June 2007

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Power to the people (2)

29 June 2007 in Government, Public Sector Information, Web 2.0

The Cabinet Office has responded positively to the independent report it commissioned on the future of government services – The Power of Information (see previous post) – saying that the Government will engage in partnership with user-led online communities, not attempt to replicate them:

The Government should work in partnership with the best of citizens’ efforts, not replicate them. If we really want to deliver better public services, the best way to do that is bottom up. Change is driven by better feedback, open information and more ways in which citizens can make their voices heard about what matters to them. The challenge is for all public bodies to think about how they can respond to the challenges described here.

Citizens themselves are already helping each other in online communities. If 30,000 parents were meeting in a park or football stadium to share information and tips about parenting, government would take notice. That they are doing it online simply means we have to find different ways to take their efforts just as seriously.

The DTI has also finally responded to the OFT Market Study on Commercial Use of Public Information. While welcoming the recommendations and “able to accept the majority at this point”, the DTI feels that “there are some that require further work”. In particular, it is wary of tampering with the trading fund model, under which – according to the OFT – the government bodies compete unfairly with the private sector through monopolistic supply of “refined” products which are expected to provide a return to the Treasury.

According to a Guardian Technology article:

It brusquely dismisses the OFT’s proposal for a new terminology to distinguish between “unrefined” data, generally held by a government body, and “refined” products derived from it.

Although it seems an obscure technical point, the definition is central to the OFT’s case that while unrefined data may be a natural monopoly, the government should encourage competition in refined products by allowing access to the unrefined form. ‘The situation is already complex and introducing new terms may not be helpful as existing definitions cannot be replaced or removed,’ says the DTI, which is especially nervous about data being redefined if doing so could hit the income of a trading fund.

We don’t need no Education

29 June 2007 in Government | 1 comment

DfES and DTI are no more, replaced by three new Departments and a fair bit of confusion.

The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) is responsible for children’s services, families, schools, 14-19 education, and the Respect Taskforce.

The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) “will deliver the Government’s long-term vision to make Britain one of the best places in the world for science, research and innovation. It will ensure that the UK has the skilled workforce it needs to compete in the global economy.”

The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR) takes over from the DTI (minus the Innovation bit?), being responsible for “creating the conditions for business success, developing deeper and more effective engagement with business”, and “promoting the competitiveness agenda”.

Of course, this is all a bit of a headache for the web chappies who will be expected to use their ingenuity to put the optimum set of redirects in place. Not too much of a problem at the ex-DTI, just change the logo and shuffle some pages off to DIUS. More problematic is the DCSF/DIUS split. I’m also wondering where those who are both innovative and enterprising should look for guidance; indeed, what about innovative and enterprising teens?

Extended family

28 June 2007 in Law blogs | 4 comments

Quite a gaggle of family law blogs now.

Joining the established Family Lore from John Bolch (note the new URL) and DivorceSolicitor from Lynne Bastow, we now have:

Bloody Relations from barrister Jacqui Gilliatt who specialises in family and education law (“Where there’s a relative there’s a bloody good argument to be had.”)

Family Law Matters from Jo Spain, partner at Spain Williams llp, a specialist family law practice, who provides articles, information and news on family law.

The latter is of interest because it’s an example of the blog used as a primary web presence: ie this is the firm’s website, maintained with the blogging service TypePad, with the usual static pages and the Family Law Matters blog as a feature. For a small, niche practice, why have an indifferent, static, custom website, when you can use a blog service to do the job more easily and more effectively?

Law-abidingness – what’s your score?

26 June 2007 in Society

According to a report published by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College, London:

The ‘law-abiding majority’, which politicians like to address, is a chimera. The law-abiding majority not only do not abide by the law, they also do not believe in the value of laws and rules, shrugging them off in pursuit of their interests and desires. They even regard law-abidingness as a disadvantage.

In a sample of 1,807 people in England and Wales aged between 25 and 65:

  • A third (34 per cent) paid cash in hand to avoid taxation.
  • Just under a third (32 per cent) kept money when ‘over changed’.
  • Around one in five (18 per cent) had taken something from work.
  • One in ten (11 per cent) avoided paying their TV licence.
  • One in ten (11 per cent) wrongly used identity cards for their own gain.
  • Just under one in ten (8 per cent) did not disclose faulty goods in second hand sales.
  • Seven per cent padded an insurance claim.
  • Six per cent asked a friend in bureaucracy to ‘bend the rules’.
  • Five per cent claimed for refunds they knew they weren’t entitled to.

