There’s been a lot of chatter this afternoon on Twitter about Nick Holmes Free Legal Web project. Today he posted his manifesto (not as scarily Soviet-era as it sounds) that outlines the (rather ambitious, I can’t help but think) goals and dreams of the project. Nick’s ‘plausible promise’ is that he will:

spearhead the development of the Free Legal web — a service that joins up the law and legal commentary and analysis on the web and delivers a useful service to both lawyers and the community at large. I need a commitment from a handful of others with complementary skills and expertise to kick-start the project. All suggestions are welcome and necessary to drive this forward.

The goal is to create a ‘joined-up’ free legal web, in some way making accessible all the officially provided free information (opsi, hansard, etc) as well as blogs, legal wikis, and other free available, but ‘unofficial’ sources of legal information. All in all a very laudable goal, I must say.

This is in line with the goals of the Power of Information Task Force,who are working to public sector information more accessible to the people. (There’s even a £20k prize if you think of something they really like!)

I think that at it’s core this is a really good idea - I’m all for making information more accessible, and taking some of the control away from the legal publishers, who currently hold the legal sector to ransom for their ‘official’ information sources. As Nick says in his manifesto, legal blogs and wikis are producing some fantastic commentary and discussion on legal issues, and are far more timely and accessible than journal articles and books. And it would be great to have a central location for accessing, searching and disseminating information from both the ‘official’ and ‘non official’ freely available legal sources.

The big question that hangs over the project though, is how is it going to be done? Will it simply be a portal site (though this ground is already covered very competently by Nick’s excellent Infolaw.)? A federated search engine? A mashup of rss feeds that you can set-up according to your own interests?

I think this is a fantastic opportunity to make use of semantic web style metadata. I don’t really know enough about the semantic web to start having an intelligent discussion about how it would actually work in practice but a semantic metadata powered search engine/giant mash up might be an idea? A quick web search reveals a number of discussions already in place regarding the construction of legal ontologies for semantic web markup.

A cohesive effort to get people using a shared ontology and semantic markup for the pages would be a great step forward, and would hopefully start paving the way for future (free) uses of legal information on the web.

Lots of concerns spring to mind too though, not the least some very disgruntled legal publishers. The sheer volume of (presumably) volunteer effort will make it a slow going process. Getting the combined online legal community on board might also be a challenge. And getting everyone to come to a decision? Fraught, but not necessarily impossible.

This is a very off-the-cuff response to what is a very ambitious and multi-faceted plan. I’m sure given more thought I’ll be able to think of many more things to say about it. I do, however, think it’s a great and very laudable idea, and am looking forward to seeing how the project progresses!

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The European Commission recently released a statement regarding Europeana - the European Digital Library that will be opening in November of this year. I haven’t heard much about this, but the plan is to build a portal to European digitized collections, allowing the public to have access to the historical riches of Europe. It’s quite a neat idea, but I can’t help but think that the goal of having “an Irish art lover to get close to the Mona Lisa without queuing at the Louvre” might be a little far-fetched.

It seems to be very public oriented, looking at broad, thematic areas such as music, crime and punishment, travel and tourism. They’re hoping that they’ll get researchers to use it as well (though why they wouldn’t use the sites/databases of the primary providers is a bit beyond me), but it is primarily aimed at the ‘interested public’, whoever they are.

It’s being funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme, which is a programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable, which is a laudable, if rather vague goal. The project is being run from the national library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, and has partner institutions throughout the rest of Europe.

The idea is that it will just be a portal site, with federated search across all the member organisations collections, and with the complete digital object staying on the site it belongs to – the Bundesarchiv or British Library, for example.

I think it’s kinda a neat idea - digitisation is a good idea, at least from an archival point of view, if nothing else - but I’m not entirely convinced that it will be used. I expect it’ll end up languishing, like much of the public-oriented Europa sites, unnoticed, unusable and neglected. I don’t really know who they’re aiming it at - they might get a little further, and make it a little more practical if they did just aim the project at the researchers and academics that are far more likely to use it, rather than pretending that there is this great public desire for digitised historical documents. The public should certainly have access to such things, but it isn’t really high on the agenda for your average European citizen.

