Jul

2

Friendfeed for lawyers

Filed Under Feeds | 1 Comment 

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.

By Nick Holmes, 2 July 2009
Filed under Feeds | 1 Comment 

Jun

25

Twitter - is the party over?

Filed Under Twitter | 3 Comments 

Has what looked like a great service, populated by eager early adopters with like motivations turned into a service polluted by egotists, marketeers and spam artists? Larry Bodine, questioning the value of Twitter as a marketing tool for lawyers, thinks so:

I’ve learned that it is a shouting post for relentless self-promoters, a dumping ground for press releases and advertising, a competition to amass followers, and a target for computer-automated Tweets.

It was not initially thus, but Twitter is a victim of its own success. Should we be impressed by the headlines that proclaim 20 million Twitter users and growing at 1,382% p.a.? More is not better. It’s no wonder that 60% don’t contribute after a month, for if the signup is so easy, subsequent inactivity is much more likely.

Knock off that 60% and we have 8 million active Twitter users. That’s a sizeable number, but that does not make Twitter mainstream and talk of Twitter replacing RSS is frankly ludicrous. And if 90% of all Twitter activity is by 10% of users, that gives 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.

I’ve a soft spot for Twitter. I’m still in there, though somewhat remotely. I’d like to be able to engage with it more, but it seems to me that if everyone can join and tweet about anything, only the dedicated will find value and that takes time which may be better spent elsewhere.

OK, I don’t have to follow the noise makers, but that’s not the point. Most of us don’t need yet another inbox to filter. We’d like a bit of focus, something that sorts the wheat from the chaff and delivers a more immediately useful service. Various Twitter apps and judicious use of Twitter Search and hashtags will turn up the goodies, but many wonder why Twitter hasn’t itself organised the Twitter stream. Will that only come after a Google takeover?

Recent stats suggest the party may be over but that’s not a bad thing if that explosive growth was fuelled by hype:

Twitter is normalizing. It’s no longer a new frontier, an elite club or a culture-transforming medium. It’s just a service for sending messages. …

Twitter is appealing to people with something to sell, or people who want to network professionally. It’s also a great way to follow a hobby or intellectual interest. In other words, it’s for older people, mainly.

So is Twitter dead? Far from it. But the Twitter hype bubble has surely burst (thanks, Oprah!). Now those of us who actually get value from it can enjoy it with less of the hype, expectation and noise than we’ve been seeing in the past few months.

By Nick Holmes, 25 June 2009
Filed under Twitter | 3 Comments 

Jun

20

Dead blogs

Filed Under Blogging | 1 Comment 

Scott Greenfield has advice for bloggers who have decided to call it a day:

I ask you one thing.  Take it down.  Pull it.  Remove it, once and for all.  Do this for me.  More importantly, do this for you.

For my purpose, you’re leaving your litter and cluttering up my blogosphere.  Clean up after yourself so the blogosphere doesn’t become a dump, a wasteland of old/bad news.

For your purpose, your dead blog is a tombstone.  When someone googles your name, they may find your old, ugly, dead blog, a monument to failure.  Is that the image you’re seeking to promote?  Trust me, when your last post dealt with a novel bit of news from October, 2008, you’ve brought yourself no glory.  It makes you look bad, particularly when your sidebar proclaims that you’re on the cutting edge of legal news and thought, and that your blog reflects how great you are as a lawyer.

I don’t agree entirely. What looks bad is not a dead blog per se, but a blog abandoned without explanation. There are many reasons why you might quit your blog or not post for several months or move your blog or start an alternative. Tell us why in a last post; point us to the new you. That’s good manners, not to say common sense. If the reason you quit is you couldn’t hack blogging, then its best for all, as Scott suggests, to take down your monument to failure. But old posts have value: we all keep them in our archives. Dead blogs have value too if the exit is graceful.

By Nick Holmes, 20 June 2009
Filed under Blogging | 1 Comment 

May

12

Light at the end of the tunnel

Filed Under Mammon | Leave a Comment 

Asked whether he envisaged fees at his British papers such as … the Sun …, he replied: “We’re absolutely looking at that.“

By Nick Holmes, 12 May 2009
Filed under Mammon | Leave a Comment 

May

12

Rivers of …

Filed Under Twitter, Feeds | 2 Comments 

 Rest in Peace, RSS - flame bait from Steve Gillmor.

It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it’s not worth swimming in if you get my drift.

Twitter is a sucker’s game that only serves the needs of a tiny elite - flame bait from Seth Finkelstein.

Twitter is low-level celebrity for the chattering class. And the pathologies of celebrity are all on display, including the exploitative industries that prey on the human desire to be heard and noticed. My answer to Twitter’s slogan of “What are you doing?” is: “Not playing a sucker’s game.”

RSS is dead? My ass… by Dave Winer - he should know.

Mick Jagger didn’t say Muddy Waters or Chuck Berry are dead. He loved those guys. Their work lived on in his music, and he was good to them. It’s time for the tech biz to learn about love, Steve. Open your heart and sing happy birthday to RSS. It’s been very good to you. You should be good to RSS, though god knows most of the icons of tech have been really unappreciative at the gifts RSS brought them. It’s really sad what grumpy pissy jerks these guys are.

