The “Next Generation” of the Internet? — Web 2.0
By Jim Calloway, Director, OBA Management Assistance Program

CONTENT WARNING: This article may seem to be a bit techno-geeky; but if you read it completely, you will learn of many new free Web services available to you.

So many things that we routinely use today were a part of the science fiction literature, movies and programs that many of us followed when we were younger. Captain Kirk’s communicators looked very much like the flip phones of today. The term cyberspace was coined by science fiction writer William Gibson, who also predicted a professional class of “data cowboys” who were hired and prized for their ability to locate information online and to hack into private computer systems. Computers have become ubiquitous. Robots work in many assembly lines and other manufacturing roles without benefits or coffee breaks.

So it is in that vein that I want to discuss this month “The Next Generation” of the Internet: Web 2.0. So let’s set our phasers on stun and boldly go for a tour of the future of the Internet.

A lot of people have recently published articles about Web 2.0. I’m sure some readers are already thinking, “Oh, no, they can’t. I still don’t fully understand Web 1.0.” Well, the good news is that you won’t have to relearn your end user skills. But there is a lot happening on this front. While I was trying to write this piece, publications as diverse as Law Practice Today and PC World crossed my desktop with treatments of this subject.

Hopefully, this article will be worthwhile for both the net-savvy lawyer and the relative neophyte. In fact, regular visitors to my blog or the OBA-NET will have already seen a discussion of a few of these topics in my posts there. Technically speaking Web 2.0 refers to increased functionality of Web pages and interactions with other applications because of programmers using something called Ajax. Most lawyers don’t care about that, and I’m going to note a few Web trends and not limit myself to Ajax applications.

This article itself can serve as an illustration of the power of net-based information. It was written for publication in a very traditional print venue, the

Oklahoma Bar Journal. But one can easily make the argument that the online version of this article is more convenient and valuable to the reader with its numerous hyperlinks to other sources and the accompanying bibliography of

Web 2.0 resources and applications with hot links. It is an observation I have made before. Digital information has more intrinsic value than printed information. Would you rather have a new 400-page form book or the CD-ROM with all of the forms in your preferred word processing format? (That doesn’t mean digital is always “better.” The print bar journal is much better to toss into your briefcase to read while waiting at a crowded motion docket.)

Before we review several new Web 2.0 applications and services, let’s discuss a few next generation Internet trends to help place these tools in context.

DEMOCRATIZATION OF THE WWW

In the early days of the Internet, Web pages were posted by governmental units, educational institutions and non-profit organizations. Then as Internet use grew and the commercial benefits of the Internet became apparent, we saw corporate interests rush onto the Web in the online equivalent of the land runs that opened up Oklahoma with the resulting dot com boom and bust.

Now society operates as if everyone is online even though we know that is not exactly true.

But if the prior version of the Internet involved everyone going online and knowing how to use the Web, the next version of the Web seems to be everyone publishing their own personal content to the Web.

I’ve written previously about the blog, or Weblog, explosion where everyone can have their own online publication with little cost and virtually no technical expertise. Well, more than a few parents have been recently surprised to learn that their teenagers have been publishing Web sites on “social networking” sites like MySpace.com complete with personal profiles, blog entries and photographs, including some photographs that would not meet parental approval. And if the kids aren’t posting their pictures and thoughts on MySpace.com, they are doing it on Xanga.com, Yahoo360 or LiveJournal.com.

The point is that literally tens of thousands of personal Web sites are added to the Internet each day. I think I can easily guestimate there is more “amateur” written content posted to the Internet each day than the total of all of the print and Internet content published by the professional writers and journalists. My prediction is that if someone had a personal Web site while in high school, they are likely to have one, at least off and on, for the rest of their lives.

If you think there is a lot of information online now, you haven’t seen anything yet.

IMPROVED ONLINE SEARCH

As the collection of information online becomes even vaster, search functions help us locate what we want online. Approximately 60 million Internet users use a search engine each day (as of September 2005) according to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. But for many, online search is still a very “hit or miss” proposition. The success of many Net searches is probably mixed. But, as Bill Gates recently said in an interview, search is about to get a lot better. And already a lot of Net users are pretty good searchers. Search engine giants like Yahoo and Google have become household words. There are lots of online resources that provide information about search engines or tips on becoming a better search. SearchEngineWatch.com is a great resource for news and information about Internet search.

