Informationoverlord

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.”