Techlaw Magazine 2008

Back in January, I was involved in publishing TECHLAW, the magazine of the University of Ottawa Law & Technology Program, the program that I manage. The magazine was an upgrade of sorts from the newsletter we used to publish and send out by email.

The program mailed it out to about 600 individuals in government and cyberscholars from Canada and around the world.

Middle of last week, I uploaded the pdf of the TECHLAW magazine to the wonderful document sharing site Scribd, the originators of the iPaper format for displaying print material. That same day, the good people at Scribd selected it as a Featured Document (rss feed).

UPDATE interjected: Holy cow. Check that out. I set up this blog to use Apture, a tool that’s best described as a way to add links to web page content after it’s published. One of the things it does is to detect links to popular sites like Wikipedia and display them in a special window. But I didn’t know it handled Scribd pages as well, changing the above link to the Scribd.com page for the TECHLAW magazine into a special popup window displaying just the iPaper viewer for the magazine. That is sweet!

Scribd posted it to Twitter and I “dented” it on identi.ca and retweeted it. As of today it has had 660 viewings on Scribd.com, more than the number that we distribued at a cost by post.

Now, it is certainly true that our mailing list is a much more targeted audience than the people who have viewed the magazine on the internet. But it is only a good thing when promotional material is viewed by more people, and in this case the Twitter promotions targeted internet savvy people, some of whom may end up being interested in the material or even — who knows? — the program itself.