One of the ways that Internet search is changing is with the adoption and use of local search tools. Local search tools allow one to limit the results from Web searches to those associated with a particular state, city or ZIP code. Some examples of these tools are Google Local and Truelocal.com.

Of course, a business cannot be located on the Web if it doesn’t have a Web page.

A recent article of interest to lawyers on this topic is “Are You Ready for Local Search?” by Frederick L. Faulkner IV on LLRX.com ( Dec. 17, 2005 ). American Bar Association Webmaster Faulkner notes how local Internet search tools are already influencing consumer purchasing decisions, including a recent one that he made. He extrapolates that the increased use of local search means that law firms who have not yet launched Web pages need to do so or risk losing business when consumers use local search tools to locate lawyers.

If Bill Gates and countless other pundits are correct and Internet search will continue to greatly improve, then it stands to reason that people will make even greater use of this improved tool. I have to endorse Faulkner’s conclusion. It is time for every law firm, including solo practitioners, to have a Web page. At least, it is time for every law firm to have a Web page that requires or desires new clients. You don’t have to have an expensive or elaborate Web page, but the pages probably should be designed so that the firm’s name, address, city, state and ZIP code appear at the bottom of each page. When the search engines index the pages, we don’t want them to miss that information about the practice’s location.

We’ll cover some Web 2.0 search tools in a bit, but first let’s examine one more major trend of the next generation of the World Wide World.

COMMUNITY AND COLLABORATION

In a nutshell, the Internet of the past has largely been a passive media. One surfs to various sites for things to read, or watch, or listen to or download. The next generation of the Internet will be focused more on individual participation, contribution and relationships.

One of the most beneficial aspects of the Internet is the connection that you can make to others. Oklahoma lawyers have been greatly ahead of this trend. For years now the OBA-NET has provided Oklahoma lawyers with a private online community. OBA-NETTERs have assisted each other with information, tips and answers to questions. One of the more commonly asked questions is “Isn’t there a statute that says X? I can’t find it.” Usually a response will be posted by someone within hours with the link to the statute on OSCN. The statute often states just what the original poster recalled, but does not contain the words that were used to search for it in the first instance. Internet search may improve greatly, but it will always be a great tool to ask the opinion of a few hundred others with a single e-mail or posting.

Opinions, actual product user feedback, secrets a product manufacturer doesn’t want you to know, something where you are stumped on a search term – these are just a few of the examples where collaboration will beat Internet search every time.

OBA-NET is a great online community but there are others in the legal profession. Missouri Bar’s SFIG electronic mailing list has been around for a long time and now exceeds 450 users. Solosez, the ABA electronic mailing list for solo and small firm lawyers has exceeded 2,000 subscribers and now has a Web page and online directory for members to be able to contact each other off-list.

For example, a recent discussion on Solosez covered the various features and differences between Sirius and XM satellite radio. One person posted a query about asking for comments from subscribers to the services and several responded. Just using Internet search would likely turn up a lot of paid sponsored content. Certainly there are many places online where one can read comparisons of these services from professional, expert reviewers, but it would take a while to locate and read several reviews. It just takes a few seconds to type an e-mail and send it to the list, with a few minutes more invested to read the responses.

On the one hand, it seems inefficient to place your e-mail in a couple of those inboxes just so you can read a couple of dozen reviews from satellite radio users. But you “pay into” the system when you can answer other questions about law practice or substantive law or whatever topic comes up. In addition you learn about other things as you read other lawyer’s messages – some of their messages. It is axiomatic on high volume electronic mailing lists like Solosez that you must learn how to quickly scan e-mail subject lines and “make liberal use of the delete key.” But there are even some Internet tools we might look at later to make high volume electronic mailing lists more use friendly.

OK, you’ve made it this far with my overview of the big picture. Let’s look at some Web 2.0 applications and see how they encompass one or more aspects of the next generation of the WWW.

