I came across this PC World article highlighting Google’s Latitude. The title, “Spy on Your Workers,” caught my eye so I checked it out. It explores this new offering and some implications it may bring.

Since KM is about capturing knowledge and then making it easily accessible, Latitude falls squarely on the KM dime. It combines Web 2.0, with social networking with cell phone tracking. The result: you can see where your friends, family and co-workers are at a given time. It works for both cell phone locations as well as computer locations (based on where you connect).

As long as you trust Google not to become or enable Big Brother type uses, you may choose to see Latitude as a ‘little brother’ or maybe ‘social brother’ application.

Beyond a certain ‘cool’ factor to check out where your friends are at anytime, it has business KM applications for employers needing to track locations of employees. To its credit, Google in its normal fashion leaves control in the hands of the user. You can hide yourself and/or expose your location as you see fit.

As with a number of new technologies, I am mixed with a sense of ‘that’s cool’ and ‘this is freakin me out.’ My uber geek friend Lincoln has already sent me a Latitude invite. As an old friend of mine he already knows where numerous bodies are buried (and vice versa), so I accepted his invite to check this out. I’ll need to give this more thought, especially after playing with it a bit. I’ve already set it up on my laptop and will do so on my Blackberry to see how it works and feels.

KM implications? Numerous. Latitude adds a unique layer of knowledge that has a value-add potential we shouldn’t ignore. But still … it’s freakin me out.

When I worked in academia, we used to joke that universities were great places to work — except for all the students.  We loved the ability to work along side bright people, and contemplate new ways of addressing old ideas.  The same is true for Social Media.  It is a great resource to contemplate new ways of addressing old ideas —  now, if we could just ignore all the people out there.

There is an inherent problem with Social Media tools (in this post, I’ll limit my discussion to blogs and Twitter.)  It was apparently glossed over yesterday at Legal Tech, but was astutely picked up by Ohad Reshef after the presentation.  Very soon, spammers are going to make some of the best parts of social networking tools worthless.  
Currently, those of us that are pushing the benefits of Twitter, or the comment strings on blogging, are telling our colleagues that this is a wonderful resource where you can truly get a water cooler topic going on a global scale.  I can post this blog, and someone in Australia can comment almost immediately.  I can follow a discussion on Twitter by searching for a hash tag topic (such as #LTNY) that is being used.  It is truly a great process of sharing ideas and having that global conversation.  Unfortunately, it is also ripe for being crushed by the very openness that makes it so great.
Consider this –  If I were a spammer, or someone with malicious intent, I could practically disable a Twitter topic with very little effort.  For those of us that every used Yahoo or AOL chat rooms, you remember the chat bots that would inevitably come in and take over a room?  Well, unfortunately we face a similar fate with Twitter topics.  All it would take would be someone to start blasting hash tag comments on four or five automated Twitter accounts to make the effort of following the topic too difficult.  So far, we’ve lucked out that this hasn’t happened…  but it will.
As for blogs, we already see that one of the most popular legal blogs, Abovethelaw.com, has had to adjust its comment viewing policy due to the fact that the openness that allows everyone to comment, has become so inundated with trash and obscenities, that it makes it virtually worthless to monitor anymore.  And, the sad thing is that the readership of this blog is very bright, but apparently so caught up in the “game” of creating noise on the comments, that I seriously doubt that half of the commenters even read the story.  Even on this blog, we’ve had to remove comments because they are comment spam.
I’m dreading the day that we have to “monitor” or “hide” the comments because half of them are either spam or trash.  I’m dreading the day that I can no longer monitor Twitter comments because half the comments are spam.  In the meantime, I’m enjoying the social media honeymoon while it lasts!

We are watching the beginnings of the media giants taking over social networking.

I got an inkling of this when I heard that LexisNexis, an online research service, bought Martindale Hubbell, an online legal directory, who in turn partnered with LinkedIn, an online networking site.

Lexis has partnered with Chambers Global, a UK business that ranks lawyers and law firm’s proficiency, to display the Chambers rankings on Martindale. Lexis is owned by Reed Elselvier, one of the world’s largest providers of online information. RE employs 35,000 around the world and reported revenues of £4,584m/€6,693m/$6,625m.

Which brings me to my story.

Flickr has censored a Spanish psychologist’s collection of photos and art because of his offensive content.

He was told, “Use your common sense to determine if your content is appropriate or not to a global audience (emphasis added) … you must know that if we receive another report about your content or conduct, it is very likely to cancel your account.”

