Power to the people?

Evidently there are high hopes for social networking in the future. I have recently come across two blogs discussing whether social networking may replace (respectively) lawyers and 'some government functions'.

1. This topic has also been raised by the Gartner group, releasing a press release stating, Gartner Says Citizen Social Networks Will Complement, and May Replace, Some Government Functions.

From eGov

2. Legal futurist Richard Susskind's sequel to his 1996 best-seller The Future of Law: Facing the Challenges of Information Technology (Oxford UP) will be published in December. The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services (Oxford UP, December 2008) continues the author's focus on the effect of advances in information technology upon the law and legal practice, providing fresh perspectives and analysis of anticipated developments in the decade to come. In particular, he aims to explore the extent to which the role of the traditional lawyer can be sustained, in the face of the challenging trends in the legal marketplace and the new techniques and technologies for the delivery of legal services.

Among Suskind's predictions: (1) legal advice will be recycled by clients in social networking communities just like knowledge management recycles attorney work product internally and (2) client communities will push law firms to come together and form their own social networks to hold down costs by not reinventing the wheel.

From Law Librarian Blog

Australian Library Industry Twitter Users List

I just came across this post on Libraries Interact by Neerav. Great idea!
Australian Library Industry Twitter Users List

I was wondering if I could use Twitter for something useful.... I have also been reading about a debate happening in the US among Lawyers on the value of blogging and twittering, from the Legal Blog Watch

Research is changing.....

I am currently studying for a Certificate in Criminal Intelligence and this semester am doing a subject called Strategic Intelligence Practice. I was reading my study materials last night and was amazed at the all too familiar issues raised by the authors in regards to intelligence analysts. They are facing a challenge to retain their place in organisations due to access to the internet and open source intelligence materials. Educators are impressing on analysts the importance of adding value to their products by including recommendations in their assessments. There are several reasons why they have been reluctant to do this in the past and due to the increase in freely available material, policy makers and managers have started doing their own research and bypassing intelligence analysts.

They face the same dilemma as librarians, is it our job to answer client questions or provide access to sources only. Analysts know that forecasting is difficult to guarantee and so may prefer to provide facts and conclusions and stop short at supplying recommendations. We are often faced with a similar problem with clients asking a research query (often one they don't fully understand) and hoping we'll provide an answer rather than advise them on sources to consult.

It seems that intelligence analysts are striving to gain recognition as a profession, such as librarians (yes, we got a mention), lawyers and doctors have. Much of what they do is very similar to our research function. They liaise with clients within an organisation, gather information, data and intelligence (all of the usual problems with definitions apply) and organise that material into a strategic intelligence assessment or some other type of product or report. The tools, raw data and methods they work with may differ from ours but the imperitive to market themselves, increase their skills and gain recognition are very similar to ours.

MindMeister

I have been using Mindmeister to create diagrams (Futures Wheels to be exact) for my uni assignment and it is so easy and quite fun. I wonder if I could use it to make sense of all of the 'things', plans, to do lists and projects floating around in my head? I can't wait till I have finished studying this semester so I can play around with web 2.0 tools without feeling like I am wasting precious study time. It'll be great to get back to blogging, flickr etc

Roll on November and spring!!!

Tangler

I joined Tangler at Bibliothekia's suggestion and read the posts on the Library 2.0 Forum. I can see heaps of potential in this technology at home and at work. Again it depends on the uptake of library colleagues, friends and clients for its success.

I found a good one! eBookee It has lists of eBooks by subject, including law and even some tax texts. Lots of computer books - no suprise there!! The site links out to eBook sites like iFree

ATOLearning exercise:

1. Go to www.ebookee.com
2. Have a look at the ebooks that are available on the site (encyclopedias, classics)
3. Check out the 'free magazine subscriptions'
4. Read about Amazon's Kindle

Enjoy!!

Thing #47: New Web 2.0 site

I don't know if this classifies as web 2.0 but it is neat anyway and is designed to look like a lot of the sites that we have discovered through Learning 2.0/2.1. Service Central is a site where you log a job that you need a trades person, professional or provider for and they arrange for several services who are able to do the work in your area to contact you. It is a great time saver if it works, as you are not calling hundreds of numbers to find a company that does your size job, covers your area and has the time to do it. As far as I can see it covers Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney at least. It also has an option for sharing your experience and feedback with others so it fulfills that social networking criteria at least. I can see more and more services like this popping up as the MySpace generation grows up expecting better online access to everything. Now I know this isn't really work related so I will try to come up with something else with exercises that can be followed :-)