The Twitter Times is perhaps one of the best formatted mashups of Twitter posts I’ve seen. This jewel is the brainchild of Russian genius Maxim Griniv and combines the power of information provided in the Twitter community with the aesthetic comfort of a newspaper style format. In my opinion, this might be one of the best Twitter resources since TweetDeck (and I love TweetDeck!!) I immediately jumped on this little product and created my own personal Twitter Times.

The idea behind The Twitter Times [TwtTimes] is to take your first and second level Twitter friends and compile the information that the people you are following are “tweeting,” by pulling it all together in a format that helps you quickly see “What’s Hot” and the “Top News History.” The result is a wonderful display of text and pictures that look very much like a newspaper website. In a couple of minutes, you can quickly scan the information and catch up on the major discussions your Twitter friends (and their friends) are discussing.
I shot Maxim an email a few days ago suggesting that he should expand TwtTimes to include “Twitter Lists” as well as generic twitter user profiles. The idea I had behind the “Twitter Lists” option was that it would allow the end users to narrow the topics displayed on TwtTimes based on the lists. In other words, if I have a list of people who are focused on “law libraries” or “competitive intelligence” then the topics of TwtTimes would (hopefully) fit those more narrow topics. In its current form, The Twitter Times tends to pick up the Twitter “biggies” (e.g., ReadWriteWeb, Guy Kawasaki, WSJBlog, etc.) This isn’t saying that the current form is bad (because it isn’t), I was just hoping to guide the iteration of TwtTimes to take advantage of the Twitter Lists and be a much more flexible resource.
Maxim responded that the idea of handling Twitter Lists would mean TwtTimes would “have to support more newspapers for a single user and, consequently, [would] need more computers to handle them.” In other words, it would cost more money and equipment than TwtTimes is able to handle at this time. To off-set the costs, Maxim asked if he thought people would pay for the service. If there is one thing I know about my social media friends… they will not pay for anything “social media” related. So, that idea is definitely DOA. Combine that with a comment that (3 Geek member) Lisa gave me when I asked her to take a look at TwtTimes…

Mashup of Twitter Trends and TweetDeck notifications and Google Reader? Hmm. Not sure I have room on my social media platter …

…you’ll see that not only are my social media friends cheap… they are also burning out on all the available social media resources. If TwtTimes can support this with ads, then I think people will be fine. But, no one that I know would want to pay for a social media resource… no matter how useful it might be.
So here’s the situation. We have a great product, with a lot to offer, but in a market that is completely being overwhelmed by one social media resource after another. For all of you that are reaching your saturation point on social media tools, my suggestion is to take a look at TwtTimes and try it for a week or two. If need be, click the “mark all as read” button on your Google Reader from time to time to make room on your “social media platter.” I think you’ll find this product will be pretty tasty. Who knows… something like this could end up in the Google stable someday (hint, hint Google!!)

I read a great study about the difference between Generation X and Generation Y female online activity.According to PopSugar Media—isn’t that a great name, by the way?—two-thirds of female Gen Xers rely on female Gen Yers to define pop culture trends. And female Gen Yers are twice as likely as female Gen Xers to rely on social media to identify new brands and products. YAY me. :)I am right on the cusp of Gen Y. And I am in a position of influence. And I’m in charge of social networking for my firm. That means if a law firm is smart—and aren’t they all?—they would put a woman in the middle of her career in charge of their online strategy and let her rip. Arm her with the firm’s online social media policy, heck, maybe even let her craft it, then let her develop a web presence on behalf of the firm.I am watching a good friend of mine @KatDeLia do this for her segment of her professional services firm. I don’t think that either she or the firm realize what is going to happen.. But the results are inevitable. Mark my words, in a few months she is going to hit everyone’s radar in her office and in her industry. She’s out there every day, conscientiously tweeting about her firm. One tweet at a time, she is going to turn eyes her way. And the pay off is going to come. Because she is a likeable, attractive face in the crowd of professional services.And that is important because one of the points that the study made is that Gen Yers are extremely skeptical and seek genuine and authentic messaging. Interestingly, @KatDeLia and I were talking about this very issue last week. We have both discovered that on Twitter, if you talk “occasionally” about funny, family, quirky stuff, you are more likely to get read. And that is the point. In the overcrowded sphere of social media, you need every edge you can get. So, as we girls like to say, if you got it, flaunt it. Because it doesn’t last forever (this is me speaking from the far end of the Gen Y cusp). And you don’t just have to be a female to make this work for you. Be adorable. Be cute. Be attractive. Then talk business. Because, as @KatDeLia likes to say, “a girl’s gotta eat.”