It might behoove the Commission to think a little more about who they’re marketing these things to, and how to market it appropriately, before spending all this money on projects that no one will use.

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I just watched an amazing presentation on the anthropology of YouTube delivered by Dr Michael Wesch. At nearly an hour in length, it is a bit of a time commitment, but is worth every minute.

Michael Welsch (who you may also remember from The Machine is Us/ing Us) from earlier this year) is a professor of digital ethnography at Kansas State University, and he and his students have been conducting an anthropological study of YouTube and it’s users. The presentation covers a history of YouTube through its users – from the Numa Numa song and it’s replicators as a celebration of the webcam, through to the endless mashups of Soulja Boy, to the Free Hugs guy. He also discusses the ways in which YouTube, in particular personal vlogs, allow for a form of expression and community that is unique to the internet, allowing people to make connections and express themselves in ways that they have not been able to do before.

Exploring ideas of authenticity, personality, self expression, participation and collaboration, this is a fantastic piece that really highlights the ways in which new media and new technologies are not only changing the ways people communicate, but are changing the communities we have, and for the better.

It’s not often that I find myself coming away from a piece of media feeling positive about the future, but this presentation made me hope that there is a future for our global community beyond lots of individuals sitting in front of boxes.

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I know we’ve been incredibly quiet of late, but I promise that we will be back soon with actual posts! 

In the meantime, in the process of updating and weeding my feeds, I’ve realised that I have a distinct lack of feeds that relate to my current work.  So, does anyone have any suggestions for some good KM or Intranet related blogs?

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Jennifer and I have both started new jobs recently, which explains our radio silence lately. As a result of changing jobs however, I’ve realised that my information needs have changed. Both because of a lack of time and because of a change in roles.

As a result, whenever I do get a chance to sit in front of my google reader, I am evaluating everything I read to determine how valuable the information is that I’m getting. In the past week I’ve unsubscribed from around 10 - 15 feeds, but my reader is still looking as crowded as ever so I may have to get a bit more ruthless.

I’m not just cutting work related feeds, I’m also examining the ‘recreational’ feeds I have. I have a large number of tech related blogs that I want to read but I always end up ‘marking all as read’ so I think it might be time to scale them back.

I’ve always had a large number of feeds as I’m always afraid that I’m going to miss out on something (a fear that meant I very rarely missed school and still hate missing work!). But I’m slowly realising that I just don’t have the time (or the inclination any more) to be on top of absolutely everything. If there’s something important happening in another blog, I’m sure that I’ll find out - either through another blog or twitter.

Basically, I’m trying to streamline my information sources. And hopefully this will help me get back into the swing of reading, posting and commenting again and not be overwhelmed by the numbers in my reader!

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I’ve finally gotten around to watching a video that I’ve had saved in my google reader for weeks - We Think.  (Found via Web 2.0 (Video/Powerpoint))

It’s an animation that accompanies a book that was published in the UK recently, also titled We Think. It’s about the web and creativity and sharing and where that will take us. Whilst not directly on Web 2.0 it is about the concepts and technologies behind it, and is about the direction that the web is heading.

The first three chapters of the book are available online here.  Go, read.  I know I will be.

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Closing a bunch of tabs on my Firefox here, so I thought I’d share some interesting search related resources I’ve come across in the last few weeks:

Brijit is a tool that aggregates content and abstracts it to 100 words or less. It has a pretty comprehensive scope, and covers some sources that you might not otherwise think to keep track of, including certain subscription-only sources. They are primarily of consumer-interest (think things like Wired, GQ, even Playboy!), but does also contain some more business-oriented or ’serious’ sources, such as BusinessWeek, The Economist, The New York Times, and so on. Though many of these sources do have rss feeds of their own, it might be useful to instead get this aggregated short form content. They also produce feeds by subject, rather than by publication, which is also a pretty awesome feature, though I’m not sure of the comprehensiveness of this service. Though I’ve subbed in to a couple of feeds on this, I haven’t yet been really scanning them for content in a serious way, but as a starting point it looks like a pretty useful resource that might cover some content that you may otherwise not have access to.

