2009

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Never mind the content … (2)

25 September 2009 in Law publishing

Paul Graham, an essayist and successful entrepreneur, pens a very interesting piece on Post-Medium Publishing which is worth reading in full (hat tip John Naughton). He opens:

consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn’t better content cost more?

We didn’t (don’t) buy fiction and non-fiction, we bought books; not news, but newspapers; not music and movies, but encased CDs and DVDs. Publishers play to our desire for better packaging and/or our perception that bigger and better packaged products are more valuable: hardcovers command a premium over paperbacks; DVD cases are larger than CD jewel cases. It’s easy to see this working in the mass market. But in business and professional markets, where there is a compelling need (rather than desire) for the content and/or a relative scarcity of content creators and publishers, the content:packaging value ratio increases.

So it is with law books. Lawyers need up-to-date reference texts; the market is small and there were hitherto relatively few authors willing to put the time in to creating content and relatively few publishers willing to invest in its dissemination. So law books have always been expensive – several times more than equivalently-packaged consumer books.

Enter the internet which has enlarged the market, enabled more authors and more publishers and driven the marginal cost of producing copies to near zero. What price content now? Has the emperor been denuded of his clothes?

The physical packaging has gone, but there is still a relative scarcity of good authors and good publishers – just because anyone can do it, does not mean that anyone can do it well. There is value in the packaging, but that packaging is about how content is edited, combined, organised and presented. Despite the physical apparel, that is what publishing has always been about.

Those are my thoughts. As to what forms these new packages will take, Paul concludes:

The reason I’ve been writing about existing forms is that I don’t know what new forms will appear. But though I can’t predict specific winners, I can offer a recipe for recognizing them. When you see something that’s taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn’t have before, you’re probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that’s merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you’re probably looking at a loser.

PS. More on content/packaging from Scott Karp.

Meta keywords are a waste of time

23 September 2009 in Search

Google has finally officially confirmed what the SEO community has known for years: it “disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking”. So, don’t waste any more time on them and don’t be impressed by anyone who suggests they matter (including would-be plaintiffs).

Meta descriptions, on the other hand, do matter. They don’t affect ranking, but they are in certain circumstances used as the default text for search results snippets and they will thus affect the chance of a click-through. So, it will pay to craft concise, fact-laden meta descriptions specific to each page.

More about meta tags from Google webmaster tools.

Social business design

10 September 2009 in Business, Law 2.0, Social networking

“Social business design” is a term you’ve probably not encountered before. I was introduced to it last evening by social computing expert and entrepreneur Lee Bryant at Headshift where I attended an event to explore the themes covered in the report Social Networking for the Legal Profession authored by him with Penny Edwards. I don’t know if Lee coined the phrase, but it does an excellent job encapsulating the paradigm shift we’re now experiencing as corporations get to grips with the “new” internet (aka Web 2.0).

The 20th century was all about the growth of corporations, pushing products and services to customers, developing top-down management and, in the latter quarter, developing computerised processes to do this more efficiently through centralised systems. Some of those systems worked well some of the time for some of the people (guess which!); many have failed dismally; all were costly.

Social business design is about redesigning those structures and processes to deliver solutions that people actually want, not what the corporation thinks they should have. It is about connecting and engaging with – indeed exploiting (but in the nicest possible way) – those who matter to the business: customers and employees. Success is possible today with very modest investment in systems and software – most of it nowadays is free or all-but; all that’s needed is the need and enthusiasm of the end-users who willingly put in most of the grunt work.

So far, so very Silicon Valley. But some of the leading UK Big Law firms are doing just this, as we heard:

  • Mark Gould, Head of Knowledge Management at Addleshaw Goddard and KM blogger explained the relationship between online social networking, knowledge management and social computing initiatives in the firm.
  • Steve Perry, Head of Knowledge and Business Development at Freshfields, illustrated and explained their extensive social intranet – wiki spaces, blogs and external resources all plugged into personalised iFreshfields start pages.
  • Sam Dimond, Director of Knowledge Systems Clifford Chance, told how wiki spaces and blogs had been enthusiastically adopted and cut project-related email by 90 per cent.

