Ballad in Plain E

The 2008 edition of the Canadian Law Blog Awards (CLawBies) is off to a great start – check out the growing list of blogged nominations at Steve Matthews’ Vancouver Law Librarian Blog.

I approach the nominations from the point of view of a law firm library technician.  The heavyweights that have already been nominated multiple times (Slaw, Law21, Library Boy, etc.) are all must-reads, but I wanted to focus on some other blogs that are just as deserving of some recognition.

So, without further ado, here are my 2008 CLawBie nominations!

1) I had to laugh (and feel honoured) when I looked at my feed reader earlier today and saw that Karen Sawatzky of Library Technician Dialog had nominated Ballad in Plain E, because I’m also nominating her! Karen and Brenda Wong are both law library technicians who write on a variety of topics and themes, not always law-specific, but always thoughtful and relevant. (Karen and I both work at Winnipeg law firms and I think we may be the only two legal bloggers in the province. We’d sure love to see some Manitoba lawyers start blogging – it’s a small market, but there’s definitely a need for more Manitoba commentary.)

2) Law & Style, which has both fun and helpful content, but I chose mainly because of the infinitely helpful “Wednesday Roundup”. (For those of you who don’t know about the Wednesday Roundup, it’s a summary of – and direct links to – the content featured in the Globe & Mail’s Law Page and the National Post’s Legal Post.) If you hear about it in the elevator, chances are it’s in the Wednesday Roundup – this quick & dirty way to find out what people are talking about is a law librarian’s secret weapon! (On a related note, I sure miss the old, deliciously snarky Fashionista!)

3)  I’m going to second Connie’s motion for a nomination for Steve (full disclosure: I work for Stem Legal, but have no role in the CLawBies). He was a big part of the reason I started blogging and his Law Firm Web Strategy blog consistently offers practical, timely, and down-to-earthy guidance on, well, web strategies for law firms and lawyers. I think Steve’s blogs (Law Firm Web Strategy and Vancouver Law Librarian Blog) have done so well because of his sense of humour and cut-to-the-chase style and tone. I know he won’t consider his own blogs for the CLawBies, but I also know I’m not alone in wanting to recognize his significant contributions to the Canadian legal blogosphere.

That’s it for me; who will you nominate?

Legal web guru (and, okay, my boss) Steve Matthews just published a really good article on law firm SEO over at Slaw.

Even if you’re not particularly interested in SEO, this is a great introduction to the concepts of natural/organic vs. paid search. It’s useful for anyone who wants to know what kind of effort is required to improve a website’s visibility and ranking within search engines. The section on building assets vs. renting space is especially thoughtful, I think.

After reading about Ubiquity in Simon Fodden’s Slaw post yesterday morning, and then watching Aza Raskin’s video, I *had* to download Firefox 3 so that I could try out it out. (Even though some of my favourite add-ons aren’t available in 3.0.1 yet.)

Simon’s right – it’s really, really cool. After just ten minutes of mucking around, I’m impressed. You can send a link by e-mail on the fly, call up and paste google maps into an e-mail (though I’m going to have to train myself to drop the hyphen in “e-mail” if I want it to work properly!), and a ton of other handy actions.
There are definitely still glitches (it is a prototype, after all) but overall I think this extension has huge potential and I’m really excited to see it develop.

Via Library Link of the Day, there’s a really interesting article in the July 17th edition of The Economist entitled “Great minds think (too much) alike“. The article describes research that shows how digital access to scientific journals doesn’t necessarily encourage use of long tail information. Sociologist Dr James Evans:

“has found that as more journals become available online, fewer articles are being cited in the reference lists of the research papers published within them. Moreover, those articles that do get a mention tend to have been recently published themselves. Far from growing longer, the long tail is being docked.”

My reaction is that this is somewhat analogous to the average user not looking past the first page (first ten results) in Google. The other day, I watched a friend of mine try to search for some basic instructional information on the internet. If within the first few results, she didn’t see what she was looking for, she’d immediately change her search terms. I made some suggestions for different terms and what order to put them in, and she had a bit more luck, but we still had to look at more than a couple hits to find what she was looking for. (It’s pretty satisfying when you can put your madd library skillz to use outside of work!)

On the whole, we are growing more and more impatient and unwilling to spend any time to find high-quality information. This isn’t news, obviously, but it’s something I need to remind myself of, too – because I know I do it even though I know better. I loved the quote that ends the article:

“As a wag once put it, an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until, eventually, he knows everything about nothing. It would be ironic if that is the sort of expertise that the world wide web is creating.”

In the digital realm where, in theory, it should be easy to find highly specialised information about almost anything, we need to remind ourselves that good info doesn’t always float to the top. We still have to go digging for it, be critical of it, and not assume we are experts about any of it.

As noted on Slaw, Google’s introduced “teleportation” – the poor man’s site: syntax shortcut.