Co-author of the study, Professor Susanne Karstedt, said:

Contempt for the law is as widespread in the centre of society as it is assumed to be rampant at the margins and amongst specific marginal groups. Anti-social behaviour by the few is mirrored by anti-civil behaviour by the many. Neither greed nor need can explain why respectable citizens cheat on insurance claims or in second hand sales, and do not hesitate to discuss their exploits with friends in pubs.

The above findings will of course come as no surprise to my law-abiding readers. It does surprise me though that so many don’t pay their TV licence despite all those spook-types driving around in unmarked vans, ready to pounce.

Seriously, though, is your pot not just a little black?

Facing the future

26 June 2007 in Blogging, Internet law, Law 2.0, Web 2.0

Last Friday/Saturday I attended the SCL Web 2.0 conference in Oxford where speakers and panellists included technology lawyers from large practices, lawyers from Web 2.0 companies, a venture capitalist, an academic and our deputy from the ICO.

The majority of the delegates were from large law firms – there to learn what this Web 2.0 was all about. They weren’t disappointed. There were plenty of insights and much food for thought. It was refreshing to be in a forum with individuals who understood the brave new world or at least acknowledged its existence, but at the same time salutary to realise that the law firm paymasters are still firmly stuck in the old world.

There was a lot of talk of Web 2.0 in terms of companies: MySpace (“so January”), Facebook (countless references) etc. Understandable – these are the valuable clients or potential clients. Virtual worlds were also high on the agenda: Second Life, World of Warcraft and so on. These services pose interesting questions for the lawyer in the bathtub to ponder, such as: Who actually owns the property created/bought in a virtual world? (Answer – read the T&Cs). What happens if they pull the plug? (Ditto.) A few speakers were clearly heavily into other lives: at one stage we were addressed by a tenth-level something-or-other dwarf masquerading as a technology lawyer. But it all comes down to money: there is real money to be made in virtual worlds and where there is money, there are lawyers.

There was less talk on how Web 2.0 technologies were actually being implemented in law firms. Not a lot of activity it seems. Many individuals had recently set up Facebook profiles. Garnering new signups at a growth rate of 6 per cent a month, FB is now seen as a quite acceptable networking forum for grown ups, lawyers included. But few firms had done anything with blogs, wikis and social software. The old guard it seems sees experimentation with these as a waste of fee earning time.

Another interesting take-away is that these web-savvy lawyers are obliged to dish out good, solid, letter-of-the-law, old-world advice, but recognise that if you play by the rules you are disadvantaged. Live dangerously and you may create the next big something-sharing service worth billions; follow the letter of the law and you won’t make the cut. Similar applies with compliance: spend £K on doing it right or save yourself the money, fudging it in the knowledge that the ICO has no teeth.

And finally to blogs and blogging. This did not, to my mind, receive enough attention – perhaps because, unlike the other Web 2.0 services that were flavour of the conference, the blogosphere is very much a democratic space: not only can anyone contribute, but the network is distributed and not owned by anyone. Euan Semple and Ruth Ward of Allen & Overy made the case for implementing blogs, wikis and other social software in-house and Deryck Houghton of Freeth Cartwright gave an entertaining presentation of why blogging on IMPACT works for them. Lilian Edwards, Professor of IT Law at Southampton, was also up there on the podium, though not to speak about blogging.

The difference between the old and the new was well summed up in an exchange on the risks of blogging. Kim Walker of Pinsent Masons suggested companies needed blogging policies to manage the risks posed by employees let loose in the blogosphere, whether on the firm’s or their own account. “You must be joking” (or words to that effect) said Simon Deane-Johns of Zopa (see his take on the conference): existing policies adequately cover the issues and you’re asking for trouble circumscribing individual freedoms. In the new world, the user is king.

Gov 2.0 – power to the people

14 June 2007 in Government, Public Sector Information, Society, Web 2.0 | 2 comments

Around the world, the first phase of Government use of the internet is coming to an end with public services and information largely online. We are now at the start of a new era, where Government starts to learn how to support citizens’ own ways of making, finding and re-using information online.

So says Tom Steinberg, founder and Director of mySociety on the publication of The Power of Information (pdf), a report by him and Ed Mayo, Chief Executive of the National Consumer Council, commissioned by Cabinet Office Minister Hilary Armstrong to ensure Government acted as a leader in understanding changes in communication and information technology.