Whatever you think about big business or Big Law, these guys are showing that it can be conducted in a way that benefits the business by engaging and empowering the people that matter.

Hats off to Headshift and their enlightened clients.

Update: Penny Edwards has now written up the presentations on the Headshift blog:

Search engine optimisation – a holistic approach

5 September 2009 in Articles, SEO

First Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, September 2009.

Most users don’t look past the first two or three pages of results returned by a search engine, so understanding and implementing search engine optimisation (SEO) is critical. SEO is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines via natural (or “organic”) – as opposed to paid for (or “sponsored”) – search results.

In most contexts below, given its market dominance, I use “Google” as short-hand for all search engines.

How Google ranks web pages

Using sophisticated algorithms and deploying phenomenal computing resources, Google ranks all your web pages according to their perceived relevance and authority with respect to all possible search terms keyed by the user (keywords), thus determining the position of your pages for those keywords in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Google’s algorithm for calculating the relative importance of pages for given keywords is called PageRank (named after founder Larry Page).

SEO broadly involves influencing two sets of factors affecting page ranks:

On-site and on-page factors relate to the inherent value of your pages: the design and structure of your website generally and the layout and content of individual pages. These factors are wholly in your control.

Off-page factors relate to how others value you. Principally this concerns the number and value of links from other sites to your pages. You have to work consistently at gaining and retaining these “votes”.

Within these broad sets there are numerous individual factors affecting PageRank.

On-site and on-page factors
website IP address
server location
domain name of website
URL of page
title of page
meta description of page
freshness of page content
links on page to external websites
page “theme”
website “theme”		 Off-page factors
number of links to website
PageRank of links to website
number of links to page
PageRank of links to page
text in links to page (anchor text)
page click-through rate (CTR)
“stickiness” of page
total number of pages on website

Google’s Toolbar PageRank

Google calculates an aggregate PageRank for each web page and this value is displayed in the Google Toolbar if you have that installed in your browser. But this “Toolbar PageRank” is a measure of the overall value of the page (on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 10, commonly expressed as “PR6” etc), without reference to keywords. Because it is such a visible and easily digestible measure, it is often accorded undue importance; but what’s much more important is the rank of the individual pages for particular keywords.

It’s not [rocket] science

Since Google’s PageRank algorithm is a closely-guarded secret and is constantly changing, SEO involves a lot of intelligent guesswork about the relative importance of the above factors, based on analysis and experience of what works. SEO is thus not an exact science, more of an art; and it is an art whose basic principles are well-established, easily understood and readily implemented by the non-technical.

So don’t fixate on the technical detail and don’t be unduly persuaded by precise rules quoted as being optimal by many so-called SEO specialists. Instead, have in mind that, at the end of the day, Google is seeking dispassionately to judge the value of your pages and match them to the value users are seeking. Build a great website, well-structured, readily navigable, with lots of informative and compelling content and good, useful linking and Google will eagerly digest and value your pages, users will come to you, others will link to you and Google will reward you further.

Also have in mind that SEO is not an end in itself. You are after not just click-throughs from Google, but users who will find value on your site, who will trust you and bring value to you. Favour not the short-term, rank-boosting approach peddled by many get-rich-quick SEO specialists, but a balanced, longer-term value- and trust- building approach which will earn you enduring authority and PageRank.

Let’s do it!

SEO for dummies

If you’re not a self-professed SEO expert, you probably regard yourself as an SEO dummy. Fear not: here are six steps to effective SEO for you. You may not be competent actually to implement the necessary changes, but you are competent to conduct this review and to instruct your “webmaster” or “SEO expert” accordingly. SEO should not be left to the techies.

