Web 3.0, Widgets and Why Not Law?
Web 3.0 — sorry about that: not my coinage
A good example of the happy marriage of Web 3.0 and widgets is the recent Random House Insight widget and the services that lie behind it. The publisher is offering a widget that can be embedded in a web page and which will allow you to browse or search through their books, order them online, and listen to recorded excerpts. (Here’s an example.) Random House describes its Insight Services as:
a set of programming tools that allow internet applications to view and search digitized book content. Through the Insight Service, keyword searches can get inside actual book content and find matches against the full text of the book. Insight can then serve up the pages of the book in different formats depending on the needs of the developer: for example, pages can be displayed in high-quality image formats for optimal viewing or speedy little thumbnails for quick review.
My point here is not so much Random House’s offering, though that may well be of interest to us as book people; my thought is that web services and their widget avatars would suit some aspects of the legal world quite well.
At the moment, legal information gets retailed by email lists, passively on a website, or via the push/pull of RSS. It has to be said that for all that I and many others find it not merely useful but great, RSS has failed to catch on to the extent that I had thought it would: of the ten largest law firms in Canada
I think that somehow the concrete nature of a widget could make it seem more useful, indeed simpler, than the technical-seeming RSS, which focuses on the flow. It might be easier for firms if there were a more concrete object — a Thump, Bump and Rumble LLP widget — that could be pulled off their pages to live on a recipient’s desktop and broadcast the latest publication or news.
But it’s not just law firms that retail data (badly). Consider that courts, law societies, public education ventures, law schools, all possess useful information some of which is made available on websites; at the moment the utility of the information is limited by the imagination and will of the providers; but if it were available to be mixed and moulded and served up by others in creative ways, it might be far more useful. Even CanLII, pretty much a paragon in the Canadian legal field when it comes to making data usefully available, could benefit from a service and the ability to create specialized widgets to make use of them.
Law isn’t an easy field to crack. Data is held possessively; its holders tend to be traditionalist, late adopters when it comes to technology; and the form of the data is often arcane. But the consumers of law are legion, so there are great opportunities out there for the adventurous and the persistent. If not Web 3.0, then maybe Web 4.0… But some day.
some thoughts a while back on web widgets. Do they make RSS more palatable to the legal industry? Maybe, but I suspect that a widgetized web experience may be just as complicated for the less tech savvy.
Would an intermediary still be required to make the content easily accessible by all?
Steve I agree with you if the widget has to work through the browser. I see no gain here particularly over a good RSS reader in a browser. But I think maybe (and I do mean maybe: I’ve underestimated the conservativsm of the profession many times) that if tools are developed that work outside the browser — call them widgets or apps — that are easy to install (be nice to be able to simply drag something off a web page and on to the desktop) they may find more favour. There’s a nice little app built with Adobe’s Apollo (they’re calling it something different now) that works in the way I mean: Finetune Desktop. It also happens to be a decent music source.
There’s also the duty of public and quasi-public legal institutions to work up their data and make it useful. If CanLII and the courts were to start delivering stuff to the desktop via gadgets that would be cool. Perhaps there’s a role here for a third party developer to come up with a tool that can consume machine readable legal data and output a more or less integrated report for the consumer.
Not to take this in circles, but are we then talking pointcast from the late ’90’s?
I may be too web-centric in my thinking here (go figure?…), but I tend to see things moving more toward the browser-desktop idea rather than desktop apps. Perhaps a behind the firewall NetVibes-like interface? But as you say Simon, with easy additions. Would be great if there was an OS option with standards that these apps/widgets could adhere to. Maybe that’s RSS, but could be something else…