Legal Research

OverFlowLegal

By Simon Fodden

A new effort on the web, OverFlowLegal.com (”The Definitive Portal of Legal Information on the Internet”), is aimed at filtering the flow of blawg posts to bring you only those of quality. How does this happen? Though the effort of members, apparently. You join OverFlowLegal and:

OFL members who demonstrate an ability to identify, post, rate, categorize and comment on quality content will be invited to become Associate Editors of OFL. Associate Editors who demonstrate an ability to manage other member’s posted content may be invited to become full time staff as Editors of OFL.

As you’ll see if you take a look, the identifying is done by voting, à la Digg, with the vote count displayed beside the post excerpt. You can sort the flow by date and by popularity; and there’s a long list of practice areas so that you can focus your attention by topic.

Presumably OFL is counting on the same sort of editorial enthusiasm that motivates the people who contribute to Wikipedia and on the same “wisdom of the crowd” to filter the feeds. It would seem that they’re aiming at involving law students especially: one of the four tabs is devoted to news of interest to them.

It’ll be interesting to see how far this flies. We do need feed filters, and the value really has to be added by people; but that unspecified “members” gathered at large are going to make the right choices for me is something I’m sceptical about. As well, there doesn’t seem to be a list of blogs from which the posts are drawn, so it’s not really possible to get an overview of the quality of the sources.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on January 20, 2009 (boomark / email).