The offending content?

Smoking.

Now, certainly, we should be outraged at the topic of this censorship; it is as offensive as it gets no matter what side you weigh in on.

But let us, instead, look at the larger issue.

The authority, and the manner in which Flickr–now owned by Yahoo–weilds its authority, in determining what content is acceptable to a global audience.

I ask you: who is this site to determine what is globally acceptable? How can one online community, scattered hither and yore, determine what is globally acceptable?

Flickr’s solution–more rightly, Yahoo’s–is to establish an indiscriminate discriminating program that automates the intake of complaints, then sends out an automated warning to the content holder to straighten up and fly right. If they don’t, they are censored to an “adult-only” section. If they receive too many complaints, they are booted.

It is nearly impossible to appeal this process to a human. Its like spotting a unicorn–rumoured to exist and any successful attempt is regarding as myth.

With these sorts of problems, I have witnessed another solution: have human admins troll the site.

I remember AOL employed such folks back in the day when chat rooms were booming. I saw this type of policing just recently on a LiveJournal site called Vintage Photographs. They employed this method to mediate between posters when the worthiness of a photo was called into question. When a comment fight ensued, the mediator would step in, make a judgment then put the offending participants on a week-long vacation. If it happened too many times, the participant was banned.

The danger in these types of situations is that admins are either too lax or revel in their meaningless authority and go power-crazy.

Meh.

But can’t you see it now? What are the long-term results?

In a Yahoo-type environment, the program becomes the power and Hal2000 takes over.

In a VintagePhoto environment, we end up creating a hierarchy of online judges that fall under no jurisdiction.

My guess? By the year 2020, we will have a virtual jurisdiction. We have to. With the likes of Reed Elsevior and LexisNexis and LinkedIn now entering the arena, social networking is taking a decidedly serious turn.

Lord knows who will rule this virtual world . . .

Online media is replacing print media. It is a fact that PR agencies need to embrace.I hear talk about how PR agencies look to more reputable “papers” before they look to online pubs for the top news stories.But, think about it: where do readers go first when they hear about news while at work?Do they all run en masse to the local news stand 40 floors below them? Do they all run home and turn on their tv? Do they run to their car and turn on the radio?Oh, no, my little grasshopper. . . they go online!It is a fact that was reported by all online mediums. Last week, “Obama Rocked the Web,” according to AdWeek:

On Jan. 20,CNN.com Live served more than 26.9 million live video streams globally and 36.7 million streams overall. According to CNN’s internal data, that figure is more than five times the previous record of 5.3 million live streams set on Election Day last year, which at the time was record shattering.

PR agencies need to wake up and smelled the coffee. Every major paper now has its own blog where they are breaking their own stories.More and more major papers are letting go of their print publications and turning to online media. One of the most well-respected papers in the U.S., the Christian Science Monitor shut down their print publication and are now completely online. Joining the online ranks are the Kansas City Kansan, San Francisco’s AsiaNews and both Detroit newspapers–the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press.Face it, when the advertising dollars flee to online–as they already are–the papers will follow.They already are. The smart news mediums use one to leverage the other. Some are just hanging on to their denial.
===============================
Addendum: one of my online friends–thanks UTROUKX!–sent me this 1981 video.

Having been taken to task on my How To Alternative Bill post by Ron Baker, I have been making some progress on this effort so it’s time for an update. Ron presses the Just Do It approach. When we just do it, we need to be able to do two things up front.

First – we need to build budgets in one sense or another to value bill. This is the case whether it’s a flat-fee or pretty much any other type of value billing since we need to know our costs on some level. I’ve heard numerous partners tell me they know “in their gut” how much a matter or case will cost in fees. This is one approach. But it makes sense to have some benchmarks for how much a type of matter will cost. Of course, all matters are different, but some are actually quite a bit alike. Following Ron’s lead of just picking a client and getting started, you should consider picking a type of matter you know well to handle for this client. Then you can construct a budget without a lot of effort. You can also check the fees from a few similar matters as a reality check on your estimate. So without too much over-analysis, you can have a good, reasonably informed budget to use. The risk factor is low, likely low enough to match the average risk a firm takes on a new matter. So our risk issue is well addressed.

