Groklaw

http://www.groklaw.net/index.php

Intended audience
Those interested in the SCO legal actions in regards to Linux. Particularly those on the side of Open Source/Linux rather than SCO.

Usefulness of content

The site is a blog and contains a voluminous amount of data regarding the legal actions spanning the last 4+ years. It includes virually every court document, SEC filing, along with interviews, lists of all involved attorneys and judges, and transcriptions of non-digital documents and interviews. Commentary explaining the documents and breaking them down for those without legal expertise is avaliable with virtually every posting. They also have timelines of important cases and events with links to appropriate documents.

It is assumed that you know what the site is about when you arrive as there is no explanation of what the site is about, just a huge amount of data. If you come to the site for information regarding the subject of the blog it is likely the most complete collection of materials some of which are not easy to acquire (including some documents that are not available in digital form and have been transcribed by hand).

Consistency of design

As with most blogs, built with blog creation tools, the design is extremely consistent. They maintain a constant top and left menu.

Ease of navigation

They make it very easy to move around, with lots of cross-linking to appropriate related documents. That said, you probably need to know something about the subject to know what to look for. The primary menu on the left side has 25 links to internal areas. These are in alphebetical corner, sensible considering their number but meaning that sometimes if you arent' sure what you want there is no categorization of the sections.

There are some very nice features such as color-coding of legal procedings marking what actions are completed and which are still pending. They are very aware of certain types of disabled access, noting that anything color coded red as still pending will also be preceded with the word "Pending" for those who are color-blind. An amazing amount of work has gone into making it easy to move through complicated legal documents and between them and related court documents, contracts, etc.

One big issue is that there is a large assumption that you know what the site is about/you are looking for when you arrive as the front page immediately shows you all the most current news and documents. This is probalby reasonable considering what the site is about but they probably should have made it more obvious to learn about the site if you did not know or were new to the subject. If you can find it, the 10th item in the menu is "Groklaw Info" which takes you to a part of the site that explains its purpose. Also, the last items is "Where is...?" which gives a graphical view of a typical page with an explanation of each section. It took a bit of poking around to locate these.

All in all, an amazing site and amount of work about this important legal issue in the world of open-source and well deserving of the awards it has received.