1. Review your Google results

Your first step should be review how your web pages are seen by Google. To do this, enter a search in the Google search box in the following form: site:yourdomain.co.uk. This will clearly show you: (a) all the pages on your site that are in Google’s index; (b) the titles of all these pages (as to the importance of titles, see step 4); and (c) the relative ranking of these pages (so, for example, if you have two pages on a similar topic, you can see which is ranked higher).

2. Decide which keywords to target

It’s all very well to want to be on page 1 of Google, but all search engine results pages are with reference to particular keyword searches by users. Put yourself in your prospective client’s shoes, brainstorm with your colleagues and come up with a list of the primary keywords you wish to target. Two or three word searches are by far the most common. Start with a couple of dozen and extend the list later as necessary. Against each primary keyword note a few synonyms and closely-related terms – your secondary keywords.

3. Write informative and compelling content

Take your list of primary keywords and review your existing web pages against the list. Ensure you have a web page providing informative, compelling content for each topic reflected in your keywords. As to the content, broad generalisations, expansive language and marketing-speak will not do! Treat each page as an article on the topic, with a concise introduction and good, informative textual substance. Use short sentences and short paragraphs; break up the text with clear subheadings and bulleted lists; and include links to relevant internal pages and to supporting external sites.

4. Optimise your content

You’ve done most of the work now, but to really make your pages work for you in Google you’ll need to review and tweak a few elements to “optimise” each page for your targeted keywords.

The page title is by far the most important element: Google gives far more weight to words in the title than to words anywhere else on the page. The page title is the wording contained in the html <title> tag. In a browser window it appears in the blue title bar at the top. Because this is not very prominent to the viewer, it is often paid little regard by the inexperienced, but it is key. The page title is also shown as the heading in Google results, linked to the page, so it should be intelligible and high impact to maximise your chances of a click-through. Review your page titles as described in Step 1. Each page should have a unique title directly “promoting” the page content. A good rule of thumb is a title in the following form: Primary keyword – secondary keywords – Your Name.

The page meta description is an optional hidden element within the <head> element of a web page that can be used to describe the content of the page. The meta description is important to Google and in some instances is displayed in the results. Not all pages will necessarily benefit from a meta description, but certainly your home page and the main section pages of your site should include one. The description should be intelligible and high impact and include your primary keywords near the start and all your secondary keywords. Limit it to say 20 to 25 words.

Now review the content of your page and ensure that your keywords are well represented on the page, in particular in the first few lines of text and in headings. But you need to strike a balance: excessive repetition and “keyword stuffing” will annoy your readers and may also be penalised by Google.

5. Keep it fresh

No matter how good the content, your pages will gradually drop down the rankings if they remain unchanged. Keep them fresh by regularly reviewing and updating them. News and blog pages of course will score well on this count.

6. Build in-bound links

The ranking of your pages is strongly influenced by how many other pages link to them and how important the referring pages are. A link from any page, even an unimportant one, will count, but the more important the referring page, the greater the increase in the rank of your page.

An essential part of your search engine optimisation strategy should therefore be to increase the number of inbound links by conducting a structured link-building campaign, including link-swaps and directory submissions. Start with your associates, clients and suppliers who are most likely to favour you with a link.

Link-building campaigns are meat and drink to the SEO industry who will do the work for you for an often substantial fee. Most will employ legitimate tactics but bear in mind that Google constantly strives to devalue attempts to build artificial links designed purely to boost rankings and the benefit of such practices may be short lived. In particular note that selling links contravenes Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and the selling site may well be penalised; consequently links purchased from those sites may turn out to be worthless.

Doing it all in one with blogs

Blogging provides an inexpensive, efficient and effective way to publish web content and to expose that content to the search engines. With blog software you can easily create and update new pages on your website without any technical knowledge. You think and write; the blog software does all the rest out of the box.

There’s much more to blogging than just pushing out content, but for present purposes let’s concentrate on a huge benefit of blogging – its built-in SEO effects. SEO should never be your primary purpose in blogging, but it is a compelling reason for you to start a blog, to use a blog service rather than a custom CMS for topical content, to blog better and to blog more frequently.

