Blogging
Reasons not to blog
Another great post sourced from this month’s Blawg Review is US attorney Brett Trout’s Why Lawyers Should Not Blog. The culture of some law firms is simply not conducive to blogging. Blogging simply emphasizes the firm culture. If the law firm is filled with quality attorneys, blogs will are beneficial, not only to the law […]
Trainee love
More than two months on, Watson Farley & Williams continue to show no remorse, persisting in publishing their so-called Trainee Law Blog, whose failings I have previously summed up. We’re now on episode 23. On its launch in late September, Legal Week quickly posted a story about it, sans any investigation, describing it as “possibly […]
Adnonsense (2)
Kevin O’Keefe blogs sensibly that running Google ads is inappropriate on blogs marketing professional service or product, pointing out that at the very best you may earn only a few hundred dollars a month. If you’re a law firm or other professional service firm charging hundreds of dollars an hour for your time, do you […]
Fun with numbers
Blog enthusiasts will be chuffed to learn that the blogosphere represents more than half of all websites. So bloggers rule! Or do they? Netcraft, in its November 2006 web survey reports that there are now over 101 million websites (hostnames), commenting that “Blogs and small business web sites have driven the explosive growth this year, […]
No sign of the Times
What’s happened to the TimesOnline Law Weblog which has disappeared from the radar? At the time of its launch I wondered how the TimesOnline Law section and the Law Weblog would co-exist, commenting that, compared to news sites, blogs “allow less formal reporting and comment, free from the usual editorial strictures”. Could it be the […]
The new internet
Web 2.0 is not a technology or even a group of technologies; rather it is a buzzword describing the companies and ideas behind the emergence of a “new” internet built on the participatation of users. “Technology,” a sage once observed, “is stuff that doesn’t work yet.” That sounds like a joke, and it is, but […]
Communicate, share, collaborate
We talk a lot about public blogs and wikis, so it’s good to get a report of the benefits and potential of their use internally within a large law firm. In the latest issue of Legal Technology Journal from Legalease (print on paper), Ruth Ward, head of knowledge sytems and development at Allen & Overy, […]
Fertile ground for law blogs (2)
Following my recent post in which I suggested The Lawyer should get blogging, I note that Legal Week has done just that, with the Editor’s Blog and The Daily Diary (your one-stop gossip shop). There’s lots of good comment in all the legal weeklies, so why not share it with us? You’ll get a result.
Let’s get social
Blog software is what is these days called “social software” – software “which enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities.” Unlike other communities which exist in a particular space (like MySpace, a wiki etc), the blogosphere is a virtual space, created principally by the links to other […]
Democratising law publishing
Jordan Furlong, who edits the Canadian Lawyers Weekly, posts on Slaw about how blogs and RSS feeds will democratise Legal Publishing in the 21st Century: Legal publishers need to understand that the number of competitors [in legal news publishing] is not going to shrink – it’s going to multiply tenfold. And these competitors won’t have […]
Fertile ground for law blogs
I had a long overdue face-to-face with Justin of Human Law last week. We bemoaned the state of the legal blogosphere. In fact, there are so few points on the surface of this sphere, that it hardly rates as a sphere at all, even a small one. Should we actively try to expand it or […]
e-Books for lawyers
I have expended much of my creative effort these last few weeks finishing off a couple of new e-books with 5 CPD points a pop on the subject of the legal web, produced by me and Delia Venables and just published on infolaw. You’ll find full details there, but here’s a quick summary. Changing Practice […]
The new Blogger (with a capital B)
John Bolch at Family Lore is the first law blogger I know of to adopt the new Blogger platform which is currently in beta. Family Lore thus has a new look and new features. With this release Blogger has at last introduced categorisation. Another nice new feature is that archive links can be expanded to […]
Blog optimisation
Here’s an interesting one. Kevin O’Keefe (a well-known US law blog champion) comments on Doc Searls (a prolific A-list blogger) who comments on Nicholas Carr (a not-so-prolific B-list blogger) who comments on how to get a link from an A-lister. Nick Carr says: As the blogophere has become more rigidly hierarchical … it has turned […]
Necessarily anonymous
Nearly Legal offers a thoughtful post on the issues connected with anonymous blogging, saying “What interests me … is the fraught conjunction of anonymity, confessional, freedom of expression, privacy, veracity, self-exposure and unwanted exposure involved here.”
