Informationoverlord

Two articles on the subject of Twitter have caught my eye today, both concerning aspects of advertising. The first article by Phil Bradley asks whether Twitter’s ‘Re-Tweet’ functionality could and is starting to be exploited to an extent where it will effectively kill Twitter. Phil highlights the growing use by companies of all sorts asking users to Re-Tweet a message and/or add certain #hashtag to be in with a chance of winning ’some piece of tat or the other’.

According to Phil this results in three problems:

1 – Multiple re-tweets of same post in your timeline.
2 – Contamination of ‘Trends’ section.
3 – Possible swamping of companies getting people to people constantly tweet and re-tweet nonsensical messages.

Thankfully the re-tweeting that goes on in my timeline tends to be people re-tweeting interesting content and not marketing rubbish, but I can see how it could become a problem unless twitter introduces a filter/block for this type of content.

The second article by Laurie Sullivan on Media Post does kind of fit in with Phil’s as it is about ‘legitimate’ marketers complaining that Twitter is starting to be taken over by spam, porn, and escort services. According to Sullivan, ‘marketers relying on the site to promote family values tied to goods and services don’t seem too thrilled’.

I have to admit this made me smile. Why I would be any happier having these marketers trying to spam me more than I am of porn or other spam messages, I don’t know. I’m not really sure where the complaint is. Are they worried that some porn accounts/escorts are ‘following’ them? For starters, I’m pretty sure escorts buy stuff too. Are they worried that people with nothing better to do that go through pages and pages of ‘followers’ lists are going to see/click on one of these types of followers and go – oh no ‘ pure and innocent product’ is being followed by @hotxxx, therefore they must be evil or associated with porn?

If it isn’t that then all they have to do is not follow these people back. All very easy. I only follow about half those that follow me, partly it is because I don’t think I have anything in common with them, and partly it is because it when I see an account like this I just ignore it. However, if someone chooses to follow this ‘person’ then that’s their decision.

For me, the issue is spam. It doesn’t matter who is creating it or what the content is. I don’t personally have a problem with porn or escorts on Twitter -I follow US porn star jessica drake. If all Twitter does is starts to make it easier for marketers to use the service, without adding effective means of allowing users to block/filter their content, to keep this and other content out, then people will just move elsewhere.

Greg Lambert at the 3 Geeks and a Law Blog has a short review of a lawfirm publications aggregator called myCorporateResource.com. About a year ago I wrote a comparison article of three other aggregators: Lexology, Mondaq and Linex Legal for Internet Newsletter for Lawyers & Law 2.0 entitled Mining the Value of Law Firm Publications [Note to self: Add to link my articles tab]. I must confess I would not have thought there was a need or indeed room in the market for another similar site, but at first look, myCorporateResource.com looks like a useful and welcome addition to the club.

All law firms write client memoranda and articles. These publications are primarily written for the benefit of in-house counsel/lawyers in organisations, and function – when done properly – as an excellent source of free know-how that can be used as excellent primer material on a given topic, especially if a firm has been brave to enough to actually take a position on a particular subject, rather than just sit on the fence (still the usual approach).

Companies such as Lexology, Mondaq and Linex Legal now do the hard job of aggregating the content for you: allowing you to search by firm, legal topic/sector, jurisdiction and keyword, and saving you the trouble of monitoring each firms’ website individually to find new material.

My Corporate Resource can now be added to these three as an additional source of aggregating and disseminating these useful publications and updates.