How does blogging provide SEO? First and foremost, blogging generates great new content. As each new item (blog “post”) is published, your site content is enhanced: new pages are created with page titles, headings and content that include many keywords relevant to your audience, so your presence in Google increases for all those terms.

Google loves blogs. It likes the fact that your website is being frequently updated and places a higher value on your pages than it does on otherwise equivalent pages on more static sites. Google knows a lot about blog structures and crawls and indexes new content surprisingly quickly: you get onto Google ahead of the more pedestrian competition.

Blogs also automatically generate RSS feeds which effectively distribute your latest information to those who choose to subscribe to the feeds. As more and more people adopt RSS reading, this distribution channel is becoming increasingly effective and will drive more traffic to your blog. In addition to the indirect SEO benefits of increased traffic, other bloggers and sites may also “pipe” information from your RSS feeds into their pages, creating links to your blog.

A good blog will also establish connections and conversations with your peers and readers by providing comment and analysis, linking to other bloggers and encouraging user comments. These connections and conversations further enhance your visibility and reputation, leading to networking and consequent linkage with others of influence.

These factors – good content with keyword relevance, frequency of updating and quality linkage to (and from) your site – are the key metrics used by Google and other search engines in determining your page rank.

Without question good blogging will dramatically improve your visibility in the search engines by improving your score on all counts.

Nick Holmes is joint editor of this Newsletter.

Email nickholmes@infolaw.co.uk.

Never mind the content, feel the packaging

18 August 2009 in Business, Publishing | 3 comments

So, Rupert Murdoch has declared that News International sites will all start charging for content by next summer. What he actually said was he was satisfied that News International could produce “significant revenues from the sale of digital delivery of newspaper content”, that “we intend to charge for all our news websites” and “make our content better and differentiate it from other people”.

He hasn’t got where he is by announcing his plans in advance and I don’t think this announcement is an exception. It signals an intention but says nothing about the plans. He talks broadly – as most commentators also do – of “content”, when he fully understands the substantial differences between news, comment, reviews, features, serialised fiction, crosswords, recipes, agony aunt columns, … And what does “charge for a website” mean? He knows that clumsy, broad paywalls are a non-starter.

For any pay-to-view charging system to succeed it’s going to have to be sophisticated in its pricing and completely painless for the user. The overwhelming consensus is that no-one’s going to pay for news which is abundant elsewhere and not sufficiently differentiable. Some argue that comment and analysis have sufficient value, but the only proven cases are for business-critical content (Wall Street Journal and Financial Times). The only one sure way you’re going to get people to pay to view is to provide content that is either unique or otherwise unavailable for free elsewhere.

But there’s another way to differentiate your content – to create value – and that’s in the packaging.

Back in 2001 News International introduced charges for its crossword on Times Online, with a £10 annual fee; that’s now not just crosswords online but the Crossword Club, giving access to more than 9,000 puzzles and a host of member benefits – for £4.95 a month or £12.95 a year. That may be generating small beer for the Times, but it is based on just a tiny fraction of the the Times’ content. There are plenty more examples like this where news sites are already generating revenue from their content – but most commentators seem completely blind to them.

There’s no end to the number of packages, large and small, that news publishers could dream up, serving particular niches, and most will have a far higher perceived value than the simple online delivery of their base content.

Typography for Lawyers

29 July 2009 in Typography | 1 comment

Having cut my working teeth in an editorial department in law book publishing, Typography for Lawyers is just up my street.

With the advent of the microprocessor, along came word processing, then desktop publishing, then the web. Along the way regular users have been given ever more sophisticated tools easily to generate typography and layouts previously the preserve of skilled designers and craftsmen. Of course most made a hash of it and most still do.

