Syndication and Weblogs: Publish and Distribute Your Court Information to the Web
With a List of Resources for Courts and other Public Information Providers

Court officers and staff, like lawyers and legal professionals, are knowledge managers by trade. To stay current and render sound judments and advice, we must track a variety of information; recent decisions, changes in court rules, decisions by other courts, new filings, and news items, (to name just a few) all may come to bear on the efficient function of a modern court. These items are increasingly available on the Web, but visiting individual sites, and pages within those sites, is time-consuming. Fortunately, an alternative exists. The advent of personal content management software has made it easier and smarter for legal professionals to publish on the web. This trend has exploded in the past two years, with a wide variety of legal professionals publishing Web sites known as "weblogs." These frequently-updated pages are comprised of log-style entries and have become a refreshingly direct way to follow an issue or read perspectives on a new legal developments. In addition to supplying a richer base of publicly-available legal content, these new law-related weblogs ("blawgs" to some) are making this content available for custom use via subscription feeds.

A CASE IN POINT. Since May 2002, I've personally been using weblog software to publish four pages on the Court's Web site. The four pages cover aspects of court information that we routinely handle in the Clerk's Office: new court opinions, granted cases and upcoming dockets, and schedules and notices in high-profile cases. We routinely point interested persons to the Web site for answers; so when the available material expands, the public is better informed and we can focus our energy on other tasks. The recent opinions page contains short topical summaries of recently-issued opinions, as well as notices about high-profile cases and the like. The civil topics page, the criminal topics page, and the family topics page all contain opinion summaries specific to those topics, as well as case, docket and rule updates for matters pertaining to those three broad categories. I have found this method of web publishing to be a very effective method for delivering court information: I write the entries, determine where the entry will be appear on the Web, and click "publish." Feedback from the public, practicing attorneys and court staff has been very positive. However, if you don't necessarily want to check these pages every day to see what has changed, you can subscribe to the content, be notified when it changes, and read the new material without visiting the Web page itself. This is accomplished by producing a stripped-down version of the content changes that is also available on the Web. The widely-employed format to create these information feeds is called RSS. The presence of an RSS feed for a Web page is usually denoted by: , the white-on-orange XML button. The Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia has four newsfeeds available:

 Recent Opinions
 Civil Topics
 Criminal Topics
 Family Topics

Since the RSS feeds became available in May of 2002, our site statistics have revealed steady increase in their use, bringing more visitors to the Court's Web site. Information about court cases is also more readily discoverable on search engines. These archived web pages revealthat in September 2002, when mass asbestos litigation was pending in this Court and the US Supreme Court, French researchers were able to find the Court's web content on the issue highly ranked on Google almost immediately. This type of content distribution enhances public access to the courts by ensuring that in addition to news accounts, researchers can have direct access to court documents and comments.

CUSTOMIZE YOUR NEWS ON THE WEB. The information feeds provided by the Court are publicly available for others to use, allowing users to customize their own legal information page. For example, at the right there is a screenshot of a Web-based news aggregator called Bloglines, displaying excerpts from a popular law-related weblog.

In addition to Web-based services, users can also download the information feeds automatically to customized readers on the desktop.

The power of RSS feeds for public information lies in their versatility: users can subscribe to these feeds using software programs called news aggregators, view the feeds as incorporated directly into a public Web site or intranet, utilize a broad variety of search functions and statistical reports. (A good list of feed readers for most computer platforms is available at RSS Info.) Most personal web publishing software can automatically generate the RSS feeds each time you publish an update. Alternatively, an automated docketing system could output the RSS file to the Web, along with the traditional HTML page. Either method is low-cost. (I pay $40 per year for the software I need to publish the four pages and RSS feeds for the Court.) One of the best introductions to the subscription side of weblogs is Bloglines, a Web-based aggregator that offers a wealth of free services.