Just found out that Amazon granted my wishes of pushing the beta version of the Kindle application to the PC Desktop!! This, my friends, is a total game changer in a number of ways. I’m about 5 minutes into testing out the new application, but I’m already finding some good, and some bad things.

Good:
  • Big Screen!
  • Color!
  • Syncs with Kindle
Bad:
  • No note taking ability in PC mode
  • No highlighting ability in PC mode
  • No searching ability in PC mode
  • No voice option in PC mode
Let’s all hope that Amazon updates the PC version to match all the features you can get on the Kindle. But, regardless of the shortcomings of the Beta version of the Kindle for PC, this is a great step forward for electronic book publishing! Now, for all of those legal publishers out there… get busy making your books available on the Kindle!!

I read with great interest a NYT article, “Virtual Estates Lead to Real-World Headaches” that analyzed the death of an online relationship in Second Life. Apparently, a couple married, bought an island and built a house–all on Second Life. Last year, the man died of liver failure.

With the push of a button, the man’s partner lost everything they had together on Second Life: their island, their home and all memories of their relationship. Arguably, since Second Life has a current currency rate of 259 Lindens to $1, the estate had some value and could fall under legal scrutiny. I remember when I first heard of Second Life back in the early 2000s I was ranting at my friends about how this was going to raise all kinds of weird legal issues like virtual property rights, trademark issues and contractual problems. I remember saying, “they are making and selling designer clothes for their avatars, for God’s sake!” They all just rolled their eyes and said, “that whacky Lisa–she’s such a geek.” Well, they were right about the last half of that statement–little did they know how prophetic their words would be. As for the rest, it turns out that I was right, after all. I believe that we are just at the tip of the iceberg that represents all of virtual law. Remember, we are only at web 2.0. There is a long way between 2.0 and web 200.0–heck, even web 2,000.0. Don’t believe me? Take a look at science fiction writer Orson Scott Card’s description of social media that he wrote about in Ender’s Game. He wrote that book before 1985 and it perfectly describes blogging. And we are only barely touching the surface of what the human mind is capable of imagining. Ever watched Ted.com? If you have, you know what I mean. We have only just begun to comprehend the extent of the web’s reach.

My friend Saskia, a professor at University of Houston’s School of Law, turned me on to related article: “What Happens to Your Facebook After You Die?”. Facebook’s answer is to shut down the profiles but to memorialize their wall so that friends and family can pay their respects. But it is causing some backlash because dead people were showing up in their “Recommend a Friend” feature. We–meaning the social media community–are still thinking through the physical, virtual and legal ramifications of the web. We haven’t even begun to comprehend its reach.

What I foresee in the area of estate law, and the NYT article mentions this, is that lawyers will need to begin educating executors on how to manage the deceased’s social media accounts. Will, Estate and Probate forms will need to begin including social media and online passwords to not only Facebook, LinkedIn, Martindale Hubbell and Twitter but also online banking, credit card sites and the like when preparing their documents.

Heck, lawyers might even think about creating online safety deposit boxes to “hold” all these valuable docs.

We just finished celebrating Day of the Dead here in Tejas. Might be a good time to contemplate these more macabre issues. Leave it to a lawyer to ruin the party.

