October 2007

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Free access is not open access

11 October 2007 in Public Sector Information | 2 comments

I highlight again a single point from para 87 of the Power of Information review from my acronymically-entitled previous post PSI4U:

It is relatively easy to suggest changes that would give citizens and organisations better access to information held by government. These include … republishing information in open standards or as web services.

Let’s look at some examples central to the legal profession:

  • The publication of the Statute Law Database as a free access, public resource was a huge step forward and did represent a “sea change” in the government’s attitude, but free access to its web views does not open up the data. You cannot easily extract, re-use or repurpose the data as you are at the mercy of its formatting and a URI scheme that relies on its internal document IDs; and there are no RSS feeds of new legislation.
  • Similarly, the numerous different courts publish their judgments, but all in their own way and with no RSS feeds that I could see at last review. (BAILII does a grand job aggregating and making sense of these, but even they do not provide RSS feeds.)
  • All government websites add important new policy documents daily to their websites, yet, again, there is no consistency and the provision of RSS feeds for these latest additions is relatively scant, patchy and inconsistent.

These are all materials which there is no argument we should be able to use and re-use freely, but for the sake of a few days’ programming time, we are denied the keys to open access which would unlock the data’s potential.

Then we have the PSI that is locked up in trading funds. This is a political issue, with the nay-sayers believing that its value can only be exploited via the fundholders’ monopolies and the open access brigade believing that huge social and commercial benefits will flow from its release into the public domain. We do have, in many cases, free access to the data in that we can, via the appropriate website, query the fundholders’ data for the information we need, but it is served up in small chunks, and if we want to do anything with a meaningful set of data, we are reduced to scraping the websites. That’s fair or foul depending your conscience rather than the niceties of copyright law.

If you’ve any interest in leveraging public sector information, then do publicise (via a link in your blogroll or wherever) and contribute to [updated 10/07/2008 OPSI's Public Sector Information Unlocking Service].

Assault and battery

11 October 2007 in Design and style

Information Overlord thinks the look and feel of the redesigned Lawyer website is “just nasty“. That’s harsh, but it is certainly a brutal assault on the senses: hundreds of info fragments dressed up with red and blue all over and replete with the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes (and token green and orange for our friends westwards). Why do so many sites – news sites in particular – feel they have to cram as much as possible onto one page and tart themselves up?

This is a question Nick Carr also asks and he doesn’t really have an answer:

Head to any online magazine or newspaper, and you’ll almost certainly be confronted with a page full of dense-packed info-fragments. On a recent visit to the home page of this newspaper, the well-named Guardian Unlimited, I counted 204 links and 30 photographs. The New York Times home page had 316 links, 18 photos, and a dozen banner ads. The pages of technology publications are the worst. …

There’s more than a hint of desperation in all these chockablock sites. “Please don’t go away,” they seem to shout at us. “Look at all our wonderful data-baubles. There must be something here to hold your attention.”

But the shouting’s usually in vain. We may start out looking for some particular piece of information, but as often as not we end up miles away, our neurons frazzled, our original purpose forgotten.

Who’s to blame here? Is it the cluttered sites that are driving us to distraction? Or are the site designers just catering to our scatter-brained capriciousness? That’s hard to say. My guess is that we’re caught in a vicious cycle that speeds up with every mouse click.

What we hanker for is “a small, quiet clearing amid the digital brambles”. That’s why I’ll go for simple, understated design every time. Sure, colour and images liven things up and have their place, but when they take over and actually get in the way of our task at hand, they are counter-productive. We can’t get away from ads, as on many sites they support the free access we enjoy, but we can ask for less other visual clutter. Good web design is not what pleases the execs on a big screen in the boardroom; it is what works for users.

Opening up the social graph

11 October 2007 in Social networking | 2 comments

Francis Irving of the Open Knowledge Foundation posts about how Brad Fitzpatrick, ex Six Apart and now with Google, plans to open up the social graph (the connections between people that build social networks). Currently the now numerous social networks all operate as walled gardens; the ultimate goal of Brad’s project is, via a a non-profit and open source software to:

make the social graph a community asset, utilizing the data from all the different sites, but not depending on any company or organization as “the” central graph owner.

Rumour is that Google will announce a new set of APIs on 5 November that will allow developers to leverage its social graph data, with Brad leading the charge to make the project as open as possible.

OPSI Legislation – heading towards the semantic web

10 October 2007 in Legislation | 2 comments

The OPSI Report on Public Access Scheme Funding 2006/07 gives a good summary of recent and planned improvements in the OPSI legislation site. (See also my earlier post on improved access.) Here are some extracts from the (pdf) report:

Over the last year and a half the Office of Public Sector Information has used funding reallocated from the public library subsidy for printed legislation to improve government’s free online legislation services to the citizen. … This report shows the specific improvements we have made in 2006/07 with this funding.