Second – we need to monitor our performance over the life of the matter to see how we perform against the budget. Even if you choose not to share this effort with the client, you will be learning how to manage against the budget. This will tell you how honest your budget was and it will tell you when you need to make adjustments in how you manage the matter. If you plan to continue to value bill in to the future, this information feedback will be critical to your success. It will help you focus your efforts on higher value tasks and to manage your business with profitability in mind.

Both of these efforts can be kept relatively simple. Lawyers do have a tendency to over analyze and cripple their efforts by seeking perfection. Ron’s advice makes sense in that context. And in my recent diggings, I have found that firms can perform both of these tasks. At first they may be very manually intensive, but over time necessity will drive development of automation. And this automation will be laser-focused. Too often large firms serve up great technology that never gets used. In this situation – technology will be highly focused on meeting pressing needs. Thus I see it getting used and being quite valuable.

The Bottom Line! Firms already have tools to handle value billing. These are likely not the best tools, but they can get the job done. And once you start value billing, you will be motivated to implement better tools and will know exactly what you want them to do.

I have touted the benefits of using MicroBlogging tools like Twitter in the past as a good method of replacing listservs and as a way of creating a virtual water cooler to bounce ideas off of others. MicroBlogging – basically, a method of small electronic message communication – has many ways of streamlining communications in ways that e-mail cannot. I recently learned that one of Twitter’s former competitors, Jaiku, is not being killed by Google, but rather, it is being set free as open source software.

The details are not complete, but I’m going ahead and assuming that when they say open source, they mean that I will be able to load the MicroBlogging software on my own network and create a MicroBlogging service within my own network. Enjoying all of the benefits of small messaging services, with the security of having it behind the firewall. Jason, over at No Option for Law Firm has a great overview of what it means to have this type of service available in a secure environment.  (Note: there is an existing option for MicroBlogging within your organization by using Yammer.  However, Yammer is an external application and may make some IT directors hesitant to try it without having control over the backend of the program.)

Many of us work in environments where we have individuals that are highly intelligent, creative, and inquisitive.  Bouncing ideas off of these people would not only help you better handle the tasks that are set before you, it may also clue them into different ways of looking at problems, and help them handle task better.  Unfortunately, the people within your organization that you could benefit the most from having these “water cooler” discussions with, may be in different offices, or even in different countries.  E-mail just doesn’t give you the ability to toss out an idea to a community, and see if someone picks it up and tosses a suggestion back.  Imagine what would happen the first time you sent out one of those infamous “ALL EMPLOYEE” e-mails.   The other possibility is to try to revive “instant messaging” within the enterprise, but I think that is something that gives every technology leader within an organization a twitching eye.
Having an MicroBlogging resource within the enterprise allows you to start building these relationships without overburdening the email system.  It also allows you to throw things out there like links to a good article you just read, or to a competitors website with a comment of “can’t we do something like this here?”  Some of the messages will never be answered, but some will.  And, answered by someone that you may not have ever had the chance to work with before.  Breaking down barriers within the organization, and allowing the ability to really play off the wealth of knowledge that is contained within the organization.
Of course, there will be drawbacks to MicroBlogging – there’s always someone that decides that it is the perfect place to talk about the concert they went to last night, or how there are cookies in the break room.  But, to be honest, even these things are not all that bad.  IBM has had these Web 2.0 resource internally for over a year now, and they are encouraging any type of communications, even personal activity discussion.  The thought there is that people will better know other workers and feel that there is a true community within the organization.  
We all hear that communications is essential to a well-run workforce.  But, most organizations haven’t really evolved past the e-mail phase of electronic communications.  MicroBlogging within the enterprise can be the next step toward enabling employees to communicate without overloading either the email system, or each other.  I look forward to testing out Jaiku when it is released as open source.

Well I have been out-of-pocket this week since I traveled to D.C. to witness the Inauguration with my lovely wife. We had an incredible time. We had tickets in one of the front sections with seats and actually made it there in time to see the whole thing. We also made it to the reception being held in my firm’s office – on the parade route. When the President got out of the Stagecoach to walk, it was right in front of us. Incredible! One of my lessons from this experience is the value of knowledge. Since we had done our homework well, we had the right knowledge to make our way through the crowds. This meant when the train conductor announced he would not be stopping at the station we selected, we knew of an alternative route. We did so well, we defied The Post. That morning’s edition stated it would be “impossible” to make both the Inauguration and the parade. Yet we did. Yes – it’s stretching the definition of KM, but I had to post about this! [Edit: Special thanks to Ron and Stuart for hosting us!] Here’s a couple of shots taken with my phone. Giving the Inaugural Address The sun sets on the Capitol

If you’ve followed my “product review” blog posts in the past, you know that I am a sucker for presenting information in new and entertaining ways.  Well, I found a tool from IBM that really excites me about how information can be presented in ways that help the end-user quickly grasp large amounts of information in a better way.

