July 2008

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Blogs as a publishing platform

23 July 2008 in Blogging | 1 comment

Dave Winer, pioneer of blogging, RSS and other publishing standards, recently posted about the importance of blogs as a publishing platform:

Publishing keeps getting cheaper. That’s been the constant push, the practical application of Moore’s Law in my neck of the woods. I’ve always been a publishing guy, and that’s always been how I viewed computers, and it’s why I got into them in the first place. Most people don’t get this, the real story of blogging is just the continuation of the process. … Blogging is the leading edge in publishing in the first decade of this century.

I too am a “publishing guy” and continue to promote here the merits of the blog as a publishing platform for the legal world , as does Kevin O’Keefe – most recently:

Whether you’re Thomson West publishing legal treatises, ALM publishing legal periodicals, a law firm publishing newsletters, or a law professor publishing law review articles, you ought to be looking at blogging as a very cost effective means of publishing. In addition to reduced costs, blogs offer a means of distributing content. Content that is also more timely than that published in traditional fashion.

Dave and Kevin link to supporting comments from Clay Shirky (of Here Comes Everybody fame). Clay’s argument was that the concept of blogging would become less important as the range of publishing activity enabled by the blog platform expanded.

The word blog itself is going to fade into the middle distance, in the same way words like home page and portal did. Those words used to mean something relatively crisp and specific, but became so overloaded as to be meaningless.

But it’s interesting to note that Clay’s comments are actually from an interview in April 2004. So, in the context of that time, he was clearly wrong: “blogs” and “blogging” exploded thereafter. His assertion makes more sense today – now that blogging has become “normal”. But while it’s true we’re less likely to talk of newsletters, collections of articles etc as blogs just because they use blog technology, to my mind “blogging” will live on as the term used to define the “naked conversations” which have popularised the medium.

Towards Gov 2.0

14 July 2008 in Articles, Government

Democracy – as Abraham Lincoln famously defined it – is the government of the people, by the people and for the people. Hitherto, we’ve been able to exercise our democratic rights only at the ballot box, by lobbying our MP and perhaps in public demonstrations. Can Gov 2.0 – the application of Web 2.0 to government, engaging citizens and businesses – deliver greater democracy?

Recent government and independent reports suggest that government should be:

  • providing services designed around the citizen or business, not the provider
  • opening up its (our) information for re-use by citizens and businesses
  • working in partnership with the best of citizen and business efforts.

Transformational government

The report Transformational Government: Enabled by Technology, published by the Cabinet Office in November 2005, set out an ambitious vision for the delivery of public services in the 21st century using the power of new technologies to change the way government works. We are fortunate now to have as the new encumbent minister in charge a man of vision who really gets it, Westminster über-blogger Tom Watson. His immediate plans are ambitious:

  • pushing through the closure of hundreds of unnecessary government websites
  • improving online content, including minimum standards for the content of remaining websites
  • ensuring that all content is fully accessible to the major search engines
  • embedding data mash-up into thinking across all of government, not just the early adopters
  • capturing skills, talent and energy needed for change from within government and from outside
  • using new media to engage more directly and more effectively with individuals and communities.

And his vision for the future goes far beyond this, launching the Power of Information Task Force, which will drive forward the Government’s agenda. A key goal is to increase innovation and improve the way government shares information so ordinary people can develop online services that benefit their community.

Open information

A prerequisite to the effective delivery of Gov 2.0 is the openness of public sector information (PSI). There is a vast amount of PSI available for free access and much more that may be requested under the terms of the FOIA. But the supply of PSI does not automatically give the recipient of the information the right to re-use it: most PSI is subject to Crown copyright, administered by HMSO (now part of OPSI).

Brief extracts of most materials may be reproduced under the fair dealing provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (sections 29 and 30) for the purposes of research for non-commercial purposes, private study, criticism, review and news reporting.

Further, many Crown copyright materials, including press notices, legislation and explanatory notes, ministerial speeches, consultation documents and other documents on official websites, may be reproduced freely under the “Crown copyright waiver”.

For other materials, OPSI implement a “click-use licensing” scheme. There is no charge for the basic PSI Licence, nor for the Parliamentary Licence, but there may be (and often is) a charge for the Value-Added Licence, depending on the type and amount of information being re-used.

The Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2005 implemented the like-named EU Directive. Their aim is to stimulate the development of value-added products and services by removing obstacles standing in the way. They do not impose any obligation on PSI holders (PSIHs) to license re-use but regulate the conditions under which they do so.

Most government information is currently published in a way that suits the government, not the citizen or business, and much raw data gathered at taxpayers’ expense is not freely available for re-use, being locked up in trading funds (Ordnance Survey, Met Office, Companies House, Land Registry et al) which must earn a return for the Treasury. The Office of Fair Trading, in its market study on Commercial use of public information published in December 2006, found that raw information is not as easily available as it should be, licensing arrangements are restrictive, prices are not always linked to costs and PSIHs may be giving competing businesses less attractive terms than their own value-added operations.

The OFT concluded that PSIHs should make as much PSI available as possible for commercial re-use; ensure that businesses have access to PSI at the earliest point that it is useful; and provide access to information where the PSIH is the only supplier on an equal basis to all businesses and the PSIH itself.

In response, the DTI (now the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform) commissioned a private study by Cambridge University into the pricing of PSI by the trading funds, which was published on the side with the 2008 Budget Report. Entitled Models of Public Sector Information Provision via Trading Funds (PDF), the study examines the benefits for society, and the effects on government revenue, of different charging policies.

The paper finds that socially optimal policy would involve leaving the charging regime for most “refined” products unchanged, but moving to marginal (in the digital era, zero) cost charging for “unrefined” data. The trading funds would then be in commercial competition with outside organisations who would now have access to “unrefined” data on the same terms as the trading fund itself.

The conclusion that our data should be free will be difficult for the Government to ignore. Many in government are fully supportive; but the decision lies with the Treasury who has thus far simply announced its intention to “look at these issues” during the current spending review cycle.

The power of information

With government information open and free, citizens and businesses will have much greater opportunity and incentive to develop value-added online services that benefit their communities and markets.

The Power of Information, an independent report commissioned by the Cabinet Office to ensure government acts as a leader in understanding changes in communication and information technology, argued that government should 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.

It identified the rise of two new groups of citizens exploiting developments on the internet: people who create public service information, such as Netmums, an online community for parents or expectant parents, and TheStudentRoom, mainly about homework and university applications; and those who take information from various sources and mix it together to make new tools and services – more colloquially and widely known as “data mashers”.

The latter group includes businesses, non-profits and the general public. Already particularly active in this area is mySociety with services such as TheyWorkForYou, based on Hansard, and FixMyStreet.

The report recommended 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.

At the time, the Cabinet Office responded positively, saying that the Government would engage in partnership with user-led online communities, not attempt to replicate them. Tom Watson’s recent speeches and the establishment of the Power of Information Task Force demonstrate a desire to drive this forward quickly.

Could Gov 2.0 be just around the corner?

Follow the Power of Information agenda. For a lively debate on data issues, see the Free Our Data campaign blog.

Quick and easy custom search with Google

14 July 2008 in Articles, Search

Some 18 months ago Google launched its Custom Search service (still in beta) that enables you to create a custom search engine (CSE) focussing on anything up to 2,000 specified URLs.

The rationale is that, despite its undoubtedly sophisticated algorithms, even with a carefully crafted search, Google will always return results near the top that are of low relevance or unwanted and effectively hide some results that are particularly relevant or wanted. A Google CSE enables you to influence the results by including exclusively or emphasising results from particular sites or particular parts of sites that are determined by you to be most relevant to your audience.

Applications

Before looking at the nitty gritty of how it works, let’s consider the circumstances in which a Google CSE might be useful.

Search your own site

Chances are Google indexes all the open-access content on your site. By pointing a Google CSE just at your site you instantly have a site search facility with which your users are familiar. Even if you currently have a site search facility, it’s worth experimenting with a Google CSE.

Search a single favourite site

How many large sites have you visited where the search engine provided is less than satisfactory or even worse than useless for your purposes? By setting up a Google CSE for the site you can customise the search experience to suit your exact needs.