NOTIFICATION WITHOUT E-MAIL: With RSS feeds available, an interested party can subscribe and be alerted when an update appears. Because this transaction occurs between the user's computer and the Web server, no e-mail is necessary, allowing court managers to focus on content, and avoid some of the perils increasingly associated with e-mail.

Further Reading and Resources

The curious reader will no doubt have further questions. The links and resources listed below have been assembled from a variety of sources and will hopefully help to provide better understanding and implementation of this publishing technology in the courts and other public information providers. NOTE: The links provided herein are provided for informational purposes only, and are not to be construed as a commercial endorsement.)

On the emergence of weblogs for legal news and public information

• FCC Chief launches blog aimed at techies, Reuters, Jeremy Pelofsky (July 9, 2004).
• How To Speed-Read the Net: Ditch your browserÑRSS makes surfing for news a joy, Paul Boutin, for Slate (March 4, 2004).
• Enthusiasts call Web feed next big thing, by Frank Bajak, AP Technology Editor (Feb 27, 2004).
• Technofile: Blogging for Business, by Anne Stuart; Inc.com (July 2003).
• Legal And Appellate Weblogs: What They Are, Why You Should Read Them, And Why You Should Consider Starting Your Own, by Gary O'Connor and Stephanie Tai; Journal of Appellate Practice and Process (posted July 22, 2003).
• A Blog for Everyone, by Mark Ward; BBC News (July 22, 2003).
• What Are Blogs and Why Is Everyone So Excited About Them? by Jerry Lawson, Brenda Howard, Dennis Kennedy, Ernest Svenson and Tom Mighell; LLRX.com Internet Roundtable Discussion #36 (Posted July 21, 2003).
• Welcome to the 'new' Web, same as the 'old' Web, by Christine Boese; CNN Headline News (July 15, 2003).
• Moblogs Seen as a Crystal Ball for a New Era in Online Journalism, by Howard Rheingold for Online Journalism Review (July 9, 2003).
• Blogs in the Workplace, New York Times (July 6, 2003) (registration required).
• Web Logs for Lawyers: Lessons from Ernie the Attorney, by Jerry Lawson [LLRX.com, May 26, 2003].
• News That Comes to You: RSS feeds offer info-warriors a way to take the pulse of hundreds of sites, by J.D. Lasica [Online Journalism Review, January 23, 2003]

Weblogs and RSS for Government Information

The use of RSS to deliver public information is on the rise. As of July 20, 2004, there are 293 government-related feeds listed at Syndic8.com, which is up from the 53 listed in January 2003. The State of Utah uses RSS feeds to distribute a wide variety of public information, and provides an excellent online guide to using RSS, with an extensive range of links to other helpful resources. The website RSS in Government is a useful collection of uses of RSS in government applications nationally and internationally. RSS is a technology recently touted by Bill Gates, having been previously adopted by big media organizations such as the New York Times and the BBC. Government officials such as FCC Chairman Michael Powell are using weblogs to communicate directly with the regulated community. The government of Canada has over 30 RSS feeds available, along with a helpful page of explanations. The US government has extensive weather and earthquake alerts available via RSS.

Other uses of RSS in the justice context include:

• Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority: With feeds for news, grants, recent rules and press releases.
• Cornell University's LII Project has a feed for Recent US Supreme Court Decisions and a second feed covering the longer term.
• The Oyez Project offers: On This Day is a daily-updated feed that marks events in justices' lives (appointed, born, died) and case events (argued, reargued, decided); as well as a feed for news articles appearing on their site.
• The Utah appellate courts have an RSS feed for new Supreme Court and Court of Appeals opinions

Further RSS resources

• Radio Userland's All About RSS has a lot of useful links and resources
• Dave Winer's Really Simple Syndication has "everything a non-tech user needs to know about RSS 2.0"
• RSS - A Primer for Publishers & Content Providers, this tutorial has an excellent diagram depicting how BBC feeds flow out to the various public web spaces
• The Virtual Chase has compiled a list of Legal Alerts and Current Awareness Services, many of which contain RSS feeds.

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