We at 3 Geeks will be watching with great anticipation and interest in how the 2010 Rate Increase Season unfolds. Firms and lawyers are facing a significant challenge this year. On one hand we have a zero inflation year (based on your source). And clients are still in cost-cutting mode – not very excited or open to hearing about hourly rate increases. This puts rate increases in the proverbial ‘lead balloon’ category. On the other hand many firms didn’t raise rates much, if at all, in 2009. And they may be living on deep discounts or even prior year rates with some clients. This squeeze on revenue and profits is hurting. Even with all the law firm cost cutting efforts (ala ATL) firms have been seeing downward pressure on partner incomes (how’s that for a euphemism?). So … what will firms do? One obvious answer is Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs). This shifts the question away from rates to fees. However, AFAs cannot fully address the problem. First – most engagements are still on the billable hour. And second – an AFA doesn’t change the law firm business model. It merely increases the pressure to change it. Another option is to co-opt the Big Four model. As I understand it, the Big Four rarely charge at full rates and preemptively raised their rates years ago to enable this method for maintaining revenues. For law firms this would mean raising rates and discounts at the same time. This tactic will leave existing clients at a status quo, but allow firms to start from higher hourly rates on new deals. Again – this doesn’t seem like a solution as much as a maneuver. Using the Big Four model will be problematic since firms are late to this game. The outcome of the 2010 Season will likely rely on the impending client rate letters. If clients are assertive and send out a preemptive strike – calling for status quo on rates, firms will probably go along. If law firms are first to move, they may have some flexibility in increasing rates. If firms are smart, these rate increases will be strategic – done on a market-by-market basis. For instance Bankruptcy and FCPA work, which are hot, will have lower rate sensitivity and be candidates for an increase. Whereas some other un-named practice areas won’t have such a luxury. Whatever happens, the 2010 Rate Increase Season will be interesting and probably entertaining. Stay tuned.

Heads up to all you Westlaw users out there… you’re about to face “change” dead in the face!

ThomsonReuters is rolling out a change in its password system and require everyone to roll over to their “OnePass System” by the end of January 2010. This, in and of itself, is not a big issue, but how they’ve started rolling out the change is. Seems that some of the Westlaw reps knew about this months ago and gave their folks the heads up. While others either didn’t know, or didn’t pass the message along until a mass email went out last Thursday — announcing the change that was rolling out two days later.
Needless to say, there are some folks in the law library world that aren’t happy with the way this was handled.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes we librarians can get a little freaked out on small issues, but I think this is one situation that should have been handled with a little more forethought on the side of West. Librarians tend to be the ones that have to pass along these changes to the attorneys, and in some firms, the librarian to attorney ratio can be 1:100 or more. Although theoretically we have until January 31, 2010 (nearly 3 months) before the roll out is finalized and the Westlaw sign on page goes away forever to be replaced by the OnePass sign on page, the process has already begun and now librarians are having to play catch up.
It would have been a lot better for West to announce this through the local reps at least a month before the OnePass registration process began. This would have given the librarians enough time to ask questions, prepare FAQ’s, and work with other vendors that may be affected by the change (such as those Monitoring Software packages I talked about a few weeks ago.) Now librarians have to deal with many issues all at once rather than how to implement the changes in an orderly fashion.
We’ll all survive this change, and probably be stronger as a result. But, next time, let’s all work together to make sure we don’t have to scramble to achieve the changes just because there is a lack of communication between the vendor and the clients. An ounce of communication can prevent a pound of complaints later!!

