Web Posting Rules
There was a brief posting on law.com today (Oct 10/06) on the integration of LawBase (matter management software) with Google Maps. The fact that this integration is called a “mashup” is what originally caught my attention. However, when I decided to do a little “research”, my focus changed. Mashups are apparently “hot technology” – I was therefore surprised that I couldn’t find any discussion of this functionality on the LawBase website. I then resorted to a google search to see what was available and of course found a web page with a “news release” on this development. Unfortunately, as far as I could tell, there was no “date stamp” on this news release.
Is it merely a product of my age that I like to see information in context (and in this case, one aspect of context is date). Maybe I’ve spent too many years reading magazines and newspapers, where it is easy to tell when the information was first published. It strikes me it is now too late to suggest that websites should try to indicate “date of origin” for posts. SLAW, of course, properly dates all posts and comments!
Well the Law.com piece is fascinating – but it isn’t brief – see http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/PubArticleFriendlyLT.jsp?id=1160397318143
The LawBase site hasn’t been updated in a while (as you can see from its reference to the now defunct LTN). The Law.com piece BTW is dated October 10 2006.
Mashups to Google Maps aren’t new – figuring out that there’s a legal application angle is.
Having things undated on websites drives me crazy. Some days the lawyers over here have to restrain me when they want news posted to our website without a date. Heh. This is actually one of the reasons why blogs rank so highly in Google–they tend to be updated with more regularity than other websites.
With regard to press releases, in some cases I think it is inadvertent–the date stamp was in some piece of metadata that didn’t get translated over onto the website, or more likely someone just wasn’t thinking. In a few cases I think it is deliberate. After all, if something doesn’t have a date, can it every look old? Kind of like how loose leaf services can be continuously promoted since they don’t really have a hard and fast publication date.
But we digress…