The site splits itself into nine main areas:

Corporate Team: This is an interesting idea. The site tries to identify which updates would best appeal/be of most use to different people within a Corporate Team : Directors, Senior Executives, Legal team, Finance Team, Accounting Team, HR Team, Compliance Team, Company Secretaries. Each of their groups get their own separate “portal” on this site with the latest in legal alerts, regulatory press releases, rules announcements and industry insider blogs
Client Memoranda: Browse and search by Industry, Corporate Role, Area of Law & Geography.
RSS Feeds: The site offers 70 feeds broke down by Industry, Professional Role, Area of law, and Geography
24 (Memo)rable Hours: An overview of the latest updates
Lex Pop: The most read/popular content on the site
Hot Topics: Exactly what it sounds like, articles and updates covering the latest ‘big’ thing.
The SEC: A page dedicated to the SEC and covering their press releases, a calendar, blogs, and rules releases
Standout Material: This doesn’t seem to link anywhere yet, but offers a brief reason behind their review process.
Memo of the Week: What the editors of the site think is the most interesting memo of the week.

………………………………..

Source Material

Like Linex Legal, the approach they have taken is to link out to the source material as hosted in the individual law firms’ sites, rather than hosting copies of the material themselves – the approach taken by Lexology, and Mondaq. Law firms tend to like this approach, as it feels less like someone is trying to take their content to build a business.

Reviews

What they do, which make them unique is that they review a selection of the updates that come through, offering commentary on the commentary. I quite like this, although as there is no information on the site about just who the people are that are doing this ‘reviewing’ , it is hard to place any weight on these reviews.

Coverage

Whilst it does have some non US content, the coverage is distinctly American, which is where it falls down when compared to the wider international coverage of the three other services, and which will make it a less useful research tool for lawyers, PSLs, and Library and Information staff in UK/EU law firms. It would be nice to see the international side of things developed a bit more, and maybe the addition of some non US blogs too.

Connected to this content issue, the site lacks information on how many firms (and who they are) it covers, outside of a general ref to covering the AM Top 100.

Other issues

There is also some inconsistency on the site:

Labelling of Articles: when covering items written by Freshfields, sometimes the site refers to the shortened name and sometime to the full Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.
Use of Descriptors: Whilst using the term ‘Corporate Role’ in its Client Memoranda pages, it then uses ‘Professional role’ to describe the same subset on its RSS page.

Conclusion

I think there is a lot of potential for this site, especially if you’re a US based lawyer or legal information worker. If you’re in Europe and /or rest of the world, then you are still going to be better served by Lexology (my current number one choice), Mondaq and Linex Legal.

Also part of the service offered by these three is around selling Law Firms data on the number of hits their articles get via the site, emails and rss; who is reading them, where they are from; who they work for, and other statistics. So far I cannot see evidence of my Corporate Resource doing this.

What I will say is that if my Corporate Resource decide to take the rest of the world and publications / updates from smaller firms more seriously, then all three will need to watch out. This is already a good resource and one you should certainly add to your list of sites for finding and accessing law firm content.

As I am sure you’ll all have finished reading Digital Britain by now … I found myself reading this piece in the Indie last week and soon found myself saying oh yes more than the Churchill dog. In it Nicolas Lezard questions the logic behind the Government’s plans for DAB radio.

The one surprise in the piece is that he misses out the obvious one point of competition from (digital) internet radio, esp with continuing merging of TVs and PCs and similar devices. It seem to me, this is a big part of the question of whether DAB is actually needed at all ??

In the government’s vision when 50% of listening is on digital – by 2013 - and when DAB coverage reaches that comparable with FM, then all national FM station will only be allowed to broadcast in digital and their FM signals will be cut off. Now there will be a 2 year count down to this date – currently predicted by the end of 2015. So, let’s get this right, when 50% of listening is via digital the government are planning on cutting off 50% of a broadcasters listening audience in one swoop. But everyone will have a DAB radio etc by then you cry … Hmmm.

Better still for broadcasters, if the proposed move to DAB is not achieved on time then the government and Ofcom will still terminate their FM licences, and then re-advertise the national licences. What a great deal.

Why it’s a Mess

I should clarify, this is not a statement writing off digital radio broadcasting, just the DAB version of it. Who broadcasts nationally on DAB Currently? That will be the BBC. Is that it? Not quite, but it would not be wrong to say that the BBC is propping up what seems to be a commercially unviable platform. Planet Rock is the only commercial national digital station, available on the platform, which is not also available on analogue.

