Borrowing from the lingo of museums, Jason Wilson at Slaw urges the need to “curate” the blawgosphere, to manage the ” collective analytical content” produced by lawyers (and other legal professionals, whatever he means by that). From some unattributed author, Jason quotes:
We’ve just recently latched onto the idea of curation as though it were something new. The need for curation in the old media world wasn’t as obvious as in the internet world because, on the web, ‘everything carries the same weight’ and the average user has difficulty discerning good content from bad. … The buzz word ‘curation’ does carry with it some logic: As the sheer amount of information and content grows, consumers seek help parsing the good from the bad. And that’s where curation comes in. The amount of content available to consumers—much of it free of charge, but scattered across thousands of websites—is growing exponentially every day. At the same time, consumers are increasingly doing independent research and attempting on their own to source important information to support their increasingly complicated lives.
The problem is one I’ve written about before, but the proposed solution, curation, is another matter. Jason recognizes that this solution won’t be easy.
Curating this growing body of analytical content will be difficult. It suggests a person-machine process of locating and separating good content from bad, and categorizing, verifying, authenticating, and editorializing that content. It will undoubtedly require the creation of a rich taxonomy to help organize and manage the content for later discovery, clean metadata, and a good search engine, and raises issues from data permanency to copyrights to brand dilution.
My initial reaction was to ask, who would the blawgosphere deem to be a sufficiently honest broker to serve as curator? Who would we accept to tell us whether we’re worthy or not? A curator, accepted by the blawgosphere, would wield enormous power, the ability to take an unknown, unread blawg and make it famous, or crush it into virtual dust.
It took mere minutes for the offers to roll in. In the comments to Jason’s post, a comment came in offering the efforts of Legal Informatics Blog, which bills itself as “Scholarly & Professional Commentary on Legal Information Systems and Legal Communications.” Eek. I fell asleep just reading the subtitle. Having never heard of this blog before, it strikes me as an effort by academia to find an underutilized internet niche with which to achieve tenure. Not my cup of tea.
Then came a comment by Ed Adams,
You’re on the mark, Jason. The ABA Journal has been curating legal news for three years, posting 25-50 stories a day that summarize and link to the most relevant and timely legal news stories from across the web.
And we’re categorizing each story, so readers can quickly find the news that is relevant to them. [Self-serving links omitted to spare your eyes from burning.] Our traffic has grown by 500 percent. That says, we think, there is an enormous need among lawyers for highly targeted content.
Thanks for playing, Ed. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. This from the guy who thinks Legal Rebels underwear and skateboards is a great idea, whose stories obsess over the shiniest gadgets but rarely seem to notice flagrant ethical issues.
Next came American Lawyer Media, the wannabe giant for-profit enterprise, pitch, via Bill Pollack’s blog.
We’re in the process of redesigning law.com as a portal to all of ALM’s content. Is it too late to ask if we should be expanding our horizons, turning law.com into a curation portal for the legal web (or at least the parts of it that we focus our journalism on)? I’d love to hear from our editors and journalists how they feel about Curation in general — whether we truly have the expertise to become “guides” to the legal web on behalf of our readers. And if we should pursue that course more seriously.
Hint, Bill. Maybe you could take a look at Legal Blog Watch and ask why you can’t seem to get Eric Lippman to actually watch legal blogs? More to the point, you’re in this for the money, and the idea of putting the power in the hands of a corporation that has its own blogs (and blog advertising) to sell is absurd. What are the chances that we can make fun of your inadequacies while you hold the keys to the blawgosphere?
I twitted about this problem with Jason yesterday, and he acknowledged that it’s an issue. He suggested that I might be a curator for criminal defense blawgs. Putting aside my utter lack of interest in doing anything of the sort, preferring instead to stick a needle in my eye, I responded that while I, naturally, would be the perfect judge of quality and worthiness in the criminal law blawgosphere (sarcasm, you dolts), I suspected that there might be a wide swathe of blawgers who wouldn’t feel exactly comfortable with me in charge. As I told Jason, I’m pretty sure that those blawgers who hate me will not jump on board.
Specifically, the angst-ridden tortured souls who blawg incessantly about their feelings in grandiose melodramatic posts that draw in the psycho hangers-on, or the posts from lawyers who are trying to conceal their true marketing purposes with simplistic posts, more wrong than right, designed to appeal to those with an understanding of law that aspires to be as deep as a puddle. They aren’t my biggest fans.