Matthew Butterick is a civil litigation attorney in Los Angeles. Before that he worked as a digital typeface designer and ran a website development studio. He thinks that lawyers’ poor use of typography is for lack of information, not lack of will, and hopes to fill that void with his website. It’s an excellent, concise web-based manual with particular reference to the peculiarities of legal documents; but I doubt it will find its mark.

Free – radical or not?

16 July 2009 in Business | 1 comment

“Free” is a word that has many connotations and arouses strong feelings.

Giving away products and services for free in order to sell other products and services is a well-established marketing model. What is new in the digital world is how the marginal cost of delivering services has declined to near zero. That changes the economics, even turns them on their head. In his new book, Free: the future of a radical price (not free in physical form), Chris “Long Tail” Anderson explains how “freeconomics” works and how Free can be used successfully to turn a profit.

Critics are falling over themselves to pick holes in his arguments: “it’s not really free”, “but YouTube is making a huge loss”, etc, etc – “so there”. There’s a neat counter to many of the less-informed arguments which is “read the book”. Even the better arguments point only to examples of where Free fails – or rather appears to fail. But Free works for different services in different markets in different ways; Anderson does not suggest it works for all in the same way; a lot of experimentation (and luck) is required to find a Free model that works. So YouTube is losing millions; so what? Few would say that YouTube is not successful. It’s not making money now because, though bandwidth and storage costs are very low, for video clips they are not yet near zero, and in sum they are astronomical for YouTube. Google (which has the cash to burn) hasn’t yet figured how to recoup these costs. But if these costs fall – according to Moore’s law – by 50% per annum, and/or it finds a better way to “monetise” the service, maybe Google will turn a profit on YouTube soon. And let’s not forget that Google spent several years in the red with free search before it turned the books round spectacularly with AdWords.

So take this book for what it is: a readable and extremely informative explanation of how Free works and can work for you; Anderson certainly does not advocate giving everything away and hoping for the best.

Improving legislation on the web

5 July 2009 in Articles, Legislation, Statute Law Database | 2 comments

Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, July 2009.

In 1996 HMSO started publishing new legislation on its website. Comprehensive coverage was later extended back to 1987 for Acts and 1988 for SIs. Although publication of legislation was timely and presentation competent, we yearned for what had been promised for many years – a comprehensive, up-to-date version of the statute book. Finally it arrived or so we thought.

The Statute Law Database

In December 2006, the long-awaited, long-overdue SLD was published and, while it had earlier been suggested there would be charges for “added value” views and re-use, it was declared free for all purposes after all, subject only to a “click-use” licence.

The SLD contains the updated texts of all primary legislation that was in force on 1 February 1991 or has come into force since, and the (unupdated) texts of all “printed” secondary legislation passed since then – in total more than 45,000 pieces of legislation. A key benefit of the SLD is that one can view the primary legislation not only as it currently stands but also as it stood at any date from February 1991.

In terms of completeness and consolidation it was thus a vast improvement on the incomplete and “as enacted” statute law available on OPSI.

In principle, as to the raw law, it provides functionality similar to that in the costly commercial alternatives. But its most serious defect is that it is not complete, nor up to date. There is a delay in loading new legislation, a number of key older Acts remain to be published and the effects of much legislation from 2003 onwards are not yet consolidated. There is also some anecdotal evidence that it is not entirely accurate. This may be as a result of its incompleteness, but even so, the impression it leaves with some is that it is currently unreliable.

Together these two shortcomings are the killer for the larger firms and chambers with sufficient budget to subscribe to LexisNexis or Westlaw or a more specialist service such as Complinet: there is no question that the commercial services still prevail. However, for the smaller firm and the individual barrister, for whom the big two commercial services are not an option, the SLD is a boon, despite its defects.

Other criticisms concern its functionality and ease of use. Statute law is complex, and that complexity is revealed rather than hidden in the SLD. It is undoubtedly a good attempt, but falls somewhat short of delivering intuitive use and following up later legislative effects is tedious to put it mildly.

