June 2008

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Going to Barbados

29 June 2008 in Miscellany

See you soon.

Monitoring LexMonitor

25 June 2008 in Blogging, Law blogs, Law sites | 3 comments

There has been a fair amount of comment on LexMonitor, Lexblog’s law blog aggregation service in the last few days since its soft launch.

Aside from straightforward reports of its launch and what it is, there have been some who have been quick to trash it – either the whole concept or because of current failings. For example, in the first comment to the ABA Journal’s report of its launch:

Just what we need … another wholly unnecessary, unrequested fish-net trawling the oceans’ aggregation of blogs where the crap fish dominate and cover the real prize fish.

At the other end of the scale, there have been those like me and like-minded Steve Matthews and others who have enthusiastically congratulated Lexblog. It is not that we think Lexblog has got it right: there are certainly many criticisms one can level at its current implementation. But that misses the point. We see a guy (Kevin O’Keefe, president of Lexblog) who is passionate about the usefulness of blogs for the legal world and has built a very successful business around that, who has a keen grasp of the potential of the developing technologies for the legal profession and who (with editor Rob la Gutta) is not afraid to put his new project up there for us to knock down. For, though there has been pre-launch testing and feedback, that is not sufficient; only by exposing it to the masses will he find out if it might fly. And by garnering early feedback from all quarters, good and bad, he’ll be able to tweak it to perform more like what we want. That’s how things work on the internet.

The most considered review I’ve seen to date is from Scott Greenfield on Simple Justice. He’s highly critical critical of several aspects of the current service, in particular the inclusion of blogs that have no value:

I have a problem with the pipeline getting clogged with crap that will make people turn away from the blawgosphere because it appears to offer nothing useful and serves only self-promotion. This will harm businesses such as Kevin’s as well, and it’s in his interest to get his customers on track as well as produce content that serves a purpose. LexMonitor has the potential to do so, but doesn’t.

But – and this is an important but – he does go on to say in the comments “I meant the feedback constructively, and I’m glad you took it that way. I think your concept is good and helpful. Now let’s tune up the execution and you’ve really got something.”

So, let’s view LexMonitor for what it is – a work in progress. It may fly, it may not; but without innovators like Kevin and team we won’t get the legal web we want.

I’ll be reviewing it myself fully when I’ve had more time on it.

LexMonitor

23 June 2008 in Feeds, Law blogs | 12 comments

Congrats to LexBlog who have just launched LexMonitor, “a daily review of law blogs and journals highlighting prominent legal discussion as well as the lawyers and other professionals participating in this conversation.”

LexMonitor pulls feeds from nearly 2,000 sources and 5,000 authors, classifies them and serves them up, sliced and diced by subject category, author etc or by tags. And there’s more now and more to come. Great work Kevin, Rob and team.

Above the law?

23 June 2008 in Fun | 4 comments

Ironic that Above the Law should post a list of its Official Top 10 Law Songs replete with links to YouTube video clips, none of which, I’ll wager, are licensed.

You have to wonder who voted in the poll. Heading the list is the Clash’s version of They Fought the Law and the Law Won with Bobby Fuller’s version of the same in at #9. And, much as I am addicted to Law and Order, you cannot possibly rate the theme in your top 10.

What’s your fave “law song”?

Are you LinkedIn?

18 June 2008 in Social networking | 1 comment

It seems that “serious” social networking – LinkedIn in particular – is now being seriously embraced by the legal profession. Whereas Facebook is probably correctly seen primarily as a place to socialise rather than do business and is full of clutter, LinkedIn is a focussed and uncluttered service for the professional/business person – a place to “list” yourself and to find others who may be useful to you in your work.

Picking up on research done by Kevin O’Keefe in April, who then found that 118,000 describing themselves as in the “law practice industry” had profiles on LinkedIn, Steve Matthews reported on 13 June that this had “spiked to an incredible 216,000″.

