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Saturday, February 01, 2003
Lawyer gets a kick out of karate law Fairfax, Va., solo David Z. Kaufman may have the only Web site devoted to martial arts law, KarateLaw.com. A sixth-degree black belt, Kaufman counsels karate instructors and students on liability, contracts and a host of related issues. He also serves as an expert witness in cases involving the martial arts. I was ready to proclaim him the only lawyer in the field, but then I found Randall R. Sevenish. 'Site Manager' simplifies Web site upkeep A product introduced to the legal market at the recent LegalTech in New York takes an almost blog-like approach to Web site management, making it easy for lawyers with no knowledge of HTML to create and modify pages on their Web sites, much as blogging tools make it easy to update pages without coding. Called Site Manager, it comes from the three-year-old Orlando company DigiBelly Inc.. Site Manager works in your browser, so you can update your Web site from wherever you are. It creates within your browser a word-processing-like interface, through which you can edit text and add images or tables. It has tools to allow you to organize pages within your site easily and to create specialized pages. For example, if you want to add an FAQ page, it provides fields for entering each question and answer, and then automatically organizes them in classic FAQ style, with the questions at the top serving as hyperlinks to the answers below. It even inserts the appropriate anchors within the page and the "back to the top" link after each answer. Other features include opt-in e-mail for visitors, built-in site search, and members-only password protection. Either a drawback or a plus, depending on your perspective, is that you cannot use Site Manager without purchasing DigiBelly's design and hosting package. DigiBelly designs and builds the basic site, which you can then edit and add to. And your site must sit on DigiBelly's servers for Site Manager to be available. The company offers two packages: a Professional Site for $4,500 and a Custom Site for $10,500. Hosting is an additional $25 or $50 a month. For a smaller firm with little expertise in Web site design and HTML, DigiBelly's Site Manager could be worth considering. It offers anyone who can use a word processor the ability to keep their site's content fresh and easily expand its scope. Thursday, January 30, 2003
Cashing in on blogging I was at least partly facetious yesterday when I suggested the possibility of bloggers setting up exhibit booths at tech trade shows. But now comes this Guardian article, New biz on the blog, all about cashing in on blogging, and I wonder, Was I so far off? Extra: The Blawgistan News hits the stands Fail to fire up your aggregator for a few days and you might as well be Rip van Winkle waking after years of sleep. So let me be the last to note the launch of The Blawgistan News. But who needs an aggregator when you have this site? These folks monitor the RSS feeds of a number of law-related blogs and present all their headlines on a single page. And, if I read them right, they plan to make all these separate RSS feeds available as one monster feed. The front-page feature of The Blawgistan Times is something called "Invoking the Lazyblawg." This is not some religious rite. Rather, every time a blogger who they monitor uses the word "Blawgistan" or "Lazyblawg" in a title or category, the Times will feature that post on its front page. So here's my headline; now I'll wait and see. Wednesday, January 29, 2003
Blawgers as trade-show exhibitors? Is it antithetical to blogging for a blogger to exhibit at a commercial trade show? Not sure why, but I fully expected, as I roamed the aisles at LegalTech, to find a familiar name from the blogosphere, grinning from behind a hastily thrown together booth, looking to sell ... what? Here's my prediction: By next year's LegalTech, at least one booth will be promoting a Web log. The two tech trade shows to attend Having attended way too many legal-technology trade shows over the course of my career, I can state with certainty that there are only two each year you really should attend if you care about keeping current with the field -- LegalTech New York in January and ABA TechShow in April. Sure, there are probably hundreds of technology trade shows put on by local, state and national bars and private companies. But companies that know anything about the legal market save their most important announcements of new product launches and major upgrades for these shows. I just returned from LegalTech, and, true to form, it was a major legal technology event, brimming with exhibitors and attendees. While all the usual suspects were there, this show was significant for having attracted several non-legal vendors for the first time, signaling their enhanced recognition of the legal market's importance. These included Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. But for all the activity, this year's LegalTech lacked any buzz factor. In the wake of Enron and Anderson, electronic discovery has clearly come into its own, as was attested to by the number of companies displaying their expertise in this area. But ... we knew that. As between the big two usual suspects, West and Lexis, the former drew the greater attention for its booth just inside the entrance door where eager attendees stood in Disney-like lines waiting to don virtual-reality goggles and make spectacles of themselves. Beyond the booth, West's West KM drew interest and praise for its extension of KeyCite and Westlaw technology to knowledge management. Overall, however, little jumped out as new or different or innovative, especially among the Web-based offerings. But more on that later. |
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