I have been thinking about the cult of personality lately. As geeks, we always like to think we are so nouveau, so cutting-edge in our attempts to lasso technology. Especially in the social media arena. Our pink-haired, horn-rimmed nerdy selves keep trying to out-tweet, out-blog and out-optimize one another in an effort to be ahead of the next big thing. But the truth of it is that the compulsion to create the cult of personality has been around for ages. What brought this all to head for me was watching Michael Jackson’s This Is It this week-end (shameless plug for my movie review site inserted here). Talk about personality–he had it in spades. Whether you thought he was talented, weird, the King of Pop or whatever, this guy made and lost more money than most of us will ever see in our own lifetime. The man was a genius at making a spectacle of himself–intentionally or otherwise. The movie got me to thinking: just how does one achieve that kind of larger-than-life status? I think that is a question that all marketers, especially legal marketers, struggle with. Just how do you achieve cult status for a law firm? I mean, seriously, who has ever gone to a party and just started randomly raving about what a great lawyer they have because they helped them evade a $10 million fine for tax evasion? Or avoid an ugly trial that would cover the desperate allegations against drug company? Or how do you post a blog about how your law firm successfully negotiated a settlement for an undisclosed amount for an issue that cannot be discussed outside of the realm of attorney-client privilege? So we fall back on the cult of personality, where lawyers have to cultivate public personas to establish themselves as thought leaders in their given practice, which goes against most lawyers’ academic inclinations and most large law firms mantras that “the whole is greater than the sum of our partners.” The only lawyers that succeed at the cult of personality are those that are on their own, on tv or are judges–or some mix thereof. The most popular ones that come to mind are Judge Judy, Greta Van Susteran, Geraldo Rivera, the Supremes (a/k/a Ginsberg, Scalia, et al.) and Texas cowboy litigators, Percy Foreman, the DeGuerin brothers, Joe Jamail, and the late, great Texas lawyer John O’Quinn. All of this got me to thinking about one of the most influential of our early Americans, Benjamin Franklin. An uneducated man by any academic standards (he only completed 2 years of education) he developed his own cult of personality. I mean, how else can you account for him singlehandedly convincing 13 colonies, in the midst of a revolution, to move their clocks back one hour? How in the heck did he persuade everyone to do that without sending one single e-mail? And let’s not forget all of his lady-friends. Now that’s personality! NOTE: please don’t hold me to the historical accuracy of the creation of day light savings–I am aware that this was a long, legislative effort conceived and compelled by other men–I am merely taking some poetic license to make a point.
Twitter has come out with a great idea of allowing you to create “lists” of your favorite people and seeing what all of them are saying within a single view. Twitter is calling this the (unoriginal) “Twitter Lists“. The list idea is great, but for some reason they left out one feature that might make this idea “great”. Right now, you cannot directly create an RSS feed out of the Twitter list. I’m not sure why Twitter didn’t build that into the initial release, but luckily for you, we’ve found a way around that little issue.
Enter one of our old friends, “Dapper Dapp Factory“. One of my first blog posts was a review of the Dapp Factory, and it is still a jewel when you need it. Until Twitter wises up and figures out how great a resource the RSS feed of the Twitter Lists can be, here’s what you need to do.
1. Find the feed you want to turn into an RSS feed:

For our example, we’ll take Nicole Black’s list of “legal-must-follows“

2. Copy the URL for the list and go to Dapper’s Dapp Factory (create a free account if you don’t already have one.) Select “RSS Feed”, then click “Next”

3. On the next page, click “Add to Basket”, then “Next Step” (ignore the message, as we are just going to upload this one web page.)
4. Highlight and click the Twitter Name, then save it as “TwitterName”
5. Highlight and click the “Tweet” portion, then save it as “Tweet”
6. Highlight and click the “Time” portion, then save it as “Date”
7. The results will look like this:
8. Name your “Dapp” and save it
9. Create the RSS feed following this format:
10. Copy and paste the RSS feed into your Google Reader or other RSS resource:
This is not a perfect RSS feed, but this will work nicely until Twitter realizes that creating RSS feeds of the Twitter Lists is a needed resource.
NOTE: Nicole Black also pointed me toward another Twitter List To RSS resource (although it is having some issues, Niki says to keep trying it and it does eventually work. Thanks Niki!!

I’m a big fan of “lists” – whether they are “Top 10” lists, or “Must Follow” lists or “To Do” lists… (actually, I’m not a big fan of the “To Do” list.) But, I do not like it when someone posts a “list” on their blog that is basically a cut and paste job from other’s work. I ran across one such list today and it immediately made me think that someone didn’t do their own work.