Search multiple sites in a particular domain

On the face of it, this is the most compelling application for CSEs. You can combine the power of Google with your own expertise and judgment in a particular domain to deliver results that are most relevant to your target audience.

How to create a custom search engine

Setting up a basic Google CSE is simplicity itself.

  • Go to www.google.com/coop/cse/ and, if you do not already have a Google account, register.
  • Now click the button to Create a Custom Search Engine.
  • Enter a Name for your search engine and a Description and drop into the Sites to search box a list of the URLs of the sites you want to include or emphasise in the search.
  • Accept the Terms of service and click Next.
  • On the next page, click Finish and you’re done.

You now have a Google CSE accessible via a page on Google that will search just the sites you have listed.

Improvements

To improve your CSE, go to the My search engines page and click the control panel link for your CSE.

Include or emphasise the sites?

Under preferences, you’ll note you can select to search only the included sites or to search the entire web but emphasise the included sites. The latter option will weight the sites you have listed so that they generally appear before other results. This is an important decision and it will depend on each particular application. Bear in mind that if you include only the sites you have listed, all other results – many of which may be relevant to your users – will not appear.

Whole sites, folders or patterns?

Click the Sites menu link and click on one of the sites you’ve listed. You’ll note you can include all pages whose address contains the URL or include just the specific page or URL pattern you have entered. It’s tempting to take the easy route and simply include whole sites. But consider whether it would be better instead to include several specific folders or to use wildcards to select specific subsets of pages.

Refinements?

By labelling your sites, you enable the user to refine their results by category. Your labels can be used either to include only sites in that category or to emphasise those sites over the others. The decision will usually depend on whether the categories are mutually exclusive or not.

My place or yours?

If you’re using the default Google-hosted version, just click the Look and feel menu link to customise the format of your search page. But your CSE will be far more effective if you host it on your own site. This involves a little more work.

Click the Code menu link and you’ll be given the Google iFrame code that will enable you to:

Place a search box for your CSE on any page on your site. Simply drop the search box code into the relevant place on any page on your site.

Place the results on a designated page on your site. Set up a page template to host the results; drop the search code into the top of the page and drop the search results code beneath.

Pesky ads?

If you accepted the default Standard Edition which is free, Google ads will be displayed on the results pages. These will appear either above and below the results or to the right. Click the Code menu link to change this.

To suppress the Google ads you’ll need to pay Google $100 p.a. Click the Business Edition menu link to sign up.

Effectiveness

Do CSEs deliver useful search engines that improve the search experience for your users?

There are many circumstances in which CSEs will be effective in searching single sites or particular parts of sites because an existing alternative is lacking or inefficient. However, my experience of multi-site CSEs produced for particular domains is that, without exception, they all disappoint.

Examples of CSEs produced for the UK legal arena include:

My blawgle, searching UK law blogs, and a few others I developed covering cases, legislation and government sites.

Nearly Legal’s LawSearch which includes selected statute and case law, government guidance, reports, commentary, other resources and help and law blogs.

OUT-Law’s LawTrawlUK which currently includes 95 major law firm sites and some significant public sector sites.

Most CSEs I’ve come across are fairly basic, including just a selected list of sites to be included in the results. But to produce a CSE that does the business does require considerable thought and time implementing the advanced features: carefully and methodically selecting specific folders and/or file types using lists or wild cards, labelling the entries and weighting them.

For those reasons, when setting up the experimental CSEs on infolaw, I decided that creating CSEs with tightly defined scopes might be a fruitful path to follow; within some I spent time pointing to specific folders and folder patterns rather than just the sites; and for some I added labels so that results could be refined. I did not get into weighting the results; that was time I wasn’t willing to spend initially. Reactions from others have been positive, but I have to say even I do not use them much myself and I have yet to try and “sell” their benefit to others.

I have also tried a number of other CSEs designed for other domains. Genuine effort and expertise has gone into all of these; but they fail to engage because either one doesn’t know sufficiently precisely the scope of ones search, or if one does, one would prefer a different selection of sites, or the results feel unbalanced; and all the time one knows one will be missing some key results and those unexpected nuggets that a well-crafted global Google search would serve up. Narrowing the domain searched often takes away more than it gives.