The publication of the SLD as a free access, public resource was a huge step forward and its open licensing model did represent a sea change in the government’s attitude towards opening up public sector information (PSI). 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 structure and there are no RSS feeds of new legislation.

Improvements to OPSI legislation

In 2005 it was decided that there was a need for a dedicated body to be the principal focal point for advising on and regulating the operation of public sector information re-use and the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) was established for that purpose. Having grown out of and subsumed HMSO, OPSI also has responsibility for the publication (inter alia) of legislation and the management of Crown copyright.

Since then there have been many improvements in the OPSI legislation site, including a new page design, PDF versions of primary legislation back to 1800, directly addressable content fragments (specific sections and sub-sections can be directly referenced), improved search, RSS feeds for new legislation and for user-generated searches, and the incorporation of revised pre-1988 statutes from the SLD.

Towards a single legislation website

Until December 2008, responsibility for the SLD lay with the Statutory Publications Office (SPO), part of the Ministry of Justice. In 2008 the decision was taken to merge the SPO into OPSI and to bring the online legislative services together, creating a single place where visitors could access the widest range of legislative content held by the government alongside supporting material.

Considerable progress in developing this new service had already been made during 2008 and, since the merger became effective in January 2009, the pace of development has quickened.

The development is being led by John Sheridan, Head of eServices at OPSI. John is also on the expert panel of technologists advising the government on making public sector information more open and accessible on the web, which panel, as widely reported, now includes Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

So the tech credentials are second to none, but the development has to be lead by what users want. Who currently uses the legislation websites and what for?

To inform its development of the new service, OPSI conducted a detailed analysis of the two legislation site traffic statistics and an extensive survey of their users, profiling typical users by creating “personas”.

Unsurprisingly, the primary user is the professional, personified by Mark Green, a council Environmental Enforcement Officer. He is web-savvy and a regular user, more so of OPSI. He needs to quote legislation, uses a handful of Acts regularly and has no access to subscription services. Most smaller firm lawyers and individual barristers will no doubt identify with this persona.

Jane Booker, Law Librarian, is a secondary persona. She is an expert web researcher and confident researcher of legal documents. She is a regular user, more so of SLD and is likely to use all the features SLD site offers. She is time pressured to respond to queries. She uses subscription services and other sources.

Another secondary persona is Heather Cole, a member of public seeking to defend her rights. She is web savvy but a first time user. She does want to view legislation, but needs support and advice too; she needs to understand what she is seeing.

The OPSI website attracts 1.2 million unique visitors monthly; the SLD 150,000. Visitors predominantly come to the SLD through direct entry – ie knowing the website URL and typing it directly into their browser or by visiting the site via saved bookmarks. This suggests there is a strong community of frequent users of the service. In comparison, the OPSI site draws most visitors from search engines (ie not direct entry) and has a lower proportion of returning visitors.

What improvements will we see?

The goal of the Single Legislation Site (SLS) project is to improve access to legislation by:

  • rationalising the processes (both manual and automated) used in the preparation of legislation data;
  • more effectively leveraging the existing legislation data resources; and
  • providing open access to this data via a permanent uniform resource identifier (URI) scheme.

The best of both data resources

The SLS will effectively combine and integrate the following legislation data resources:

  • the “as enacted” versions of legislation from OPSI, immediately on enactment
  • the revised versions of legislation from the SLD, as and when available, complete with all versioning and annotation information
  • the tables of effects data maintained by the SLD which will link past legislative provisions to relevant amending provisions
  • the explanatory notes, integrated with the relevant legislative provisions

A better interface

The combined data will be presented using a reconfigured version of the current OPSI legislation interface which is far easier to navigate and far more responsive than the SLD interface. It will incorporate and extend all the features recently introduced, including PDF versions of legislation, addressable content fragments, RSS feeds and more.