By Nick Holmes, 12 May 2009
Filed under Twitter, Feeds | 2 Comments 

May

8

Internet Newsletter for Lawyers May/June issue

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In this issue:

  • Beyond collaboration by Jordan Furlong
  • CaseCheck sans borders by Stephen Moore
  • Why should lawyers blog? by Daniel Barnett
  • Words fit for purpose by Joe Reevy
  • Planning an email campaign by Sue Bramall
  • Inksters innovations by Brian Inkster
  • Sweet & Maxwell’s new web presence by Asomi Ithia
  • Voice recognition in practice by James Couzens

View the Newsletter. Full access + print issues by subscription.

By Nick Holmes, 8 May 2009
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Apr

23

CaseCheck crosses the border

Filed Under Cases | Leave a Comment 

CaseCheck, headed by Stephen Moore, has since late 2007 been delivering case summaries from the Scottish Courts and EAT in a Web 2.0 environment.

Now, in a tie-up with Law Brief Publishing, CaseCheck has added 4,000 England and Wales and EU case summaries from Law Brief Update. Law Brief Publishing was set up by Tim Kevan, barrister and BabyBarista. Tim was impressed by Stephen’s dynamic and innovative approach and views the arrangement as a great way to give Law Brief Update’s extensive back catalogue of case reports a new audience.

By Nick Holmes, 23 April 2009
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Apr

8

Free Culture - the extended Remix

Filed Under Copyright, Free culture | Leave a Comment 

Remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy (published in the UK by Bloomsbury Academic) is the latest in Lawrence Lessig’s series on regulation of cyberspace. Lessig is undeniably the leading thinker on copyright in the digital age and, though many label him a radical, his arguments derive from those of earlier leading thinkers and statesmen, many of whom were conservatives.

In Remix, Lessig has developed and refined the arguments in Free Culture (2004), remixed and added plenty of value and thereby produced something new and freshly relevant.

Remix’s central theme is that the current copyright regime is so at odds with the 21st century context in which it operates that we risk criminalising an entire generation - the net generation - who are growing up with the means to consume, remix and create and publish media in ways unimaginable even 30 years ago, yet with the permission to do less even than consume according to the 20th century industry models. Saddled with arcane laws of whose reach they may be unaware, and which, if acknowledged, they cannot understand and cannot respect, our children do what comes naturally, what seems fair to them - they “break the law”. I’d be surprised if most of us with regular internet access have not done so too, albeit to a lesser degree.

The book is in three parts: in Part 1 Lessig charts the transition from the read-only culture of the past to the read-write culture of the present; in Part 2 he describes the evolution of the hybrid internet economies, exhibiting varying mixes of commercial and sharing economy attributes, with numerous case studies of well known Web 2.0 successes; and in Part 3 he suggests the reforms that will enable the future of creativity rather than criminalise it. These are both the reforms to the law he rehearsed in Free Culture, but also, more importantly, reforms to our norms and expectations around the control of culture.

His conclusion is, however, bleak. Before a truce in the copyright wars has any hope of being brokered, the wholly disproportionate influence of BigMedia on Congress must be addressed.

Laws and politics are different here of course, but the net effect (pardon the pun) is much the same. The uncustomer is always in the wrong.

Read this book.

By Nick Holmes, 8 April 2009
Filed under Copyright, Free culture | Leave a Comment 

Apr

8

Blowing it

Filed Under Publishing | Leave a Comment 

Plenty to ponder about the future not just of the established news industry but also of other old media players in this post from Jeff Jarvis and the numerous comments:

You’ve had all that time to reinvent your products, services, and organizations for this new world, to take advantage of new opportunities and efficiencies, to retrain not only your staff but your readers and advertisers, to use the power of your megaphones while you still had it to build what would come next. But you didn’t. You blew it.

By Nick Holmes, 8 April 2009
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Apr

3

Martindale-Hubbell opens the doors - just a crack

Filed Under Social networking | 4 Comments 

For LexisNexis it’s simple: lawyers want a network developed by legal professionals, for legal professionals, and LexisNexis will provide it.

From their recent press release on the launch of Martindale-Hubbell Connected:

A survey conducted by Leader Networks in 2008 demonstrated the need for a private, online network for lawyers. According to the survey, while 54 percent of attorneys belong to an online network, fewer than 10 percent of lawyers can rely on current networking tools to help them work more efficiently and cost effectively. Lawyers trust other lawyers; 40 percent responded that they want a trusted, private, authenticated network….

At launch, the network is open to any private practice attorneys and corporate counsel. Non-lawyers such as law school faculty and students, law firm marketing directors, paralegals and other qualified legal professionals will be invited to join the network later this year as the network continues to evolve.

“Outsiders” from amongst legal commentators, marketing and social networking experts have not to date been given access and even many “insiders” (attorneys) have had difficulty signing up. Pulling no punches, Kevin O’Keefe thinks this stinks:

The days of launching a web based product without seeking real feedback and ownership from users and early adopters are over. The days of closed communities locking out those who may speak frankly and openly about community experiences are over. The days of a controlled PR campaign without integrity and transparency are over.

In developing MH Connected, LexisNexis seems to have interpreted the findings that less than 10 per cent of lawyers polled said they can rely on their current network to help them work more efficiently and that 40 per cent said they wanted a trusted, private, authenticated network as showing the need for a closed, lawyers-only network. But as Kevin, Doug Cornelius and other commentators have pointed out, non-lawyers should not have been excluded and useful feedback will come mainly from early adopters. Non-lawyer early adopters of legal networking should have been key to beta testing; and amongst lawyers those early adopters are that less than 10 per cent who already get value from public networks, not the 90 per cent who say they don’t. LexisNexis have belatedly discovered this.

By Nick Holmes, 3 April 2009
Filed under Social networking | 4 Comments 

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