A wake-up call to lawyers

14 July 2008 in Articles, Future of law

Professor Richard Susskind is, as I write, no doubt completing the final draft of his forthcoming treatise, The End of Lawyers? to be published in June by Oxford University Press.

More than 12 years ago he wrote its predecessor, The Future of Law. Then only a few of us had awoken to the internet; only a handful of firms had websites; there was no free law to speak of and no e-commerce; Google’s founders were still students and facebooks were still published annually in hard covers. Yet he then predicted remarkably accurately the shape of the legal internet of today.

In six extracts published recently in Times Online he gives us a taste of his updated thinking and asks us to help him finish the new book!

  • He challenges lawyers to embrace change.
  • He revisits some of the predictions he made in The Future of Law.
  • He argues that lawyers will give way to multi-disciplinary advisers.
  • He says that clients will not remain loyal to conventional practices.
  • He asks who is looking beyond the next five years.
  • He addresses his critics and says they have missed the point.

Here are extracts from the extracts. The headings are mine, with apologies to the author.

Face up to it

“The law is not there to provide a livelihood for lawyers any more than ill-health exists to offer a living for doctors. Successful legal business may be a by-product of law in society, but it is not the purpose of law. And, just as numerous other industries and sectors are having to adapt to broader change, so too should lawyers. —

The challenge is not to assess how commoditisation and IT might threaten the current work of lawyers, so that the traditional ways can be protected and change avoided. It is to find and embrace better, quicker, less costly, more convenient and publicly valued ways of working.”

No, I am not dangerous or insane

“I argued that many of our fundamental assumptions about the nature of legal service and the nature of legal process would be challenged by the coming of information technology and the internet. In other words, much that we had always taken for granted in the past, about the way that lawyers work and the way non-lawyers receive legal guidance, would change through technology. —

When I suggested ten years ago that e-mail would become the principal means by which clients and lawyers would communicate, many people suggested I was dangerous, that I was probably insane and that I certainly did not understand anything about security or confidentiality.”

The e-volution is upon us

“Lawyers, like the rest of humanity, face the threat of ‘disintermediation’ (broadly, being cut out of some supply chain) by smart systems; and, as in other sectors, if they want to survive, their focus should be on re-intermediating – that is, on finding news ways of invaluably inserting themselves in supply chains. This will lead, I believe, to the emergence of what I call ‘legal hybrids’: individuals of multi-disciplinary background, whose training in law will have evolved and dovetail with a formal education in one or more other disciplines. —

I am not suggesting that there will be no call for the traditional legal expert. I am saying there will be less call for these individuals, because new ways of satisfying legal demand will evolve and old inefficiencies will be eliminated.”

Your clients will vote with their wallets

“The major firms may feel they are beyond the scope of commoditisation and systematisation and that, on bet-the-ranch deals and disputes the legal fees represent but pocket change in the grand scheme. But this is not the attitude I find amongst the general counsel of some of the world’s largest organisations.

These managers are under pressure to reduce their legal budget. And these clients’ loyalty to conventional firms will be limited if new legal businesses emerge that offer quicker, more convenient, lower cost alternatives to low- and high-value work that seem to be more geared to the interests of clients and are more business-like in their constitution.”

Think of your children

“No-one who might be thought to be in the driving seat of the legal system is thinking systematically, rigorously and in a sustained way about the long term future of legal service. No-one seems to be worrying about the fate of the next generation of lawyers.

It is assumed that legal guidance will continue to be dispensed by skilled professionals as a one-to-one, consultative advisory service. By and large, no discontinuities, transformations, upheavals, disruptions or revolutions in the nature of legal service are being contemplated.”

Wake up!

“Open-minded lawyers, and those who genuinely care about the interests of their clients should be looking at ways in which IT can play a more prominent role in their services. there are existing and emerging technologies whose widespread adoption will effectively render [some lawyers] redundant. ‘disruptive legal technologies’ [will] challenge and replace them, in whole or in part.

Most are phenomena of which most practising lawyers are only dimly aware. If lawyers are barely conversant with today’s technologies, they have even less sense of how much progress in legal technology is likely in the coming 10 years. Politely, it puzzles me profoundly that lawyers who know little about current and future technologies can be so confident about their inapplicability.”

