New Blawg Design for the New Year
Regular readers will have already noticed the obvious: for a few days now, I’ve been running this Blawg using a snazzy new Wordpress theme.
It was created by zeeshanhasan, a small creative design studio based in Lahore, Pakistan. (I offshored the job only after suffering extreme disillusionment with several individuals stateside, and the decision proved an excellent one.)
The new design reflects some rethinking of my place in the blogosphere. I began this Blawg in May 2003, back in the blogging Bronze Age, with this simple and modest premise:
Most days I read recent cases and material on labor and employment law. But too often, by the time I need to cite a case or whatever, I’ve forgotten what I read and can’t find it.
So one purpose of this is to have my own personal archive. While I’m at it, why not share it with the world?
In essence, then, I started with twin goals of personal knowledge management and public knowledge sharing.
As the Blawg evolved, I became aware of a growing and diverse audience of nonlawyers with an interest in employment law and HR issues. And I watched the geometric growth of the blogosphere with amazement, adding new blogs to my blogroll weekly.
When I attended Blawgthink in November 2005, I had the opportunity to pose a question for discussion with other bloggers. I asked whether the proliferation of bloggers was doing more to help with information overload or more to make it worse, perhaps much worse.
Most legal bloggers found the question less interesting than others like “how can I actually get new clients using a blog,” but I had an excellent conversation with a number of participants who were law librarians and professional knowledge managers, including the renowned Sabrina I. Pacifici, of BeSpacific® LLC.
There were no definitive answers, of course, just some agreement that there is indeed a paradox: as more bloggers post relevant content, each blogger’s effort to capture the most relevant Internet content in one place for a busy professional’s regular and rapid perusal was diluted by the profusion of other excellent blogs.
Now fast forward to the new and improved George’s Employment Blawg.
My concept is to have the home page of the Blawg serve as kind of a newspaper front page — or perhaps more accurately, an Internet portal — offering at-a-glance views of a large amount of relevant content from a single page.
The Interactive Blogroll at right allows browsing of a vast array of employment-related blogs, organized by category; the Headline Browser likewise allows browsing of my personal selection of news stories. Further details can be found by clicking the “Blogroll” and “News” tabs above.
Additionally, as an aid to others seeking useful and authoritative labor, employment and HR information, I have created a custom search engine combining Google technology with a refined set of of blogs and webites.
This will hopefully be a means of dealing with the information overload that occurs when Google returns over a million results! Click the Custom Search tab to access this feature.
All told, I may be writing fewer main posts, but I hope you’ll find more useful and readily accessible information here than ever before, and come to rely on this Blawg as part of your information overload solution.
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I like the new design. I am noticing some (for lack of a better term) technical gobbledegook on the front page when I come on, though. Looks like error message stuff. When I clicked on the headline for this post though, this page was fine.
I read this blog everyday and find it very helpful, and I aspire to your level of readership.
Regards,
Peter Mullison
http://www.employmentlawcolorado.com