New page design

The most apparent change made as part of the programme is that legislative content is now presented using the same user interface design as other parts of the OPSI website. … Providing visitors with a website view of the content, with a consistent site wide layout and clear navigation options, gives first time users a sense of where they have arrived and what other possibilities are provided by the site. Important usability features, such as prominent bread crumb navigation (the “you are here” tracks at the top of each page) provide a context for visitors to explore the site more fully.

PDF versions of primary legislation back to 1800

We know that many visitors to the OPSI website value having a “print version” in PDF, to see an Act or Statutory Instrument as it appears on the print page and to produce their own paper copy. OPSI started publishing PDF versions of legislation in October 2005 and backdated the catalogue of PDFs to 2001, with primary legislation from 1999. This year OPSI has used funding from the Public Access Scheme to backdate the range of PDFs available for Acts of Parliament to 1800, where the Act is wholly or substantially in force.

Directly addressable content fragments

The republished legislation includes a highly granular unique identifier scheme, which allows specific sections and sub sections within a legislation item to be directly reference by a URI, which resolves to the right place in the online version. … This URI scheme can be adopted and used by others and it is hoped will contribute to the development of other more semantic representations of UK legislation as we move towards the Semantic Web (or the web of data).

Improved search

Several enhancements have been made to the way the website search facility works. The search engine, based on the Google Search Appliance, has been integrated with APR’s Semaphore product, to provide for a subject based refinement facility. The user performs their search in the usual way, but with their results they are given an opportunity to refine the search by a subject term from the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary, or to search for related subjects to their original search term.

User created RSS Feeds

The website search engine also allows visitors to create and then subscribe to their own RSS feeds. To create an RSS Feed, for example to be alerted to any new legislation which is published about “pensions”, the user searches for “pensions” in the normal way. At the top of the search results is an option to subscribe to the pensions RSS feed. When a new piece of legislation concerning “pensions” is published, the new items will appear in the feed.

Incorporating statutes from the SLD

OPSI is working with SPO to bring our online legislative services together, to create a single place where visitors can access the widest range of legislative content held by the government alongside supporting material. The first step in this process is to publish a most recent version of revised statutes from the Statute Law Database, using the same style and approach as OPSI has taken to publishing legislation as enacted. The first stage of this work, published revised statutes up to 1988, will be completed by the end of the September 2007. This will help improve access to the content in the Statute Law Database, particularly for non-legal experts, less likely to need the more sophisticated features provided by the Statute Law Database website.

Plans for 2007/08

  • Detailed usability testing, using eye-tracking software, to evaluate the improvements made to the online legislation service, identify yet more enhancements and to help shape options for bringing together legislation on the OPSI website with content from the Statute Law Database.
  • Extending the scope of legislation published from the Statute Law Database from 1988 to date.
  • Republishing secondary legislation to the same standard as primary legislation.
  • Developing and applying a legislation specific taxonomy, to aid the searching and inter-relating of legislation.
  • Publishing non-print Statutory Instruments online.
  • Publishing the legislative tables of effect for secondary legislation online.
  • Continuing to add alt attributes to images and table summary information to ensure the full contents of legislation is accessible to those using screen readers and other assistive technology.

IHT – die happy

10 October 2007 in Law blogs, Mammon | 1 comment

Time to mention the blogs IHT Solutions and Law and Death and Taxes who both post about the death of the nil-rate band discretionary trust.

IHT Solutions:

You could certainly call the government politically cynical but for once, one can be magnanimous and simply accept that the government have listened to the voices of “middle Britain”. … In effect, the government has now made legal by statutory powers that which has until now been achieved by utilising the nil-rate band discretionary loan trust Will. As such, this form of Will in a stroke has effectively been consigned to the annals of legal history.

Law and Death and Taxes has a detailed post with the technical detail and the following comment:

This is an elegant solution to what was a real problem for couples: how to pass down the matrimonial home to children without an inheritance tax charge or the creation of complex trust arrangements that weren’t really understood. Contrary to what some commentators are saying, it does not raise the nil-rate threshold.

Seems to me that the government has also deftly kept to its principles. While the left argue that paying death duties is vital for social mobility and opportunity and the Chancellor’s wheeze will now relieve many in middle Britain from those taxes, its benefit is largely in favour of those who did not appreciate the need for, or could not afford, the IHT planning common amongst the ABC1s.

Oh dear!

5 October 2007 in Blogging, Law blogs | 3 comments

Ed at Blawg Review has pulled me up for supplying only 6 best blawgs:

There is no rule that you are not to include a blog already named by another. In fact, it’s encouraged, as those most deserving of the acknowledgment will be given it from many other top bloggers who have been nominated. So, this meme should not run out of steam, unless individuals are misinformed about the rules as they pass it on to those they include in their lists. Please add another 4 to your list, by including those you would have liked to include but for being misguided about that “rule” which is not a rule, at all.