WIKIS

Wikipedia is perhaps the best-known wiki (pronounced wick-key). It is an online encyclopedia at www.wikipedia.com that recently marked its fifth anniversary. Let’s see what Wikipedia tells us about wikis. A search there for wiki gives us this definition:

“A wiki is a type of Website that allows users to add and edit content and is especially suited for constructive collaborative authoring…. Some wikis allow almost completely unrestricted access so that people are able to contribute to the site without necessarily having to undergo a process of 'registration' as had usually been required by various other types of interactive Websites such as Internet forums or chat sites.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Wikis generally are reference guides that can be edited by any user or visitor. As lawyers trained to search for authoritative facts, it is easy to judge wikis as inherently unreliable due to the lack of controls and potential lack of qualifications of the “editors.”

However, in December 2005, blogger Evan Brown at Internetcases.com noted eight appellate court opinions citing Wikipedia .Some of you may have read of a recent public controversy involving Wikipedia. Retired journalist John Seigenthaler Sr., who had served as assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, complained in USA Today that false and defamatory information was posted about him on Wikipedia and allowed to remain for a long time when it was then picked up by other Web sites. Mr. Seigenthaler was incensed that the information was allowed to remain online so long and that there apparently no way to trace the defamer. An individual later confessed and resigned his unrelated job. He indicated he had meant it as a prank on mutual acquaintances that he shared with Mr. Seigenthaler.

But before you completely disregard wiki technology, consider three quick final points.

Wikipedia can serve as a great resource, in particular for obscure facts or technical terms, even if you may not want to rely on it for mission-critical client matters or cite it in a brief.

Wiki technology can be employed in a powerful way within a medium-sized or large law firm. Imagine the wealth of knowledge that could be accumulated privately behind a law firm firewall if lawyers were empowered to quickly record summaries of research projects, rulings from local trial courts, links to briefs contained on the firm’s network, links to online resources and more. This could quickly become a powerful knowledge bank for the firm.

Cornell’s Legal Information Institute recently announced the launch of Wex, a collaboratively built and freely available legal dictionary and encyclopedia. This is based on wiki technology but will be edited only by approved and vetted editors. Given LII’s track record of astounding success in providing other online resources, do not be surprised if this soon becomes the Black’s Law Dictionary of the Internet.

TAGGING

Previously, I noted the value and power of an online community where people know each other and trust each other’s judgment to a certain extent. But Web 2.0 ushers in an era where absolute strangers can pass along their views and opinions to all Internet users by classifying Web content through a process called tagging.

A really nice treatment of this topic is found in “The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging” by Ellyssa Kroski. The “hive mind” does not refer to the Borg, and we will define folksonomies in just a minute. But first let’s read the enthusiastic opening paragraph of Kroski’s essay:

“There is a revolution happening on the Internet that is alive and building momentum with each passing tag. With the advent of social software and Web 2.0, we usher in a new era of Internet order. One in which the user has the power to effect their own online experience, and contribute to others’. Today, users are adding metadata and using tags to organize their own digital collections, categorize the content of others and build bottom-up classification systems. The wisdom of crowds, the hive mind, and the collective intelligence are doing what heretofore only expert catalogers, information architects and Web site authors have done. They are categorizing and organizing the Internet and determining the user experience, and it’s working. No longer do the experts have the monopoly on this domain; in this new age users have been empowered to determine their own cataloging needs. Metadata is now in the realm of the Everyman.”

OK, I know that above-quoted text is a lot to digest for a lot of lawyer-readers. Feel free to follow the link to the entire article at http://tinyurl.com/b33fd if you are interested.

Wikipedia has a definition of Folksonomy that explains tagging fairly well too:

“Folksonomy, a portmanteau word combining ‘folk’ and ‘taxonomy,’ refers to the collaborative but unsophisticated way in which information is being categorized on the Web. Instead of using a centralized form of classification, users are encouraged to assign freely chosen keywords (called tags) to pieces of information or data, a process known as tagging. Examples of Web services that use tagging include those designed to allow users to publish and share photographs (Flickr), bookmarks (del.icio.us, Connectedy), social software generally, and most blog software, which permits authors to assign tags to each entry.” (http://tinyurl.com/cwznu )

Tagging is an interesting phenomenon. Tagging must drive the archivists and cataloging libraries crazy in the same way that the citizen journalists and their blogs drive the professional journalists crazy. Visit del.icio.us at http://del.icio.us/ to learn more about tagging.