Part of the point of DAB was meant to be the attraction of getting lots of new radio stations, not just a means to transfer the ones we already have to a digital platform. Channel 4’s decision at the end of last year to pull out of the 4radio project to develop second national digital radio multiplex platform seemed to indicate a lack of interest in DAB from a commercial viewpoint. Whilst CH4 blamed economic climate for pulling out, the writing seemed to be on the wall for the project a good year before the economic climate change.

At the time when Ofcom decide to award the licence to the second multiplex, the owners of the first one – Digital One ( Gcap) told Ofcom there was no demand for the additional capacity, and that it had unused capacity for anyone wanting to launch DAB services, so a second national multiplex was un-needed and unwanted.

This may be why in the report the government proposes new legislation to allow current regional multiplex owners to extend in to currently unserved areas, without the need for a new licence, and also to allow – in fact encourage, cajole – adjoining regional multiplexes to merge. “These powers will allow the existing regional multiplexes to consolidate and extend to form a second national multiplex.” The carrot for the multiplex owners is the promise of operators’ licences until 2030. The problem is many of these regional multiplex operators have no desire to merge and produce the government’s second national multiplex vision, and some will actively oppose it.

The government also has another problem. Yes, sales in Digital radios are on the up, but 52% of listeners had not changed their main radio because they were ‘quite happy with my existing radio’. That’s the point. Ofcom says that whilst you can get digital on a number of platforms, we need a dedicated digital platform or else we’re all doomed Captain Mainwaring. Now I own a FM/DAB /Internet radio. It’s great, I love it – but I use it to listen to Radio 2, 4 and 5 Live on DAB (and even then, often I do Radio 2 on FM), and then I listen to Internet radio and podcasts or ‘listen again’ shows, and I can stream my music from my PC on it. The DAB aspect is actually the least appealing bit of it, if I am perfectly honest.

Add to this that the version of DAB we currently use isn’t that great – and that the government sees no current need to upgrade it. The Report dismisses the call for a decision of technology, and dismisses this as unimportant. “[T]hese opinions give too much regard to technologies and too little the real drivers of change, the listener” So when the footnote states, for example, that “DAB+ is a non-backward compliant variant of DAB which uses newer compression techniques providing a more spectrum efficient broadcast signal”, this doesn’t matter to the listener? What tosh. It would matter if they had a Radio that stopped working if we moved from DAB to that; but it would also matter because of the improved sound quality that the listener would be, erm, listening too.

The government will get around this by mandating / encouraging manufacturers to ensure that all Digital Radios can handle DAB, DAB+ and DMB-A formats.

There is a great bit in the impact assessment on the ‘do nothing’ option:

” The UK, with little direct Government intervention, is a world leader in the take-up of digital radio. It could be argued that whilst the framework in which this has been achieved is not ideal, the market could alone continue to deliver growth to a point where radio’s digitalisation naturally occurred. Benefits: There are no obvious benefits to broadcasters, multiplex operators or manufacturers of a ‘do nothing’ scenario. For listeners, there may be a related benefit because existing analogue radio receivers would have remain fully functional for longer; however, this should be offset by the slower introduction of new stations and functionality to DAB listeners.”

There is that mention of ‘new stations’ again. Let us say this again, these new proposals are all about shifting EXISTING FM stations to DAB, not the creation of new ones which, as CH4 have demonstrated is not that straight forward. In reality, if an organisation wanted to start broadcasting in digital, then the internet would be the way to go. There are many reasons for this: cheaper; easier; not regulated by Ofcom. Brands can launch their own stations now, and build listenership on the back of that brand – such as The Sun newspaper has recently done, albeit in a limited fashion, with the launch of SunTalk

Mobile

So far DAB been ignored by mobile phone operators. Nokia have said that they have the ability to add DAB radio to their phones, but will only do so if and when there is a genuine need/demand for it, partly because of what a huge battery sapping technology it is. If you put batteries in the average current DAB radio and an old fashioned portable FM radio the DAB will pack in ages before the FM one does.

