Long-established legal business commentators Delia Venables and Nick Holmes explain why the much-vaunted Web 2.0
concept is more than just buzzword bingo





The Internet is changing, from a one-to-many broadcasting system to a many-to-many communications system. It is becoming a shared resource.



Anyone can put forward their ideas, amend or correct the ideas of others, talk to their friends, locate long-lost friends or find new ones, and create and load pictures or video clips. All of these activities are active (taking part) rather than passive (consuming). This 'new' Internet is known as Web 2.0, or the social web. This article is about some of the key types of activity associated with Web 2.0, and about how legal business fits in.



Blogs

A blog is an online journal, the page presenting most recent items (posts), with archive pages presenting collections of past posts, typically by month and category. User contributions are enabled via comments on posts. While most blogs are published by individuals, multi-author or group blogs increasingly provide an effective way for small networks to connect, share and collaborate. There are already more than 130 law blogs in the UK from firms, individual solicitors, barristers, academics and others in the legal world.



Wikis

A wiki is a collaborative website whose pages can be created and edited directly by anyone with permission to do so. Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is the best-known public wiki with two million articles in English. City law firm Allen & Overy is using internal wikis for knowledge sharing and document creation, and there are already publicly available wikis in crime, mental health and intellectual property law.



Social networks

These are online networks for communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. They provide a collection of ways for users to interact, such as chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging and discussion groups. The best known in the UK include MySpace (myspace.com) and Facebook (facebook.com).



Photo, video, file-sharing

Flickr (flickr.com) provides a convenient platform for storing, sharing and showcasing digital photographs. Video-sharing services such as YouTube (youtube.com) host video clips and primarily provide entertainment - DivorceOnline recently became the first legal business to market its services with an advert on YouTube.



Virtual worlds

These are computer-generated environments. Virtual worlds were until recently most commonly used for games but are now increasingly used to mirror real-life interactions. Second Life (secondlife.com) is gaining attention as a place not just to have fun, but to do business. Several law firms have offices 'in-world'.



RSS

Really Simple Syndication or Remote Site Syndication (RSS) allows the publication of 'feeds' of information from news sites, blogs and other databases. A feed contains headlines and links to the latest items and can then provide either excerpts or the full text of the items.



Law 2.0

The facilities inherent in the technologies behind Web 2.0 will enable lawyers to collaborate, learn from each other, network, serve themselves and cut out the middle-man. Here are some of the ways lawyers can benefit from Web 2.0:

l Collaboration: the benefits of collaboration have become clearer to lawyers as the use of free and low-cost Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis and many other online office applications has proliferated.

l Knowledge acquisition and sharing: Web 2.0 tools such as RSS feeds, social bookmarks, blogs and wikis provide effective means to gather information, and harness and distribute collective knowledge.

l Social and business networking: social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn and the networked communities that evolve through blogging provide effective ways to expand business networks.

l Marketing: blogs can provide an effective, low-cost way to establish individual lawyers as thought

leaders in their fields and to promote the expertise of firms and chambers. Video-sharing or podcasting can spread marketing messages at no cost once the recording is made.

l Legal information services: blogs, RSS feeds and wikis have the potential to replace at least some of the current generation of subscription-based legal information services and, of course, there is now also a vast corpus of free public sector information available.



It is horses for courses really: depending on what information you need, there are several options for obtaining it, only some of which are formal paid-for services. Web 2.0 demonstrates the potential for individuals and small players in concert to upset the legal publishing status quo.



Nick Holmes and Delia Venables are joint editors of 'Internet Newsletter for Lawyers & Law 2.0'. Go to infolaw.co.uk, venables.co.uk.