FLICKR

Flickr is a photo sharing service online at www.flickr.com.

That brief description hardly does Flickr justice. Sure, you can post your photos and build photo albums using its Organizer feature. You can add tags to photos so that others can search for them and view them. But you can also create private photo albums and make them available only to family and friends. And, unless you want to upload a large number of photos, the service is free.

BLOGS AND RSS

I wrote an article in the Jan. 15, 2005 Oklahoma Bar Journal titled “Was 2004 the Year of the Blog?”. In it I also introduced my blog, Jim Calloway’s Law Practice Tips. I also discussed RSS newsfeeds. Due to space limitations, I won’t replow that ground again. But there is a link included, and there are certainly many more blogs now than when I first wrote that article.

One important update is that now Oklahoma court opinions are available via RSS newsfeeds as soon as they are posted to the WWW. Go to www.oscn.net and click on “feeds available” for more information.

GMAIL

Gmail is a Web-based e-mail service from Google. There are many Web-based e-mail services, but Gmail is special. It combines ease of use, a huge and growing storage capacity, the search capability of Google of your accumulated e-mail and what is apparently excellent virus scanning. You can sign up for Gmail by going to http://gmail.google.com and entering your mobile phone number. But you can also ask a current Gmail user. E-mail me at jim.calloway@gmail.com for your invite.

Gmail is my tool of choice for dealing with high volume mailing lists like Solosez. It automatically sorts messages with exactly the same subject line into threads that can be read at one time, and it offers enough capacity to save years worth of the messages in case one would ever want to search them for something.

ROLLYO

“Roll your own Search Engine.” Just imagine a customized search engine of just those sources you want. That’s exactly what Rollyo does. Just to show you how it works, I set up an Internet research group. Check it out by going to http://rollyo.com/jimcalloway/net_research_pros/. (Don’t worry if the URL in the address bar changes.) Just give it a try.

I could list more Web 2.0 sites and services. I haven’t mentioned an online group calendar like www.planzo.com or any of the free online spreadsheets, but at this point I want to direct you to the annotated bibliography that follows this article, particularly “The Strongest Links: Web 2.0” by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell in Law Practice Today, where they have a lengthy list of Web 2.0 articles and applications.

CONCLUSION

The “Next Generation” of the Internet is here today.

Maybe this is the practice tip of the week. Today revise all of your new client intake forms to include the question “Have you posted anything to the Internet about this matter or any of the parties involved? When the new client answers, “No,” you can follow up by saying, “And you won’t do that while I am representing you, right?” I bet that several of you will be surprised sometime during 2006 when, instead of “no,” your client pauses and says, “Well, I did …uh……”

What Is Web 2.0? A Web 2.0 Annotated Bibliography

“What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software” by Tim O’Reilly (Sept. 30, 2005). This article is as good a candidate as any for the current definitive Web 2.0 article. But it is not in any way legal industry specific. The O’Reilly Network’s WebBoard software formed the base structure of the first Web-based version of the OBA-Net, when it left CompuServ.

“Does Web 2.0 Point Us Toward Law 2.0?” A roundtable discussion. Law Practice Today (January 2006) Legal technologists Frederick L. Faulkner IV, Dennis Kennedy, Tom Mighell, Stephen M. Nipper and John Tredennick discuss Web 2.0 concepts and applications.

“The Strongest Links: Web 2.0” Law Practice Today (January 2006) by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. This sidebar article accompanies the one noted above. It contains many links to articles about Web 2.0 and to Web 2.0 Applications already online in beta test form. Very comprehensive.

“Are You Ready for Local Search?” by Frederick L. Faulkner IV LLRX.com (Dec. 17, 2005).

“How to Use a Wiki for Business” by Ezra Goodnoe, Information Week (Aug. 8, 2005).

“Top Ten Web 2.0 Moments of 2005” by Richard MacManus.

Originally published in the Oklahoma Bar Journal January 14, 2006 - Vol. 77; No.02