In the legal environment, clients and lawyers alike require access to important and relevant up-to-date information/knowledge under time-sensitive pressures. Management of this through online communities, whether corporate blogs or wikis, accomplishes this by providing easy access to annotated value-added information/knowledge overseen by a community of experts. Practical value is seen from the lawyer perspective where lawyers are updated with recent case law, legislation and commentaries. Clients find value in educating themselves on the topic by visiting these media tools. In fact, the process is cyclical since clients who have access to such valuable legal information oftent contact the law firm which hosts these sites, leading, somtimes, to more legal services for the firm. Davis and Co. run a gaming law blog that is updated fairly frequently and their success can be noticed by the amount of visitors to the site. They have been featured in many public relation sessions too. See http://davis.ca/community/blogs/video_games/Default.aspx

I am getting ready to launch a Publicity Wiki to initiate a collaboration project on free and low cost PR and publicity stunts for small businesses. Primary beneficiary will be my company, but others will also gain insight.

I have described it in my “open source publicity wiki for small business” in the wiki here.

Answer to #1) By figuring out how to make a living at it before telling the world just to get a book.
Answer to #2) I’ll get back to you