This is a test post. Weblog entries have been disappearing. Test of upstreaming.

Howard Bashman asks:"What makes for a useful appellate court Web site?" Good question, Howard. Rather than all the necessaries, I'll only discuss the most important useful requirement. When it comes to appellate courts, opinions take priority. Issuing written opinions is what appellate courts do best. It's what drives the common law, creates media and scholarly interest, and enables continuing public confidence in the courts. A useful site makes it easy to find topical information and full text of current opinions, and plays friendly with search engines. (For example, I've been using the Google-It! macro in Radio to link the new opinion topical headings directly to Google. Over time, this has enabled users to get a quick feel for recent West Virginia legal topics by using Google as a free legal research service. See, e.g., the results of the query "wv remediation subsequent purchaser") Hopefully opinions are available in HTML or plain text and not PDF only or some other proprietary format.

Because of the demonstrable benefits to site traffic and dispersal of public information, I'm also partial to the weblog format and RSS/XML feeds for public information. Even in little old West Virginia I've seen traffic to the official court site originating from RSS feeds triple in the past few weeks. And as a busy court clerk on a limited public budget, I'd rather use inexpensive weblog software to publish useful category pages than invest time and energy in flash photo intros and the like.

West Virginia's court site could use work, as could many of the sites for state courts of last resort. (Here's a page with links to all 50.) I would like to see more official court bloggers. I'd also like to create docket-level RSS feeds and an automatic notification system. Enthusiasm for useful tools like these is getting easier every day. With all the blawgs popping up, there's enough expertise out there to actually do something with all this information flow.