You can’t really fault the admittedly simple methodology – a Google search for “law practice industry” site:www.linkedin.com does indeed appear to return only one hit per LinkedIn profile for those classifying themselves as in the “law practice industry”. Google result sets for the same search do though differ wildly from day to day; a few days ago, this search returned 161K, yesterday 202K. But, even given that variation, the results show a huge increase over 2 months. That 200K may be a small percentage of the total number in the law practice industry globally, but – given the growth rate – it is nevertheless very significant. [Update: As at 17/07/2008 the figure is 290K.]

In my last post I suggested that Robert Ambroggi was wrong to describe social networking sites as “just glorified directories” and suggested they were “glorified Rolodexes” maybe. On reflection I think I was wrong – certainly in the case of LinkedIn: I only have a problem with Robert’s “just”. LinkedIn is an increasingly useful directory – a place where you can find a good number of business people who provide services in which you may be interested (via keywords) and/or who are involved in a particular industry and/or who are based in or near a particular country or more precise location. And results can be listed by, inter alia, keyword relevance or “degrees” away from you. Put your profile on LinkedIn and you will be found in this way. LinkedIn also acts as a super Rolodex or contacts manager, enabling you to keep track of not just your contacts, but also your contacts’ contacts. This latter, networking, function is the label that attaches to such services and with all the hype surrounding social networking, one can forgive the majority for not yet jumping on the bandwagon. But, as a lawyer, view it first as an effective, free directory in which to promote your services; then use it as a directory yourself to find others. Once you’ve done that, it becomes clear that the more you develop your network and establish the connections between you and those you know, the more useful it becomes both for you and those who might be seeking you.

It’s not hard to see that, with a bit more development, LinkedIn may well blow the “traditional” lawyer directories away.

Real lawyers should network

13 June 2008 in Blogging, Social networking

Robert Ambrogi has written the first of two articles on social networking for lawyers for law.com’s Legal Technology News. In the first, Social Networking May Pay Off in the End he starts off by saying that “social networking web sites are just glorified directories”. However, he clearly doesn’t believe that – glorified Rolodexes maybe. The article looks at “how to” on LinkedIn, Facebook and Plaxo. The latter, which may not be familiar to many, he describes as having developed into “a multifaceted tool for managing, tracking and networking with contacts across multiple platforms”.

His conclusion is that “Of the three, LinkedIn is the stronger marketing tool. Facebook is a fun way to keep in contact with your circle of friends and colleagues. Plaxo is a sure route to maintaining your contacts over the long haul.”

Looking forward to the next instalment.

In a ramshackle but extremely interesting video interview, Robert Scoble of Scobleizer fame quizzes Kevin O’Keefe of Lexblog on the benefits of blogging and social networking for lawyers. Kevin is the world’s foremost champion of why real lawyers should (inter alia) blog.

RSS – who profits?

4 June 2008 in Feeds, Internet law | 9 comments

In response to my last post, Susan Cartier Liebel raises the question of the legalities of streaming others’ feeds without permission. She points to her post Shouldn’t You Have To Ask Permission If You Want To Take A Blog’s Feed For Your Profit? which has attracted considerable comment.

Of course your content is your copyright and others should not copy it without your permission. But a feed can be repurposed in many ways, and we need to look at what parts of the feed are being copied and who profits.

Copyright lawyers will have to fill me in on the latest case law on all of this, but I think in practice we have despatched the question whether links are legal (is the web legal?) with a resounding yes. As Sir Tim father-of-the-web-but-not-a-lawyer Berners-Lee has said:

There are some fundamental principles about links on which the Web is based. These principles allow the world of distributed hypertext to work. Lawyers, users and technology and content providers must all agree to respect these principles.

What of link+title? In principle there is copyright in a title, but it’s hard to see anyone any longer seeking to enforce copyright here.

But an RSS feed is an aggregation, so what of a bunch of links+titles? Here there is a stronger case for saying that this aggregation is protected by copyright, and if we’re talking about an aggregation of links+titles+descriptions or even +excerpts, that is clearly protected. So let’s talk about permission, express or implied.