And then there is Spotify and LastFM and other streaming music sites, which can allow you to create your own radio – if music only is your interest.

So why is the government ploughing ahead with this anyway? Answers on a postcard …

Being one of those strange creatures that still insists on buying a newspaper ever day, I was interested by a short piece in today’s Independent (my weekday paper of choice – and yes it is too preachy, but it’s easier to read on train/DLR than Guardian/Torygraph) by Terence Blacker on the gradual killing off of school libraries.

He points out that whilst prisoners have a statutory right to a library, schoolchildren do not, and that we have a government that keeps spouting on about ‘Creative Britain’, yet is the same one who has overseen the decimation of school libraries in this country.

Departing Culture Secretary (and new Heath Secretary) Andy Burnham was often keen to ensure people that his and the government’s commitment to provision of comprehensive library service is ‘absolutely non-negotiable’. And yet whilst on the one hand he has said “there is a real thirst out there from people looking for opportunities to come together. Libraries should be the place where real social networking happens - libraries as Facebook-3D; libraries as OurSpace instead of MySpace”; on the other, he and his government has turned their back on the ideal people to explore and develop just this kind of real social networking – children.

No doubt, he, and the government would point the fingers at others, at school finances, at local councils etc, but if as Blacker (and campaign for the Book) suggest our school children were given the same guaranteed statutory right to libraries as our prisoners were, this would not be an issue. And lets us not forget the words of our (old) ‘great’ leader: “Education, Education, Education.”

Paula Thornton at The FASTForward Blog has a great piece on Enterprise 2.0: “Enterprise 2.0 Isn’t a Checklist”

Whilst it doesn’t contain any radical new thinking on the way to success for Enterprise 2.0 – It’s the people, stupid – I do like the way her mind thinks and how she expresses things. I agree in particular with her assertion about the role of IT and how traditional organisation IT thinking is something that can kill Enterprise 2.0.

“If you’re building a spaceship and lives are at stake, these practices are a must. If you’re running a company in today’s turbulent marketplace, everything that is locked down and fixed prevents the real human capital of the organization from adapting to constantly changing circumstances. There is never an ideal process or system and there will always be exceptions. IT cannot respond fast enough to these changes. That means the flexibility has to be built into the systems.”

I think having organisations that are adaptable is key. This also touches on an idea explored in the excellent book ‘Starfish and the Spider’ by Ori Brafman and Rod Becksrom about how being more decentralised in business can help to make your more efficient. This in itself often needs for there to be a cultural shift in the organisation away from command and control and practices and a culture that reinforce such behaviours. As Paula Thornton says “A different culture is not a prerequisite, it’s a corequisite.” I like that. ” It should evolve as enabled by the other changes. Such cultures have to move from ‘rules’ to ‘guidelines’; from ‘fixed processes’ to ‘governance models’; from binary to heuristic (obvious exceptions will be for those industries and/or business artifacts subject to legislation).”

All this must, of course, go hand in hand with enterprise 2.0 tools only being introduced to enhance and improve actual working processes. There is the danger that companies, who give lip service to having an open cultue, but who are in reality still very much command and control, decide to ‘get’ enterprise 2.0 and start telling people what the wiki , blog, etc SHOULD be used for,rather than making people aware of the tools and allowing them to discover how certain tools can best help them do there job better/quicker etc.

There is an interesting set of posts on the 3 Geeks and a Law Blog about using crowdsourcing with lawfirms to accomplish certain research tasks. They are pleasantly surprised by the quality of results they get back for tasks paying only 10-50 cents per task, using Amazon’s MTurk ‘crowdsource’ work system. The tasks – identifying general counsels and summarising articles are not hugely difficult, but work well as a proof of concept for the idea.

