Legal Technology Journal

Just when you thought it was safe to take an interest in the internet again, now that all the excitement surrounding the dot.com era hype has finally dissipated, suddenly people are starting to talk, with bated breath, about Web 2.0. So what is it – and does it matter?

As with most technology innovations, Web 2.0 is 10% inspiration and 90% hype. Indeed, it is probably fair to say there is nothing in Web 2.0 that was not already available in plain vanilla Web 1.0. And don’t just take my word for it – Tim Berners-Lee, who is widely credited for having kick-started the whole internet revolution with his work on hypertext and the web-browser interface, also thinks Web 2.0 is primarily a marketing beast: ‘Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.’ What, however, is different is that while various interactive and collaborative facilities have been available on the internet for a number of years, newer innovations such as blogging and wiki technology (also known as ‘social media’ software) now make collaboration much easier.

For example, posting information up onto a blog is now about as complicated as composing, sending and filing an e-mail message – in fact, you can even post onto a blog via e-mail. Elsewhere in this issue, Ruth Ward of Allen & Overy LLP talks about the impact this has had on knowledge management – in a nutshell, it removes the technology issues and labour-intensive processes previously needed to disseminate know-how. But what about the downside?

For example, at the start of September, the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs had to ‘lock down’ its environmental issues wiki after inviting comments from the public – and promptly being bombarded with the cyberspace equivalent of graffiti. I suspect environment secretary David Milliband did not expect his concern about the effectiveness of government policies on the environment would be edited to read: ‘[B]esides we just can’t help but meddle, interfere, impose our views on others and generally use taxpayers’ resources in ways that are wasteful except in our own self-aggrandisement.’

Admittedly, law firms are not going to open up their blogs and wikis to public comment, but can they trust their own people not to devalue these facilities with half-baked postings? This may seem a harsh comment, but as various e-mail ‘scandals’ have revealed, lawyers still seem to have difficulty engaging the brain before sending off into cyberspace an e-mail chivvying a secretary for a contribution towards a dry-cleaning bill or bragging about how sexually well-endowed they are. Web 2.0 may simplify internet usage but it also makes life easier for idiots.

Charles Christian