Advocate's Studio

I don’t often occupy that position, but I apparently do on this issue. Stanford University conducted a survey of law librarians and found respondents generally prefer Westlaw to LexisNexis as a research tool. Not surprisingly, Thomson Reuters proudly trumpets the results on its own blog. Evenso, the numbers are interesting:

Law school respondents preferred Westlaw at a rate of nearly four-to-one
78% of federal court/government respondents preferred Westlaw
60% of the law firm respondents preferred Westlaw

Of course, this is Thomson’s summary of the results. You can read them for yourself here.

My shorthand response to the Westlaw vs. LexisNexis debate traditionally has been that Westlaw has the edge on case law and legal research, while LexisNexis has the edge on newspapers, periodicals and other publications. I think these differences have been collapsing over the years.  The ultimate winner of this debate will be the one who packages the information (the same information, mind you) in a manner that is easier to locate, assimilate and manipulate. I always found Westlaw easier to use but that may have owed more to my first Westlaw representative than to any other factor.

And when the free online resources for this essentially public information improve their interfaces and accessibility, watch out Big Two!

I made my own new RSS badge of the official Olympic Adidas soccer ball in honor of the Beijing Olympics and the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team routing New Zealand and proceeding to the quarter-finals this morning! Go Team USA!

If you want the badge, let me know and I will figure out how to send it along.

It’s a little fuzzy around the edges, but I kinda like it. Once again, my esteemed computer geek husband helped. It’s a nod to my musical roots and my vintage guitar collection. Rock On!

Tip of the headstock to the Lorinator for her iccn graphic.

Further to my earlier post about Wikis and Blogs as sources for legal authority and judicial citation, here is a great link to the Harvest Christian Academy’s page entitled “Lose Your Wikipedia Crutch.” The page lists 100 places to go in search of information on a variety of topics, arranging the places by type such as Library & Reference, User Contributed, Encyclopedias, Science & Math, Social Studies, Fine Art, Language & Literature, Technology, Question & Answer, General and Miscellaneous. If you just aren’t sure about that Wikipedia entry, why not try one of the alternatives listed in this article to jump-start your search?

Also, in the spirit of healthy competition, Google has announced its own user-contributed-content encyclopedia, Knol. The tagline is “a unit of knowledge.” According to itself, a “knol” is an authoritative article on a specific topic. From the site:

Knol makes it easy for you to write and share your knowledge with the world. Knol offers:

Ease of use
All you need is an account, a name and a desire to write and we’ll take care of the rest.

Control
You specify the level of collaboration you want with the community. Your knol, your voice.

Community
You can connect with other experts in your area of interest to share and grow knowledge.

Visibility
We value and promote authorship. Great content will be visible on any search engine.

Growth
Sharing your knowledge with the world is rewarding for everyone.

It was launched on July 23, 2008 and appears to still be in beta form. There is still plenty of room for good “knols” contributed by all of you bursting-with-knowledge sorts.

I just spent all afternoon and evening moving my blog / blawg from Windows Live Spaces to a previously existing, but languishing, WordPress account. There was no easy way to do it. I had to manually move 32 posts drafted over the past five months, upload the photos and videos, edit so that it would like right and figure out how to get my picture in the sidebar and an RSS feed to my http://advantageadvocates.com website, the latter with the help of my esteemed, computer-geek husband. It was worth the effort. In the past five months, I got a grand total of zilch comments and one invitation to be the friend of a drunken barfly. In the past two hours, I have gotten two very nice comments. PayDay!

I hope you enjoy my blogblawg going forward. I try to post at least once per week, if not more, as the schedule allows. I have one salaried job, one business and one family with three children. It gets busy around here, but it’s all good.

Thanks for reading!