Our IT and Digital Media groups have been rolling out a lot of great product improvements over the last few months.  In case you've missed those, here's a recap:

1.  Our content tagging project has made great progress, and we're now beginning to see the fruits of all that effort.  The "NStein" product which we are using as our tagging engine has now been trained, thanks to a great deal of effort by editors throughout the company.  Even while we continue to fine-tune the tagging, we're preparing to have the tool go back through our entire archive to apply those tags, which will dramatically improve search results and present more relevant content to our readers.  Down the road, those content tags will also allow our advertising sales team to sell much more sophisticated and targeted advertising, keyed against specific content (e.g. litigation).  You can see an early application of tagging on some of law.com's article pages -- here's an example: 

http://www.law.com/jsp/law/article.jsp?id=1202470031244&BratzBarbie_Fight_Gets_Ugly_With_RICO_IP_Theft_Claims

Note on the right-hand side the box which shows "Firms and Companies in this Article".  And at the bottom you can see the tag-cloud based on concepts from the article itself.  Our goal is to encourage greater "stickiness" on our sites -- having readers see more pages, read more articles, and spend more time with us.  This is a very important step forward, one which will be rolling out over the next several months.

2.  The New York Smart Litigator is set to launch on September 20th.  We're in the final stages of getting ready for that launch -- refining our marketing and customer service plans, double-checking our content and all the links on the site, etc.  This may have been the most complex bit of product development we have ever done, and we have learned a great deal through the process.  My hope is that we will now be able to move faster to introduce updated versions with enhanced capabilities for our NY customers as well as new launches in additional states.

3.  Our Digital Book initiative has also made great progress.  Larry Selby and his team are now beta testing the software which will enable Law Journal Press customers to access our treatises electronically.  Currently we have 5 6 books on the system, and plan to have an additional 40 treatises digitized and available to our customers by year-end. 

4.  You may have seen that our LawJobs site relaunched at the end of July.  Next up is the Daily Business Review website, which will launch on August 31st.  Future website relaunches now in various stages of  design include law.com, NY Lawyer, and Law Technology News.

5.  Digital Directories are clearly in demand.  The new Expert Witness directory product launched at the end of June, though improvements continue to be made.  GlobeSt's Directory is expected to be ready by the end of this month, with the new CLE Directory not far behind.  Work on directories of Recruiters and Judges is now underway.

6.  As if they don't have enough to do, Jill Windwer, Gene Bishop, their teams and many folks from our product groups have been working this summer on a new E-Commerce initiative, designing a new system to replace LawCatalog.  The team has received proposals from a variety of vendors which they are now sifting through.  Too soon to know the exact timetable for this one, but look for launch sometime in 2011.

This is all very important work, as we rollout the infrastructure necessary for our transition from a print-centric to a more digitally-centric business.  If I have left off an important project from the list above, please feel free to add it below in the comments.