Effective update status

Keeping the SLD fully and expeditiously up to date is of course a goal. The merger of the SPO and OPSI editorial teams has provided the opportunity to deduplicate some effort and hence to improve the timeliness of updates, but it remains the case that the editorial work is time consuming and publishing of consolidated legislation will always lag some way behind the publication of amending instruments.

Given this, if users are to be able to rely on the SLD, it is imperative that the status of what the user sees is absolutely clear, ie what later effects are not incorporated, and that ready access to the relevant amendments is provided.

At present if one accesses a piece of legislation on the SLD that is not fully up to date, one is faced with a warning such as this (re Employment Rights Act 1996):

Update Status Warning:

There are effects on this legislation that have not yet been applied to the Statute Law Database for the following year(s): 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009. Please see the Tables of legislative effects for details. See also important information in Update status of legislation.

Not only is this off-putting (“How can I possibly rely on this?”), but it is also unhelpful and actually accessing the relevant amendments is a tortuous process. However, all the data necessary to present useful lists of relevant amendments and build links to them are held in the Tables of Effects which the SLD maintains; using data linking techniques, the new site will provide intuitive, direct navigation to these amendments.

A permanent URI scheme

Key to the utility of the new legislation service and opening up the information has been the development of a permanent URI scheme for addressing legislation, legislation fragments, versions and related resources on the new site which will be at www.legislation.gov.uk.

For example, a UK Public General Act will be addressable by its number as

/id/ukpga/2008/4

or by its short title as

/id?title=Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008

Fragments will be addressable as

/id/ukpga/2008/4/section/6

and if a version other than the current is required, the enacted version will be addressable as

/id/ukpga/2008/4/section/6/enacted

or that current on a particular date as

/id/ukpga/2008/4/section/6/1998-12-31

This scheme will be permanent. It will avoid link rot and provide an intuitive format with which any external individual or website can reliably construct an address to any legislative resource. This is not just a technical nicety, but a fundamental improvement that will open up UK legislation for public consumption.

Social networks – how they work

5 July 2009 in Articles, Social networking

First Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, July 2009.

Facebook has over 200 million users; LinkedIn, the network for business and professionals, has over 40 million; Twitter is all the rage; and don’t forget blogs.

Although these services are hugely popular, it’s safe to say that amongst lawyers use is still largely confined to so-called early adopters. Should you be using these (public) social networks? If so, which? for what?

Too often answers to the question “Why should I use social networks?” focus on particular features each service offers and for what tasks they can be used. But it is worth first understanding how they work, their similarities and, more importantly, their differences. Then consider the numbers and the demographics and the benefits of making balanced use of some or all of these services – according to taste – should be clear.

Who you know

Facebook is a free-access, privately-owned social networking web service. It acts as a super-charged social address book – a destination where you can connect and interact with “friends”, see how they are interacting with their friends and also connect to others with whom you have a looser social connection (all those in your workplace, college or region).

Post your profile, add some friends (subject to their confirmation) and you’re away. Say what’s on your mind, see what’s on theirs, add more friends along the way, set up social events and much more via built-in Facebook features or one of the countless third party applications.

Founded initially for use by college students, Facebook is now open to anyone over 13, with the UK proportionately the most enthusiastic adopters.

Although it can be used for professional purposes, it is primarily used for social interaction and its largest constituency remains the 18-25. Indeed, it is so dominant amongst UK students that not to be on Facebook is to be all but invisible to your peers.

Who they know

LinkedIn is again a privately-owned social networking service designed for professional and business networking. It is free to use but with certain extended features available to paying subscribers.

Your profile on LinkedIn acts as your online CV, describing your experience and expertise and enabling others on the network easily to find you and connect with you. All LinkedIn public profiles are also indexed by Google, so your profile becomes another valuable property in your online portfolio. LinkedIn is fast becoming the online directory of business and professional people.

You can invite anyone (whether a LinkedIn user or not) to become a connection or can request to connect with another user via a pre-existing relationship or the intervention of an existing contact. This “gated access” approach is intended to build trust among users.

