November 2006 Archives

Here's an early Christmas present - a search engine just for legal blogs from Justia.com. The ability to search only legal blogs is a giant step towards using blogs more effectively for research purposes. For example, try a search for stock option backdating on the Justia Blawg Search and just look at the good stuff that comes up.

According to Tara Calishain's ResearchBuzz, the search engine covers over 600 blawgs with more on the way. You can also browse for blogs by subject, browse recent keyword searches, and view blog entry tags. It's well-organized, attractive and a great resource for searching and identifying legal blogs.

If you'd like to peruse some of the presentations from Internet Librarian, they've started appearing on the Information Today site. If you don't see the one that you're looking for, check back later; I believe this page is a work in progress.

Sometimes I blog items to make sure I can find them again in the future. In that respect, LawLibTech is my own personal knowledgebase. This item is in that category, and who knows, maybe you'll be interested, too!

If you have a presentation to give in the near future, no matter how mundane or technical, read Where to Start, from Creating Passionate Users.

I especially like #3, "For the love of god, DO NOT start with history!" And let me just say, if you're a vendor, conducting a product demo, don't spend the first 15 minutes of a 30 minute demo talking about your company and how wonderful it is. Spend your allotted time making me care about the product!

If you read my entry on mashups, you might have wondered what possible application they could have within the legal environment. It didn't take long. Synaptec Software has integrated a mashup in a recent version of its Lawbase software, according to John Waters in his article, Mashups to Re-Map the Legal Tech Market?

They're claiming the first commercial legal tech mashup, but that all depends upon your definition of the word. In its most general sense, that is, an application that uses content from more than one source to create a completely new service, WestKM and Lexis TotalSearch fit the bill. However, the word mashup is usually used to refer to web applications that utilize publicly available APIs from Google Maps, Flickr, Yahoo, etc., so in that sense, they may have a claim.

For a directory of mashups, covering a variety of different areas, see The Programmable Web.