The report argues that government could now grasp the opportunities that are emerging in terms of the creation, consumption and re-use of information. Current policy and action is not yet adequate to grasp these opportunities. To this end, the report recommends a strategy in which government:

  • welcomes and engages with users and operators of user-generated sites in pursuit of common social and economic objectives;
  • supplies innovators that are re-using government-held information with the information they need, when they need it, in a way that maximises the long-term benefits for all citizens; and
  • protects the public interest by preparing citizens for a world of plentiful (and sometimes unreliable) information, and helps excluded groups take advantage.

[Update: An alternative html version of the report is on Comment on This.]

Information professionals – hip or unhip?

7 June 2007 in Web 2.0

LexisNexis has announced the results of a nationwide (US) survey to provide insights into how information professionals are adding value to their organisations through Web 2.0 technology and knowledge management.

According to the press release, when respondents were asked, “What is the most successful new initiative/service that you have launched in the past year?”, the top response was:

document search, retrieval, delivery, and access enhancements, such as centralizing the document collection into a common ILS or Integrated Library System, OpenURL linking, RSS feed, taxonomy, and library portal integration, development and/or enhancement

That’s a bit of a mouthful! Seems to me it is an aggregation of numerous responses, conveniently added up to achieve top slot.

They also report that information professionals are “very in-tune”, with nearly four in ten accessing blogs at least weekly. That leaves six in ten in the dark ages of the 20th century.

(Hat tip: James Mullan)

By George

7 June 2007 in Blogging | 2 comments

Martin George has outed himself as author of the blog formerly known as Legal Scribbles, saying:

I would rather be open and honest about my identity. I don’t write about my personal life, nor do I touch on overtly sensitive topics …, so there is no good reason to hide behind a domain name.

I can see that for him anonymity served no purpose, and most law bloggers were aware of his identity any way. But I thought Legal Scribbles was a perfectly good name and that he had established a good following using that name. So, I sked him, “Why abandon it and the associated domain name? Why not just declare identity in the About page?”

Martin’s response is that he thought it better to move his blog to his named domain website (ie martingeorge.org), and phaseout all other “branding” (aside from www.conflictoflaws.net).

This makes it simpler for me (I don’t have to post to two blogs) and hopefully easier for everyone else as well. Domain names tend to go in and out of fashion (and I was never particularly enamoured with “Legal Scribbles” – it seemed to imply a certain frivolity or lack of care), but my name will be fairly relevant to me for a while yet, I imagine!

I don’t agree that “frivolous” (or should we say “clever”) blog names are detrimental. Indeed it is par for the course, even in legal academia: witness the wide range of clever names under which US law professors blog.

SEO: quality is the key

7 June 2007 in SEO

Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine in the New York Times gives a rare view inside one of the key departments at Googleplex. Amit Singhal, for some reason quaintly referred to as “Mr. Singhal” throughout, is the master of Google’s ranking algorithm, the complex program that calculates the relevance of a particular page to a particular query. He and his search quality team consider 100 or so reports per day on deficiencies and anomalies in Google results and make about a half-dozen changes a week to the page ranking formulae – everything from penalising particular types of spam sites that are ranking highly to promoting local traders who are not ranking high enough for very relevant local queries.

The article is short on analysis, but you clearly get the picture that this is a truly determined ongoing effort to improve search quality: first to review in a myriad of narrow contexts what is relevant and then through changes to the algorithm to promote the deserving, demote the undeserving and avoid upsetting the apple cart for the rest.

It follows that the only way to longer term success in the page rankings is to provide copious pages of quality, in-depth information relevant to all possible issues your prospective clients might want to address. In doing so you should also consider and apply basic optimisation rules, but the most important can be summarised on a few pages and implemented at little cost. Most other techniques employed by self-proclaimed SEO experts are simply costly shortcuts to short-term success, as Seth Godin comments:

In the SEO arms race, shortcuts have a shorter shelf-life than ever before. [Google's search quality team] is obsessed with them, and they outnumber whoever you might hire to beat the system. Organic success, on the other hand, is a clear path. If you want to be on the front page of matches for “White Plains Lawyer”, then the best choice is to build a series of pages (on your site, on social sites, etc.) that give people really useful information. Not just boilerplate information you stole from a legal website, but really useful stuff about you, the local courts, the forms people need … the things you’d want to find if you were doing that search.

Once you’ve done everything you can … once you’ve built a web of information and once you’ve given the ability to do this to your best clients and your partners and colleagues, then by all means apply the best SEO thinking in the world to your efforts. Hire the best consultants and use the resources you’ve got left to be sure you’re playing by the right rules.

(Hat tip: Kevin O’Keefe)