An important feature of LinkedIn is its emphasis on “degrees of connection”. Your direct connections are your 1st degree connections; their connections are your 2nd degree connections; their connections are your 3rd degree connections. On every screen you are reminded of these degrees of connection and invited explicitly or implicitly to extend your network by connecting directly to current 2nd or 3rd degree connections.

LinkedIn emphasises degrees of connection because, in business, it is often not just who you know that counts; it is who they know.

What you know

Blogging is not a service owned by anyone: your blog is yours and the Net is the network. Unlike Facebook and LinkedIn, the emphasis is not on who you know, but on what you know. With blogging you demonstrate your knowledge, expertise and personality through your writing. You connect with other people not explicitly, but by linking to and commenting on their blogs. Likewise, if you have something useful or interesting to say, others will link to and comment on your blog. Blogging is thus a mutually reinforcing ecosystem of authors and commenters of like or overlapping interests.

Blog search and analysis services such as Technorati and Google blog search work by highlighting the connections between blogs and enable you to readily search across them and extend your blog network.

Whatever

And so to Twitter, usually referred to as a social networking and micro-blogging service. It shares some characteristics of both social networking and blogging, but it is the differences that are most revealing.

Twitter is deceptively simple in functionality, yet its essence is fiendishly difficult to explain. Indeed, the most common early tweet by new users is something along the lines of “I don’t get it.” Even those who have become avid users admit that it took some time before it clicked.

All you can do on Twitter is post short messages of 140 characters or less and read those posted by others. You follow those whose messages interest you and these are displayed in a “stream” on your Twitter home page. (Users can protect their updates, requiring their permission for you to follow them, but few do.) Likewise you are followed by those to whom your messages are of interest and your tweets show on their home page.

Unlike Facebook and LinkedIn connections which are reciprocal, Twitter connections are asymmetric: you choose whom to follow; others choose you.

As with blogging, Twitter connections are also made indirectly by linking to others – responding to or “retweeting” their tweets or referencing them in your messages.

Twitter’s prompt “What are you doing?” is somewhat misleading for new users, suggesting that its main purpose is to post status updates. But what you use it for is entirely up to you. The 140-character constraint forces brevity: pithy comment, banter, breaking news headlines, link sharing; these are all meat and drink to Twitter users.

Twitter is very much flavour of the year, but don’t be impressed by headlines that proclaim 20 million Twitter users and growing at 1,382 per cent per annum. Recent research reveals that 60 per cent don’t contribute after a month, so we have 8 million active Twitter users. That’s a sizeable number, but it does not make Twitter mainstream. And 90 per cent of all Twitter activity is by 10 per cent of users, giving us only 2 million users worldwide who fully embrace it. That’s not going to change the world, much as that minority would like it to.

Conclusion

When it comes to socialising, Facebook certainly looks likely to be the winner who will take all (see bit.ly/1A2z5k), but I’ve yet to be convinced that it’s a must have or even a nice to have for business.

For doing business we must look to the more focussed service that delivers business benefits. LinkedIn has always sold itself as the network for business and professionals and it is so. Despite its continuing rapid growth – with over 43 million members in over 200 countries – it has not grabbed the headlines, being too worthy and boring for lazy hacks to comprehend. Because it has focus, the increase in usage has not produced a lot of noise. Though Stephen Fry has heard of it, thankfully he has not yet found a use for it and he lurks in the shadows.

Blogging is good for business. But it takes effort and commitment.

As to Twitter – give it a go. If you make an effort, you never know what might happen.

Friendfeed for lawyers

2 July 2009 in Feeds | 2 comments

Some time ago I set up a Friendfeed account and plugged in a couple of my feeds. I did not pay it any further attention until recently I noticed a number of my band of followers were subscribing to my Friendfeed.

So I checked out why. Via the Twitterverse I was pointed to this great post on Friendfeed for Lawyers on Advocate’s Studio by Martha Sperry, an attorney in the Boston. It tells you all you need to know.

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