I don’t believe there’s any implied permission for others to republish feeds. But in practice, why publish a feed if you don’t want it to be republished? It will be, and there’s little you can do to stop it. You can frame some stern T & Cs or apply a more friendly CC licence, but most, whether intentionally or by default, will take little notice.

Susan makes much of others taking your (blog) feed “for profit”. We are all miffed if we see others profiting from our work at our expense. But, with feed repurposing, in most cases we profit too, sufficiently that we do not see it as being at our expense.

  • Google indexes, caches and republishes parts of my website, my blog, my feeds without my permission. Google profits handsomely, but I profit too.
  • Other specialist search engines and directories – like Tehcnorati, Blawg Search – also index and repurpose my content. If I’ve submitted my site to them, I’ve probably given them permission to do this, but in most cases my signing up only legitimates what they have been doing / would do anyway. (Susan, Technorati indexes your blog whether you’ve claimed it or not.) They profit, but I profit too.
  • Smaller fish might also republish my feeds, but in all cases short of their republishing my full text, I profit as much as or more than they do. All items link back to me. And I really am not going to lose sleep if they choose to wrap Google ads around it or seek to profit in other ways. (I do view sploggers etc as the scum of the earth, but I blame Google Adsense.)

So in practice, what we are all most concerned about is others claiming our real work – our full posts or articles – as their own; and there is a simple answer: if you want to protect your content, include only excerpts rather than full text in your feeds. Syndicate your metadata, not your data.

RSS – endless possibilities … if only

3 June 2008 in Feeds | 13 comments

When I said at the turn of the last year that RSS would explode in 2007, I don’t think I was being particularly prescient.

The RSS standard was then sufficiently well established that it was only a matter of time (and in internet time, that means months rather than years) before it took hold. Blogs were already pumping out RSS as standard and most news sites were latching onto it; Firefox had added support for Live Bookmarks and I saw the release of IE7 as being the catalyst for wider awareness.

Although there are many desktop RSS readers around, most people are finding it more convenient to do their computing in “the cloud” and anecdotal evidence suggests that Google Reader is perhaps now the RSS reader of choice.

But the potential for RSS lies not simply in the benefits it provides for individuals to consume and manage breaking news/current awareness feeds for themselves, it lies in the literally endless opportunities it offers for us to repurpose that information to our own ends. There are numerous applications now that enable you to publish RSS feeds on your web pages; to aggregate and filter feeds and generate custom feeds from that; and to feed these feeds into services that themselves produce feeds.

The only problem I have with all this cool stuff is the nightmare vision that we are creating endless loops which sooner or later will bring the global network down!

In the UK legal field, there are plenty of useful blog and news feeds to be getting on with; but it is to their shame that, outside these spheres, established publishers have so far failed to come up with the goods:

  • the Statute Law Database – finally released after more than 14 years development – has not seen fit (despite my entreaties) to implement feeds of latest legislation (and if you do so, by year and number, both descending please!)
  • the law publishers may be doing things with their current awareness content behind the paywall, but the unarguable benefits of their publishing feeds of their latest publications have thus far escaped them (the only current exception being Wiley Law)
  • even BAILII – at the vanguard of the free legal web – does not yet (publicly) publish feeds of latest cases (they do produce an unannounced beta – from which a few pipes)

Get on with it!

Law tweeting proposition 2

2 June 2008 in Twitter | 10 comments

Excellent response to my call to arms for blawgers to start tweeting. First up were John Bolch, Nearly Legal, Usefully Employed, LawMinx and Charon QC.

So now for my next proposition: pipe us the best feeds in your area of legal interest. Here’s how:

Set up a new Twitter account with a meaningful username like xxxlaw. The land grab for Twitter usernames like these is not yet under way, so you should be able to nab your preferred one. You will need to have a usable alternative email address for the account as an email can only be used for one account. Be sure also to use other appropriate keywords in the “bio” for the account.

Pipe into this account using Twitterfeed the best law news feeds in your subject area. I’d restrict it to just three or four; more may be overkill. But it’s up entirely to you of course.

Now follow it yourself and promote it to others. A stream of useful news will now intersperse the social tweets you follow.

For general law news, follow my lawtweets.