According to Greg Lambert “I have to admit that I was pretty impressed with the quality of the work. Regardless of if we paid 25 or 50 cents, the work was very good. I’m also stunned by the seriousness that the MTurkers seem to take with regards to the quality of the work.”

Should we in the information community now be worried about crowdsourcing as well as outsourcing when it comes to our jobs? Or should be all be signing up for MTurk now to make some additional money on the side!?

I came across this site  and it gave me an idea for a new web2 startup, that I’d like to call, Burglr

I see two types of account: Sharer and Follower.

Sharer Account:

List all the good and possessions you have in your house.
Sign up to use ‘always on’ GPS location tool.
Link your Dopplr/Tripit etc account to let people know when you’re away from home.
Link to Twitter/Facebook ’status updates’ to confirm you’re away from home.

Follower Account:

Search by Area
Integration with Google Street View
Anonymous ‘follow’
Email when ‘away’ alerts

The idea still needs some fleshing out, and most people I know are already providing enough information for this to work without my new site, so maybe it isn’t needed anyway? What do you think?

I could not resist a short blog post about Dell’s new netbook. It looks like a nice little machine. Dell obviously agree, and have also decided that what they need to do is target women. So much so they have set up a ‘Della‘ part of their website to tell women why they should get a Dell mini: It’ll fit in your handbag; you can find and save recipes and watch cooking videos; track your calories; download meditation podcasts, watch yoga videos…

Think they missed, we’ll patronise the fuck out of you. Why not just go the whole hog and say we’ve pre-installed a link to eBay and already saved searches on handbags and shoes for you, so you don’t need to.

According to the BBC the French National Assembly has passed the Hadopi law (by 296 to 233) which will implement a three strikes rule that would cut internet access to anyone ‘caught’ illegal file sharing. A new state agency, the Hadopi, would first send illegal file-sharers a warning e-mail, then a letter, and finally cut off their connection for a year if they were caught a third time.

The move comes as the UK music and film industries are putting pressure on Lord Carter to add a similar recommendation to his Digital Britain report.

The French move is a risky one, as it puts it on collision course with the European Union. Last week the European Parliament (EP) reinstated one of its first reading amendments for the EU’s new telecoms regulatory package by reinstating an amendment that guaranteed that an internet user’s internet access could not be restricted without a court ruling. “no restriction may be imposed on the fundamental rights and freedoms of end users, without a prior ruling by the judicial authorities (…) save when public security is threatened.”

The French Law which does not involve the accused person having their internet access blocked by any judicial authority would immediately be in breach of that law (if adopted). However: EU telecoms ministers, who have a final say on the EU legislation, could reject the amendment at a meeting on 12 June, but this would delay agreement and adoption of the whole telecom reform package for months. Also, as chances are there will be 12-24 months for Member States to implement any agreed new telecoms package; and that the infringement process of the European Commission is tediously slow (Countries are still only just being found in breach of EU law for the European Court of Justice for infringing the telecoms framework that was in place before the current one (which was passed in 2002); regardless of what the Commission eventually decides on this issue France may still go ahead with this plan.

I notice that the US government has signed some new agreements with a variety of social media sites to allow federal agencies to follow President Obama’s lead by joining the likes of Facebook and MySpace to help increase citizen participation in government. The agreements resolve legal concerns found in many standard terms and conditions that pose problems for federal agencies, such as liability, endorsements, advertising, freedom of information, and governing law.

Of course President Obama already has the Whitehouse in full social media/networking tilt, with a presence on Facebook , Flickr , YouTube , MySpace , Vimeo and Twitter

Of course, here in the UK our own glorious leader has seen 10 Downing Street spreading its message via some of the same tools

Facebook, YouTube, Flickr , and Twitter

Although it has to be said they have been rather quiet of late on Twitter - nothing new for a week? Some might say an accurate reflection of the state of the current PM.