There have been ongoing efforts to manage the blawgosphere, but none thus far has captured widespread acceptance and with good reason. As much as I agree with Jason that the blawgosphere has become increasingly unwieldy, not to mention embarrassing as blogs pop up spouting inane if not laughably erroneous content, it strikes me as impossible to anoint any person or entity as curator. There are plenty of people who I would accept as honest broker, but no one whose judgment is so sound that they could be entrusted with the power.
It’s long been my hope that we, the people who toil at blawgs with some experience and regularity, would ride herd over our own and keep the place clean and safe. But I’m coming to the sad realization that the blawgosphere is filled with too many cowards who lack the fortitude to do the dirty work of cleaning up the mess that others make, and too many self-promoters who feign substantive blawging when their only purpose is self-aggrandizement. Worse still, I see the blawgers who should be calling out the frauds actually promoting the shills to further their own agendas.
It’s a mess. We could use a curator, since we can’t keep it clean on our own, but who?
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Fine, I’ll do it.
Wait, this has to do with neutering cats, right?
Yes, it’s all about neutering metaphysical cats. With your teeth.
Scott,
It’s already begun with products like Lexis Web. Here’s how they described it:
“The Lexis Web product includes important, legal-oriented Web content selected and validated by the LexisNexis editorial staff. You can trust that all content has met LexisNexis criteria for being authoritative and accurate.”
I think once the large commercial vendors start rolling this into Westlaw and Lexis proper, who gets in and who is left out may become a bigger issue. Particularly when you consider that the vast majority of working lawyers don’t even read blogs, so they will only get introduced to them through other research platforms.
OK, fine, I’ll do it.
I do, of course, have a couple of financial needs that must be taken care of, aside from the seven figure salary and healthy discretionary expense account. But I’m sure that those who beg for the curator will have no problem meeting my modest needs.
This raises a very interesting question. For those lawyers who have no clue what goes on in the blawgosphere, Lexis may have legs as a curator. But within the blawgosphere, I doubt anyone would even consider trusting lexis. But for the vast majority of lawyers who have never read blogs, and are introduced via Lexis, it seems to me that the minute they come into the blawgosphere to read, that will the end of Lexis’ influence and they will find their way around on their own.
As for the LexisNexis criteria for being authoritative and accurate, lets not even go there. And I add that SJ is available via Lexis and I make 25 cents every time someone clicks on it via Newstex.
I downloaded Mark Bennett’s “Criminal Defense” Google Reader Bundle some time ago, and it’s the only reason I know what any of you criminal defense people are up to these days.
I’ve been meaning to make a handful of bundles relevant to my practice areas, but, well, I have, like, a job and clients and family and responsibilities and stuff.
The Google Reader Bundle isn’t too hard to manage — it takes me only a minute or two to read everything of interest to me on the Criminal Defense blogs — and I can’t think of any better way to curate things. Sites like ATL, LBW, WSJ Law Blog, and the like will, by design and by necessity, gravitate towards news stories with big companies or titillating facts, and so can’t be trusted to properly tend to blogs by practicing attorneys. In turn, curating is likely too much for any practicing attorney, since it requires a fair amount of time, even if you do it in a haphazard way. Hence the Bundle solution.
I was talking about something like this with a colleague recently. The person process of locating and separating good content from bad, categorizing, verifying, authenticating, and editorializing that you describe is what the publishers of treatises do (in theory — there has been a definite decline as publishers have cut back or been merged into others). But those works tend to be dated by time they hit the press (or Wexis depending on the work). I find plenty of relevant information on blogs but, unless I take the time to bookmark the information, carefully rename the bookmark to something useful and then file the information in a separate folder in my bookmarks file the information could be lost when I need it. Since time i s money, I rarely do this. It will take time and money for somebody to combine the two — a treatise with worthwhile materials that is up to date and search-able.
If you can chew the metaphysical cat testicle, we can pay the fee.
“Curating The Legal Web” — How Much Filtering Does Substantive Legal Blogging Need?
Jason Wilson is trying to figure out — first at his own site, then again at Slaw — what to do with the explosion of legal analysis on the internet: [W]e have seen a rapid growth in legal media outlets,…