The list was compiled by a “Lawyer Coach” and is called “50 Lawyers and Legal Professionals You Should Follow.” I’m not going to link to it, but you can do a Twitter search to find some of the tweets and re-tweets that point to it, or you can Google it!
I saw this tweeted by a couple of very reputable people I follow and so I checked it out to see who the “best of the best” were. When I got there, I saw what looked like the great list of people that Lance Goddard and Adrian Lurssen compiled, and to the blogger’s credit, they were credited. However, once I started looking at the list, I noticed that there were links to people:
  1. Who don’t exist
  2. Who don’t write anything
  3. Who died over a year ago
It reminded me of some attorneys I’ve known over the years that blindly cut and paste sections from someone else’s brief only to have a judge point out to them that the quote or citation from the original brief was wrong. Doing things like this show that you are sloppy in your research, and if you aren’t willing to put in the effort to at least verify the people that you claim others should follow, then why would anyone want to follow (or hire) you??
So please… if you put a list on your blog that you want me to take seriously; DON’T COPY & PASTE SOMEONE ELSE’S LIST!! And, if you feel that you must copy and paste someone else’s list, please do some research to make sure the information is still accurate. Otherwise, you just end up looking like you don’t know what you’re talking about.

They say that “practice makes perfect”… so, I guess that means I need more practice.

Last Friday, the Special Libraries Association Texas Chapter (SLA-TX) hosted an all day conference at the University of Texas campus. We had a packed house, and I decided to also stream the conference in order to allow those that could not attend a chance to sit in ‘virtually.’ We used UStream as our free streaming provider, a new Logitech QuickCam Orbit MP Webcam, and Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder 3 to take advantage of the high quality camera functions through UStream.
Although things went pretty well, there were a few mistakes on my part that I’d like to share with you in case you decide to stream a presentation.
1 – If you have a chance to “hard wire” your Internet connection, do it!!

The night before the conference, I tested the streaming capabilities at the SLA-TX board meeting so that we could talk to board members that couldn’t make the trip to Austin. We used the WiFi through the hotel, and quickly discovered that weak WiFi causes bad streaming. The slowness in the WiFi connection caused the audio to chatter, and the lag time in the video became huge (around a 10 minute lag time.) When I got to the conference room the next day, I quickly found the network plug and hard wired my Internet connection.

2 – Bring an extension cord and a long network cable!

I actually did bring an extension cord with me, but the network cable I brought was only 12 feet long. Because the network plug was in the corner of the room, this meant I had to shoot the video at an angle. It would have been much better to have shot the video from the audience perspective with a straight on shot. Next time, I’m bringing at least 50 feet of networking cable, and 50 feet of extension cord… just to be safe.

3 – If you want to show both the speaker and the presentation, darken the room!

Apparently, a well-lit room and a bright projector screen are not a good combination. I noticed in the Internet Librarian live stream, that you can see the speaker and presentation just fine if the room is darker. Next time, we’re turning off some lights in the conference room!

4- Understand that the “Chat” function may be blocked by some workplace networks!

This problem I actually knew about before I started streaming on Friday (since my workplace blocks ‘Chat’ functions for security reasons.) Your audience will not be able to ‘talk’ to you, so the only way the can ask questions is to either sign in on the chat function (if they can), or you can set up a Twitter hashtag (we used #slatx09), and monitor that via the UStream widget. If all of that fails, give your audience an email address to send their questions and monitor that during the presentation.

5 – Want to record the presentation? Then read the instructions!!

I know, I know… this goes against the guy code and Toby has asked for my man card for even suggesting reading instructions but I really screwed the pooch on this one. We had a great keynote presenter in Gary Hoover who I promised I would record the presentation and send him a copy. Now I have to send an apology note to Gary that explains that, while I did press the “record” button, apparently, it was the wrong “record” button. Now, I have nothing for him but excuses. Turns out that I needed to use the record function through the UStream dashboard rather than the record function through the Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder.

I’m sure there are many, many more mistakes that I made while live streaming the SLA-TX conference last Friday, but these are all I’m admitting to at this time.
Despite the fact that I didn’t record the conference, I’d still say that the live stream was an overall success. At one point in the conference (while discussing the hot topic of the SLA name change and alignment project), we had more people watching the live stream than we had at the conference. We handled questions from the remote viewers, and were able to expand our audience beyond those that could travel to Austin. That, my friends, is a win-win for everyone. I hope that some of you reading this are now inspired to live stream your conferences and seminars. If you do, please let me know so I can tune in and see if you’ve learned from my mistakes.