Voluminous is a catalogue of free e-books, with apparently over 20,000 books listed. It’s not free, but is a paid-service (though there is a free trial) – it’s also only available for Mac, not PC. Why do all the interesting book-apps come to mac first? /grumble/ It’s kind of interesting, but as it’s searching books that are in the public domain anyway, I’m not entirely sure that I’d be keen to pay for it, as you should be able to search for them for free somewhere. The screen-caps look nice though – think iTunes for books – and I suppose if you were really, really into ebooks it might be worth the purchase.

Searchme is a new search engine that visually breaks down searches into conceptual categories to help you find what you’re looking for. It’s dynamic, so the categories pop up and change as you type, which is pretty neat. Searching for, say, ‘rain’ (what? No – of course I’m not frustrated with the weather!), brings up categories such as weather, music, poetry, (the dreariness must make people more creative!), software, etc. If you add ‘boot’ to the search, you get categories for clothes and sales added. The search results themselves are visual, so you can see the page before you click on it – this doesn’t really enamor me, I like lists, but I suppose if you’re a really visual searcher, or knew what you were looking for, it might help. I don’t think this is a desperately practical search engine, but it’s quite pretty, and rather interesting, so I thought it was worth a mention.

GoogleHacks is seriously old news by now, but for some reason it’d completely passed me by. It’s a pretty neat tool that lets you perform quite complicated and powerful Google searches. Now, whilst you technically can do these searches manually, it’s nice to be able to have a tool that makes it that much easier. It’s mostly focused towards finding new media, and lets you search for various file types.

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Today I came across a very cool website - Get London Reading. It’s done by Booktrust with support from 3M. From the name I thought it was going to be a new initiative for getting more people to read (which it is), but the best bit about it is the Google maps mashup they have that shows books set in London.   Being a Google map, you can zoom into street level and find books by each area or street, as well as click on each cover to get a short synopsis and author and publisher details.

There is also a free edition of the Rough Guide to London by the Book, which sounds fantastic and who doesn’t like random trivia about London?

There’s currently only around 400 books, but it has potential. I’ll be using it to find new books to read that’s for sure!

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A few months ago I wrote about the Asus Eee PC, and how much I loved it and wanted one. I never got around to actually buying one, and I’m glad I didn’t as they’re about to bring out the latest version and it sounds even better! The screen is bigger, the hard drive is bigger (20Gb instead of 4Gb), and my favourite, gestures on the mouse pad! There’s a review here which goes into detail about all the changes.

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I read a post yesterday about how in Japan, rather than putting a whole URL on an advert, they tend to use a search box with key words in it, so that if you search for those terms, the product will come up. There is some interesting discussion in the comments about how this relates to Japanese culture in particular, with increased use of internet-through-mobiles, and the problems of turning Japanese characters into URLs, and things like that. But the thing that struck me most is how it really is a sign of the ways in which people use the internet are changing, and how ubiquitous search has become.

Since I’ve started using del.icio.us I’ve tended to shy away from bookmarking sites on my computer, particularly at home. I have a relatively large list of bookmarks at work, as they’re quite specific, but at home I don’t have a single site bookmarked. But this does mean that I use search a lot. And not for complicated things. Often, it’s for desperately simple things, to the point where I’m guilty of searching for ‘maps’ or ‘calendar’ so that I can get to the Google variants of both. And yes, I know that they’re linked just from the top of the Google homepage, but in Firefox it’s quicker for me to search for them – I don’t even have to open up a new tab. Searching is a whole lot quicker than opening up a new tab/window and typing in the tedious ‘doubleyoudoublyoudoublyoudot’ of a URL, and that’s when you actually remember the whole thing. I’ve taken to using search as a giant, distributed search engine – so long as I can more or less remember what I’m looking for, chances are I’ll be able to find it.

I think I like the move towards search-oriented, rather than url-oriented advertising. Who knows, it might even help people develop better searching habits? If they can’t find what they want on the first try, they might be moved to searching a better way. What are your thoughts?

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