IBM’s “ManyEyes” project is a tool in development by their wonderful AlphaWorks team.  I remember playing around with AlphaWorks projects early on in this decade, and haven’t really been paying attention to them over the past few years (apparently a dumb mistake on my part.)  Yesterday’s inauguration promoted the ManyEyes project by allowing people to view the inaugural speech by President Obama as a word tree.  ManyEyes allowed you to play around with the speech and see how phrases lead to statements, and helped see the theme of the speech in a new way.
That got me to playing around with other speeches, and I uploaded President Lincoln’s 1861 inaugural speech and found that there were two words that stuck out in his speech – “Union” & “Constitution.”  It was really insightful to use a tool like this to quickly understand the theme of the speech, and to make me look at it in a new way.
Well, it also turns out that ManyEyes doesn’t just allow you to present speeches or other pure text information in different ways, it also allows you to take datasets and present those in a visual presentation.  I started by taking information that we compiled in our “Big Law Firms onLinkedIn” posting from a few months ago, and uploaded the spreadsheet data intoManyEyes.  There were a few interesting visualizations that really gave me a different view of the data.  It is really helpful when you can take “flat” information and actually make it pop out at you.  

The last thing I’ve played with on ManyEyes (for this blog post anyway) is uploading geographical information.  I looked at the data on home foreclosures in the United States over the past 4 months, and uploaded that into ManyEyes to create a visualization map.  If I had enough time, the data could be even narrowed down to the specific county within each state.  
So, kudos to IBM’s AlphaWorks team for creating a product that allows us to visualize data in an easy to use fashion.  I suggest that if you are also interested in presenting information in more interactive and visual ways, go to IBM’s ManyEyes website and register to use the product.  There is no cost for the AlphaWorks registration, but do remember that anything you post can be seen by any other registeredAlphaWorks member.  So, no confidential information!!!
Enjoy, have fun, and share what you think!

One of the best sayings about the Internet is that it is a place “where no one knows you’re a dog.” However, tonight we are taking the leap and going to actually meet-up, or more appropriately, Tweet-Up with some of our local social media comrades. The first, of what I hope will be many, Houston Legal Tweets “Tweet-Up” will happen tonight at The Coffee Groundz (@coffeegroundz) in Mid-Town Houston. I’m hoping that it will be just more than the 3 Geeks there (mostly because I reserved a space for at least 10.) Although we are certainly not the first Tweet-up to ever happen, heck, it’s not even the first Tweet-up The Coffee Groundz has hosted. But, it should be really interesting to meet face-to-face with some of the people I’ve been having interaction with over the past few months, and actually putting a real face to a Tweet. If you are here in Houston tonight, we’ll be at The Coffee Groundz, 2503 Bagby, Houston, TX 77006 starting at 5:30. I hope to see you there. Bring your favorite mobile twitter device, or even your wifi laptop, and your best Twitter story. We won’t even require that you only tell the story in 140 character increments!! Hope to see you there!!!

P.S. – You can follow each of the 3 Geeks on Twitter:
@glambert – Greg
@lihsa – Lisa
@gnawledge – Toby

View Larger Map

He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious.
Sun-Tzu

To fully appreciate and understand the challenge of How To Alternative Bill, we should explore the various aspects of the challenge. This means we should explore all the reasons lawyers and firms have not embraced new ways of billing their services.

In Jason’s comment to my recent post, he made a telling comment: “The problem, as I see it for lawyers, is the fact they don’t want to carry the risk that the project will cost more than what the lawyer has charged.”

This presents one of the more pressing challenges for firms as it is based in fear. Lawyers are by nature, more than risk adverse. Instead or measuring and weighing risk, they are trained to eliminate it. In the business world, this approach is problematic as No Risk = No Reward. Lawyers get panicked when they ‘risk’ not getting 10% of their billing rates. How can we expect them to risk 100%?

The trick will be showing lawyers that 100% is not good enough. Risk is a two sided coin and they are only seeing the bad half of it.

Put that down on the list of to do’s for How To.