Legal Research

Lawlks.ca: The Canadian Law URL Shortener

By Connie Crosby

Last week I talked about two announcements from Stem Legal: the newly relaunched Canadian Law Blogs directory site Lawblogs.ca and the 2010 Canadian Law Blog Awards a.k.a. the CLawBies now open for nominations. A third announcement came out at the same time which we haven’t yet mentioned: a new URL shortener for the Canadian legal industry, Lawlks.ca (pronounced “Law Likes”).

Stem is primarily using it to track content being shared from Lawblogs.ca site. Steve Matthews says in the announcement on the Law Firm Web Strategy blog:

The idea is to track which Canadian legal content pieces are getting shared, and we?ve started by building it into the Twitter & Facebook buttons on the new Lawblogs.ca. It?s open for others to use in the legal community, but the primarily purpose at this point is to track lawblogs.ca sharing.

I gave it a try, shortening a link to one of our Slaw posts by plugging in the full URL: http://lawlks.ca/14u

I like the ability to drag the bookmarketlet to my toolbar for easy use in the future. The only thing I couldn’t see was any sort of tracking that I might use myself (e.g. how many people click on the link), presumably Stem have kept this private for their own tracking. I hope Steve will update us if I have missed anything.

It is kind of fun to have our own URL shortener. I see they have used the tool YOURLS: Your Own URL Shortener to create it.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on December 13, 2010 (boomark / email).