Legal Research

Web 2.0 usage by professional in the A-P

By Wendy Reynolds

CCH Australia has just released an interesting study on Web 2.0 usage by professionals in HR, law, accounting and tax in the Asia-Pacific. They consulted 200+ professionals in the region about current and expected usage in their professional and personal lives. A few snippets of note:

• Blogs are used about equally for professional and personal reasons.
• Wikis are slightly more popular for professional use.
• Not surprisingly, social networking sites are significantly more frequently used for personal purposes.

I was also interested to read the reasons why professionals use Web 2.0 tools, and the types of information that they are used for. Questions about usage of specific tools, willingness to pay for information delivered through 2.0 technologies are worth reviewing. CCH’s conclusions reflect some of the discussion at SLAW and in other venues - and may be pointing to a future role for legal publishers in the world of user-generated content.

I wonder how much difference would be found in a similar study conducted in North America. Personally, I suspect not much.

The white paper can be found at http://www.cch.com.au/DocLibrary/cch_professionals_web20_whitepaper_final.pdf

(Hat tip to Law Librarian Blog)

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on January 29, 2009 (boomark / email).