Jerry Lawson has an interesting article online at LLRX entitled: Weblogs for Lawyers: Lessons from Ernie the Attorney. The comparison of my weblog to the big law firm websites is intriguing, I suppose, but I'm not sure that it's really as significant as some might take it to be. I think it will be interesting to see law firms use weblogs for their websites (maybe they are already, but maybe you can't see it).
For example, our lawfirm has a website with a News & Events page where we make announcements about lawyers in our firm. You wouldn't know it unless I told you, but that page is actually a weblog (run with Moveable Type); and it has an RSS/XML feed. The firm website has a Legal News Page that covers legal news (it also has an RSS/XML feed).
We've just gotten these two "blawg pages" going recently so I doubt we are getting any increase in traffic. The next step is to publicize this to our clients and see if they like it. And to tinker with it according to what our clients like. I'll keep you posted on how things go, but it may not be a success story that is demonstrable by reference to Google links.
Anyway, I appreciate Jerry's point and I obviously think that he's right about the power of weblogs in the legal profession. But sometimes weblogs are most powerful when the people who are reading them don't perceive anything different from a regular website.
"Verizon said that 150 phone booths — from the Battery to Columbia University — had already been equipped with radio-signal technology, popularly known as Wi-Fi, to enable mobile computer users who are within 300 feet of a booth to connect to the Internet. About 1,000 booths covering virtually all of Manhattan and a few spots in the other boroughs will become Wi-Fi "hot spots" by the end of the year, the company said."
If you are reading this post and don't know what Wi-Fi is then you should start learning. It's always good to keep up with something that will radically change society. Well, actually, the Internet is what's changing society; but Wi-Fi is making high speed Internet access pervasively (and cheaply) available.
The implications of that simple fact are staggering.
Dave Winer of Scripting News reports that "Tom Watson is a Labour MP with a weblog." I thought Tom Watson was a golfer. But either way, he's got a blog and that's cool.
9:57:44 AM
