Insurance Defense Blog

Welcome to the Blog of the Legal Times

Welcome to the Blog of the Legal Times (BLT).  It should be good, with that many contributors.  But, will the BLT be allowed to scoop The Legal Times?

Milestone

This weblog just passed 100,000 page views -- since Aug. 2003.

Washington Lawyer article on blogging

The D.C. Bar Association's magazine, the Washington Lawyer, has an article by Sarah Kellogg about blogging.  The article is written, it seems, for those still toying with the idea of starting a weblog.

Here's my view of weblogs.  Take your standard legal newspaper, like the Virginia Lawyers' Weekly or the Maryland Daily Record.  They all have roughly the same types of articles:  current events in the law, case opinion synopses, legal gossip, editorials, and regular columns on subjects like law office technology, legal ethics, or trial practice skills.  Most weblogs will fit into one of those pigeonholes.  Myself, these days the only opinions I am really interested in are those held by men and women wearing black robes.  So I focus on the new cases -- and I think there is a need for that, as the new cases that interest me the most often get little or no interest from the legal newspapers.

If you want to get the full benefit from weblogs, then chose a range of them covering the same categories that you would find in a good legal newspaper in your locality, and subscribe to them in a news aggregator.  Then presto, you have created your own customized legal newspaper, staffed by volunteer "stringers".  It will not be a substitute to a subscription to a good legal newspaper like the Maryland Daily Record -- are you kidding me?  But it will be a valuable supplement to it.

I've already said what little else I have to say about the blogging (just click on the weblogs category on the sidebar if you want to read it). 

Blogs and the Insurance Industry

The Insurance Journal has an interesting audio feed of an interview with George Wallace, Esq., the author of Declarations and Exclusions.

The key to the usefulness of blogs, whether insurance-related or otherwise, is companion software called news aggregators. I use Sharpreader. News aggregators allow you, in essence, to create your own customized digest of news and weblog posts covering subjects of your choice.

Go here for more on news aggregators. (Later) Here is Rick Klau's review of SharpReader. Here is a link from Jerry Lawson that will take you to a round up of news aggregators.

JustBlogIt

Information about the JustBlogIt extension for Firefox is here.

Just noticed that Medscape has RSS feeds

Medscape has RSS feeds. Here's the pediatrics news page, with the icon on the lower right.

Later: If that link doesn't work, try the pull down menu for specialty homepages.

Integration of a blog into an existing website

Here's a link to a TechTV article that explains one approach to integrating a blog into an existing website.

On How to Read Blogs

DennisKennedy.blog points to an interesting Internet Roundtable discussion on blogs. Reading it makes me wonder whether the development of RSS and newsaggregators is being driven by weblogs, or vice versa. The suggestion is made there that one should read blogs through news aggregators before trying to write one. That sounds logical enough, but I've found that each of the news aggregators that I've tried presents a different "slice" of information -- e.g., full or partial headers, full or partial or no text, folders or no folders, and so on.

Educational Weblogs points to Mathemagenic's post on How Do You Read A Blog, which offers a balanced view of how weblogs should be read, and by inference, how they should be written.

A third view, which I found trying to relocate the Mathemagenic post, is presented in a post entitled Why I Can't Read Blogs.

JD's Forum on Collaborative Publishing

JD's Forum, on the Macromedia website, has an interesting piece (part 1 and part 2) about weblogs, wikis, and Contribute.

Real Time Background Checks of Jury Panel During Voir Dire?

A blog by A.J. Levy named Out-Of-The-Box-Lawyering is collecting novel and creative solutions to legal problems. For example he has written about how you can do free searches going back 5 years for legal opinions discussing an expert.

Which for some reason brings to my mind the question, who is doing real time background checks of jurors during voir dire? Somebody must be, because there is a commercial service offering the ability to do just that.

I'm sure the one solution that will recommend itself to the judicial mind will be to ban laptop computers with wireless internet access from the courtroom.