To which I have replied:

Yes I know that’s not a rule. There are no rules! I was just trying to figure the most constructive list I could give. I’ll give further thought to adding some more!

So, to comply with Ed’s “rule” that there should be 10, here are four more (in addition to maestro Charon QC himself, of course):

Changing themes

5 October 2007 in Binary Law | 2 comments

As is apparent, I’ve implemented a new theme for this blog – Blue Zinfandel, a widget-ready theme from Brian Gardner. I’ll be playing with widgets and customising it over the next couple of weeks, so apologies in advance if you lose your way.

Many thanks to Ulf Pettersen whose Modern theme has served me well for the past 18 months.

Have news? – blog it!

5 October 2007 in Blogging, Law blogs

I said in my state of UK blawging post that blog-like functions will increasingly be incorporated into all websites. I should have added that the best way to do this is using blog software rather than your own CMS. Why?

1) Blog software provides you out of the box with all the functionality you need for a latest news/latest articles section of your site, all easily configurable. So there’s little or no IT overhead and a friendly way for the non-IT-literate to post their own content, receive feedback and converse with users.

2) Blog content gets indexed almost immediately by Google and ranks higher than equivalent content authored by other means.

To illustrate these points, look at the website of Martin Kaye Solicitors.

Click the News menu link and you’re taken to … a Blogger blog. It’s integrated into the site simply by editing the Blogger blog template to mirror the site template. (I initially set up Binary Law in this manner, as a blogged news section on infolaw, but later decided I did indeed want a separate blog with its own personality.)

Now do a Google search for the words in the title of the latest post. As I write a Google search for Check the small print puts Martin Kaye at No. 1.

And if you currently have a fairly indifferent, unexciting brochureware site, you can, as mentioned before, effectively use a blog as your primary web presence.

Simply the best

5 October 2007 in Blogging, Law blogs | 2 comments

I have been tagged by Charon QC to name 10 blawgs I consider the best, continuing the meme started by the editor of Blawg Review.

As most involved have said, this is difficult. There are several blogs I do not follow closely, being outside my main sphere of interest, but which I recognise as top quality for one reason or another. Equally, there are some that I do follow closely which are best for my purposes but probably not best in the broader scheme of things. Another conundrum is that if I am not to repeat the blogs already mentioned, even those with less advanced mathematical skills will see that this meme will run out of steam pdq.

So, first, let me say that I concur with many in Charon’s list; and next I give you just 6 top legal info and legal web marketing blogs. You’ll find these in my blogroll – it’s what blogrolls are for.

[Update]

UK blawgs – where are we now?

4 October 2007 in Blogging, Law blogs | 2 comments

Although a handful of UK law bloggers were active before 2006, it was only then that the UK blawgosphere started to take off. Since then, new law blogs have continued to appear at the rate of about one a week.

On infolaw I catalogue all known UK law blogs (plus a small number of notable overseas blawgs and blawg directory sites). Currently there are 132 listings (125 UK law blogs). More than half of these are hosted by Google’s Blogger: 57 resolve to blogspot.com, 8 to wordpress.com and 8 to typepad.com; the remainder resolve to 57 other unique domains, though a number of these are nevertheless hosted by one of the big three blog services.

What trends do I see? New blawgs continue to appear at a steady rate – no great rush, but no significant falling-off either. It is noticeable that those who have been blogging for a while are (on average and with several notable exceptions) posting slightly less frequently; they are also tending to focus more on their core interests, with less posting about peripheral topics and less navel gazing. In other words, these blogs have matured.

As noted recently by Nearly Legal, there are several bloggers who have simply stopped posting or deleted their blogs or moved them elsewhere without so much as a by your leave. This I cannot understand. You have spent time creating and maintaining a blog and in building up a network of blog friends; the least you can do for yourself and out of respect for the rest of us is leave a forwarding address or tell us why you’ve stopped blogging. Leaving us with a stale last post or dumping us on a “page not found” are guaranteed to leave a poor impression.

For many, blogging is largely about self-satisfaction: getting it off their chest, stirring it up, getting feedback, learning from others; some use it more directly to promote their expertise and engage potential clients and associates. Whatever your purpose, blogging is a form of networking, putting you in touch with new people, sharing new information and insights and (if you do it right) earning you kudos and new business.

The novelty of blogging has worn off and the hype has died down. That’s a good thing. Blogging has become normal and newcomers will continue to see its benefits as part of the broader Web 2.0 movement. I don’t foresee any explosion of law blogs per se, but blogging will continue to grow and blog-like functions will increasingly be incorporated into all websites.

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