bloody time.

Kevin O’Keefe, always keen to extol the benefits of blogging, reports on one lawyer blogger’s success:

[Through my blog] I have received 18 new client inquiries over the last 12 work days. … It has been absolutely incredible.

Steven Matthews at Slaw ponders whether the written web is better than audio and video.

Is this a case of the entertainment value of audio and video vs. the exchange of ideas within the textual web? or are we simply adding another layer? Will thinking professionals like lawyers market themselves by sticking to their strengths with the written word, or become ‘rock stars’ and attempt to market to the masses?

Geeklawyer to toe the line

4 April 2007 in Blogging

Hot on the heels of Petite Anglaise’s success at a Paris Employment Tribunal whereat she was held unfairly dismissed simply for blogging and being an employee at the same time, Geeklawyer has enjoyed somewhat more modest success in being permitted by the Bar Council to continue blogging and remain a barrister provided he mends his blogging ways. Typically, Geeklawyer’s report of the hearing is less than direct; amongst the colourful verbiage the words “stop belittling the Bar Council” stand out; and I’d guess maybe he will have to stop effing and blinding so much. But can he excercise self-restraint or will he have to submit to Ruthie’s red pen?

Official Documents feed

4 April 2007 in Feeds

TSO are publishing a feed of new documents added to their Official Documents site. This includes the last 10 Command and HC Papers.