I'm supposed to be writing a paper for a workshop in May (hence the disturbing tick tock sound inside my head) so, as well as reading interesting papers on accountability, privatisation and Aer Lingus, I'm messing arounds with new ways of organising myself online.
My latest discoveries are based around the marvellous, though still very much in beta, Spicebird. Spicebird brings together Thunderbird, Sunbird and Xmpp4moz which means, in shorthand, that it is an offline version of the sort of service iGoogle tries to offer, without the information-gathering predation. Having information offline is very important for me, but I still want access to emails, my Google calendar (via GCALDaemon and then to Outlook on my office pc) and the like.
Anyway, I've spent a good part of the evening taking the static pages from the Lords, the Irish Courts and in the Times Law Reports and converting them into a single rss feed, via the excellent Feed43 and then Yahoo Pipes. Lists like this are easy to format as rss, although since they have no synopses attached to them, there's no way to use Yahoo Pipes's filtering function.
All this procrastination is most likely to no good end but it does raise the question of why more information sources are not making use of rss and the like. From a law perspective, there has to be dozens of sources that can be channeled into feeds. I suspect that, with some of the more proprietary sources, ease of access loses out to the profit motive, whether through fees or advertising. In areas where the information is becoming openly available - at least as blocks of text or html - the development of more nuanced access to information is most likely blocked by nothing more than stasis. Most likely though, once the information is provided in a raw form, it'll be up to users to develop methods for sifting and sorting. Years of procrastination lie ahead!
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