According to Wisblawg, LexisNexis is now indexing blog content as part of their information aggregation service. A few comments on her blog reflect the seeming absurdity of paying LexisNexis to access what is otherwise free content, but the consensus seems to be that a large subset of data available through LexisNexis or similar companies is freely available already and what you’re paying for is not so much access to data as access to readily available, nicely sorted, indexed, and searchable data. I’ve got to agree with the latter viewpoint on this one, although I’m not positive that blogs have a place in what is otherwise a fairly reliable source of legal information. (seems the equivalent of citing wikipedia in a research paper)
September 4, 2006
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I agree with you. I guess the reliability of data depends on the publishing party and their authority or source for issuing information. I mean if the government or a law firm wants to publish something, I guess they could just as easily publish it on an official website. If I am to receive legal advice from a blog, I would take it with a grain of salt.Blogs are currently perceived as being used mainly for personal/social/entertainment purposes, it’ll be interesting to see how its usage evolves with time.
Comment by lochness33 — September 16, 2006 @ 1:59 am
I definitely agree – I wasn’t even aware that LexisNexis was indexing Blog content. I think that the open and discussion based nature of Blogs, with little emphasis on reliability of source and legal accuracy, present very little value as a source of legal information or data.
The only value which I could see being derived from such a Blog based information aggregation service, would be to assist discussion or research in specific legal topic areas, rather than as a source of ‘pure’ primary or secondary legal information.
Comment by Michael — October 21, 2006 @ 2:34 am