Best of all, it works for the Government of BC website, which is notoriously hard to search using its own site search engine.

Just type “gov bc” into Google and you’ll see the little site search box below the first hit’s URL, intro text, and “refine your search” options. You get the same results whether you use the teleportation box or just do a straight up site: syntax search with a search term.

(As seen on Library Revolution)

This test will determine what level of education is required to understand your blog. I wish there were some information on how the reading level is determined, though.

At lunchtime, the elevator news informed me that YouTube has just unveiled a Canadian version, youtube.ca.

In response, the Ingram 2.0 column on the Globe & Mail website asks the question, “Do we really need a YouTube Canada?” Ingram says no, that funny is funny, and therefore the localisation of YouTube is pointless and probably just an advertising play.

According to another article from the Globe, “YouTube believes that by creating country-specific sites, users will have an easier time finding the relevant videos they are looking for. ”

YouTube says they won’t be doing IP redirecting to automatically take Canadian visitors to the .ca domain unless they thought it would make for “a better user experience.” To which Rob Hyndman of Toronto (THE Rob Hyndman?) commented: “ It strikes me as a little troubling that Youtube thinks that depriving me of choice could ever result in ‘a better user experience’.”

Touché!

This morning I read about an online survey that Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan is sponsoring, on extending the Skytrain Millennium Line out to UBC (um, awesome). Whilst looking for it online, I stumbled across the news that Google Transit is now available for metro Vancouver.

If you live in Vancouver or the Lower Mainland, you will probably find both of items of interest. Your mission for this morning: go take the online survey at Sam Sullivan’s website (you can vote on how far the Millennium line should be extended, whether the line should be above or below ground, among other issues), and then see if Google Transit is any less enraging than TransLink’s own Trip Planner.

I started a draft of a big rant about facebook a couple of months ago, when I noticed myself becoming increasingly frustrated at how facebook was affecting normal social interaction amidst my group of friends. I’d go to parties, and no one was talking about things that had happened in real life; they were talking about facebook drama. No one ever said “I’ll e-mail you about that”, they said “I’ll facebook you” (and we all know how I feel about the use of nouns as verbs, e.g., Google). I even experienced quasi-discrimination because I wasn’t on facebook (”Can you forward the details of this event to Emma, since she’s anti-facebook?”). Whoa!

My resistance to facebook was based on several ideas. The most important one is that although I would like to be on facebook for the relatively superficial reasons of appearing “with it” to my colleagues and patrons, it would be impossible–so far as I can tell–to exist only professionally on facebook. At the root of my concerns there is the fact that I’d like to maintain some distance between my personal and professional lives.

I was also uneasy at how exhibitionist in nature facebook is: like any social network, people can spend a lot of time tweaking and massaging their online selves in ways that they never could in real life. I’ve been there – I had a livejournal for four years. You’re never completely honest, because in part, your existence there is for others’ interest. Like a lot of online forums–my blog included–this one seems to encourages us to become even more self-absorbed and indulgent than we already are. I know that many people don’t take it anywhere near this extreme, but there are still more people than not who do.

But since then, I’ve had discussions with almost every one of my closest friends, and there is this vague sense of unease and resentment present in each of them. They’re all on facebook, but they don’t necessarily like it. They think it’s fun, but complain about how easily they can lose a couple hours to it, when they were supposed to have been doing something else. Some of my more web-savvy friends think it’s lame because it’s a gated community and defies the democratic spirit of the internet. My friends who don’t work with the internet and web apps in their professional lives think it’s boring already and so last year. Mostly everyone generally regards it as a necessary evil.

Me, I don’t know. I know that objectively, I’m on shaky ground when I criticize it, because I haven’t ever had an account, myself. But I am familiar with how it works, having logged on to others’ accounts and poked around (ooops, where did those two and a half hours go?). Maybe I’m making a big deal out of nothing, since “facebook insanity” seemed to hit Vancouver, thrive, and then peter out in fairly short order. It doesn’t really bother me that much anymore. Use it or don’t. In fact, I’m glad that people have strong opinions about it, because it’s interesting to talk about.
I felt a twinge of validation when I read Stephen Cohen’s post about his decision not to sign up for fb. And then I felt stupid for not feeling confident enough in my own instincts and decisions. It’s tricky. I don’t want to turn into someone who refuses to get with the times–for instance, someone who doesn’t “do” e-mail–but I think this one’s not life or death. I am fortunate to have many good friends and colleagues I enjoy being around, and who for the most part, don’t exclude me because I’m not on facebook. I suspect that this will turn out like Friendster and MySpace (both of which I was a member of). I think the popularity of and problems with social networks sites reflect a cultural shift – one that will be fascinating to watch unfold–regardless of whether I’m on facebook!

An excellent one by Laurel over at 12 Hours of Power.

Don’t worry, mine’s coming, too.