Comments anyone?

In keeping with the times, Times Online elicited online comments from readers to each of the articles. These served the purpose of not only engaging the readership, but also providing feedback to assist Susskind in completing his work.

A number of commentators ignore the telling question mark at the end of the title The End of Lawyers? and the sub-title rethinking the nature of legal services. Even the Times itself is guilty, asking “Will lawyers still exist in 100 years?” If lawyers are those who do legal work, then the answer is “Of course they will”. But that is not the question; the question is rather “What shape will lawyers be in?” Reliance on the fact that there will always be lawyers will not help those lawyers who fail to adapt to the changing landscape.

Others point out that there will always be high-end/complex legal work that cannot be commoditised, but here again, this is a rather narrow interpretation of Susskind’s point. “Commoditisation” and even “systematisation” may imply automation of the repetitive but not necessarily much more. But law is a knowledge business and when looking at the prospects for lawyering, including high-end work, think also “collaboration” and “collective intelligence” and other words which are to the fore in the current Web 2.0 world to see where some of the new efficiencies will lie.

There is also more substantial comment in the blogosphere and in the legal press, which you can find readily by Googling “the end of lawyers” susskind.

As to the immediate future, Susskind counsels (in his contribution to the SCL 2008 predictions):

“My advice to lawyers and law firms everywhere is to take Web 2.0 very seriously indeed in 2008. We are entering a new era of Internet activity, one that will directly affect the daily working lives of legal practitioners. The impact on the legal profession of social networking and online collaboration will be profound. I am more confident about this than I was, in 1996, when I said that the Internet would transform the communication habits (e-mail) and information-seeking habits (the Web) of lawyers. In 2008, we will see the beginnings of the legal world embracing Web 2.0.”

Web 1.0 facilitated the delivery of information and transactions between producers and consumers and set the ball rolling; Web 2.0 is transforming the medium into one that challenges the traditional roles. Susskind argues lawyers should see the writing on the wall: the acquisition, processing and application of legal know-how is no longer the preserve of (traditional) lawyers.

Unlocking the power of information

10 July 2008 in Public Sector Information

As regular readers will know, one of my pet subjects is unlocking the power of public sector information, and I’ve actively campaigned for it as it relates to legal information.

The ball is now really rolling on this with the introduction of two new services from government:

From OPSI – Public Sector Information Unlocking Service (beta)

As the regulator for public sector information re-use, we know that people can encounter difficulty from time to time getting hold of the information they need in the formats they want. Such difficulties can include issues with charging, licensing or the data standards that public sector information is provided in.

These issues are not about access (which are dealt with under access legislation, such as the Freedom of Information Act or Environmental Information Regulations), but all the other pitfalls which can occur when you want to do something with public sector information – copy it, remix it with other data or add value and republish it. If you are trying to re-use some public sector information, but the data you need is locked-up, this service is for you.

You can post a request describing the PSI you want unlocked for re-use. Provided it’s approved as on topic, it will be added and others can see your request and support it, either by adding a comment or by voting. OPSI will contact the PSI holder and see what can be done to unlock the information for re-use.

From the Cabinet Office’s Power of Information Taskforce – Show Us a Better Way (Tell us what you’d build with public information and we could help fund your idea!)

This is a competition about information, about communication and above all about making government information more useful.

The government produces masses of information on what is happening around the UK. Infomation on crime, on health, on education. However, this information is often hidden away in obscure publications or odd corners of websites. Data tucked away like this isn’t of use to the ultimate owner of that information YOU.

The Power of Information Taskforce want to hear your ideas on how to reuse, represent, mashup or combine the information the government holds to make it useful.

The Power of Information Task Force was established by Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson MP in March 2008 with a remit to advise and assist the government on delivering benefit to the public from new developments in digital media and the use of citizen- and state-generated information in the UK, including those identified in the Power of Information Review.

To give the more technically minded some raw material and a head start on getting any prototypes up and running, the site includes a listing of the huge quantity of information already available for reuse.

Vote Binary Law for a better future

8 July 2008 in Binary Law | 4 comments

Fame of a sort beckons. Would all my readers form an orderly queue and cast their votes here:

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