My co-blogger Greg has already posted a great list of DR lessons, so I thought I would add a thought of my own.

My DR/KM recommendation is for an organization, instead of individuals. For the duration of Ike and his aftermath, I have lived electronically on my BlackBerry. I tried not to complain too much, since I at least had access to information. But it became very apparent not many resources are well-tuned for mobile access.

I know my other co-blogger Lisa may take issue with this comment as she goes to great lengths to format websites for mobile viewing. Even though they are viewable, they are not very WAP friendly, as navigation and browsing are tedious.

And beyond web sites, I could have benefited from mobile access to systems and information. Although I was able to limp along and BS my way through many tasks, I wasn’t able to really live on my BB.

For KM, I think we need to look ahead and move more purposely in a WAP direction. What good is knowledge if it’s not accessible when I need it most?

The good news is that all of the geeks are alive and well after Ike.  The great news is that one of us got to actually go on a vacation and left the other two to pick up the virtual limbs left on our blog.

Here are just some quick things I learned from Ike:
  1. If you are not directly effected by a disaster, you truly don’t know the frustration that occurs with trying to do the simplest of tasks.
  2. If your IT department is in another city, they will attempt to ‘test’ your system during the crisis, and forget that you need access to your communication tools.  (Like taking down email access over the weekend to ‘test’ a new product.)
  3. If the power comes on across the street, you will learn to despise your neighbors (most of whom you’ve never met before.)  It also means that it will be days before the electric company gets around to restoring power to your home!
  4. Your neighbor, that you thought was the dumbest one on the block, is the only one smart enough to have bought a generator in advance of the storm.  
  5. You have a lot of really nice people in your neighborhood.
  6. You have an old lady in your neighborhood that you’ve never met before, but she still yells at everyone to get off her lawn (even though you’re removing all of the branches from it.)
  7. It is good to have family.
  8. It is good to have friends.
  9. You learn that by acting locally, you affect so many, and it can make a difference on a regional scale.
  10. Text Messaging (SMS) is great, but not fail-proof.
  11. My Amazon Kindle was a surprising resource with its basic web service.
  12. Twitter was nice to let my friends know how I was fairing.
  13. My power inverter that I bought for my car (so the kids could watch movies on trips) is a great tool to power a few items (like a fan and other low-powered things.)
  14. Pool water can help refill the toilet tank!!
  15. Next time there is a hurricane coming this way, I’m buying ice four-days in advance!!
  16. I’m a lucky guy to have friends, family and neighbors that helped keep me sane through it all!
  17. There are still other friends and neighbors that are out there that need a little help to keep sane through it all.
  18. It is good to be home!

In case you didn’t know this, all the geeks on this Blog are based out of beautiful warm and sunny Houston, Texas (oh, okay….  hot and humid Houston – but it is still beautiful!)  And, unless you’ve been under a rock, we have a little hurricane coming down on us in the next couple of days.

This brings me to the “geeky” part of the posting.  How does one stay in contact with others during these type of natural disasters??  When California had its earthquake a couple of months ago, the cell phones went out, but the land line phones stayed operational.  That just kind of goes against what I thought would happen.  And, because I’m all geeky, I don’t have a land line at my house, so I’m assuming that the cell phone towers will be the first thing to fail during the storm.
So, how does one communicate with no land line and no cell phone service??  According to Ernie the Attorney, the answer is “Twitter.”  
I thought I’d try this out during Gustav, but that storm went east of us.  But, it looks like we’re dead on for a nice little bout of rain and wind with Mr. Ike, so I’ll get to put Twitter to the test.
If you have nothing else to do, or you have some sick morbid sense of humor and want to follow the situation through IKE, you can follow my “Twittering”!!  

There was a lot of hulla-baloo today about MicroSoft’s latest attempt to recapture the market after Apple achieved wide appeal with its PC v Mac ads.Following the theme of the famed Seinfold show, Jerry Seinfeld’s presence assures that this commercial is about nothing.Lots of critics that it was unfunny. Not I. A giggle did escape . . . A thanks to my proverbial right-hand woman, Whitney Palmer, for spotting this story. More thoughts on the commercial can be read here:http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/18257

Search Engine Optimization is a constant game of cat and mouse between the Search Engine companies and the webmasters of the world.  Seems like last week, one of the biggies on the webmaster side got caught by the biggie on the search engine side, and in the process, I learned a new industry phrase called “link juicing.”  Now, I’m sad to say that all of those first page links out there may need to have an *asterisk* placed beside them.

The story goes like this:
1.  Findlaw, due to its being owned by Thomson Reuters, and being a highly visited web site, gets a special ranking by Google, and in turn, Google promotes links found on Findlaw to a higher ranking (thus pushing some law firms higher on the results page than others.)
2.  Seems that Google asks for those websites like Findlaw to tag any advertised links as such, and the ranking for these links will get downgraded and will keep the “true” links at the higher ranking.
3.  Findlaw allegedly was selling “high-octane” links on its site to law firms and others promoting the links as a way to increase traffic to the firms’ sites at the tune of $2,000 a month.
4.  Loose lips (emails) at Findlaw’s sales team, sent out an email that promoted this in a way that caught the attention of Google.
5.  Google then lowered Findlaw’s ranking in its PageRank.
6.  Findlaw apologized, tagged the links as “paid links” and Google then returned Findlaw’s higher PageRank value.
7.  whew…
8.  Now, I’m sure there are going to be some law firms lining up for a refund.
Legal Technology Blog is adding information on this story as it comes out.
I’m assuming that the Search Engine Optimization team at Thomson Reuters is going back to the drawing board and determining how they can leverage their highly ranked websites like Findlaw against the search engines out there in order to sell those links again.  If Google and other search engines are finding ways to test for  “link juicing,” then I’m sure the webmasters are out there finding the next method to work around the testing.  

At the ILTA conference I was introduced to 3 different legal KM blogs of note. They are:

Caselines has a Litigation KM angle to it (but not e-discovery – which is good). I saw David Hobbie present on Litigation KM – which is his thing at Goodwin Proctor. Good presentation showing great KM implementation. Nice KM blog to watch.

KM Space, which is the blog of Doug Cornelius. I also saw Doug present, then noticed him in a number of sessions with his laptop open. He was blogging live from the sessions. Cool stuff and nicely thought-out posts.

LawyerKM is the last one. This blog included live ILTA posts as well, but the author shows as anonymous (with a little effort you can find his name). Being at a large firm, I can understand that approach. In any event, another well-written legal KM blog to follow.

Although this time convergence is not in-house counsel cutting its number of outside firms, its software providers cutting the number of platforms they work on.

One example is the partnership announced at the ILTA conference between Interwoven and Lexis. The two are combining their products into one offering Lexis is calling “Lexis Search Advantage.” This combines the intelligence of Total Search with the enterprise search power of IUS. As Doug Stansfield noted in their announcement meeting, this creates a unique combination of Work Product Retrieval with Enterprise Search. IUS allows you to search multiple data sources, then Search Advantage applies its legal value-add of marking up the results with case citations and Shepardizations.

On its own, this combination is interesting. But it is also reflective of the industry moving towards converged platforms and systems. Large firms especially these days struggle with supporting too many platforms and search engines. So this trend is welcome relief.

After seeing more demos than one person should in the span of four days, I can see this trend taking shape in many corners of the market. Both Interwoven and Lexis separately talked about taking all of their products and moving them towards “unified platforms.” This effort will not happen overnight, but the path is clear.

I suppose now it will just become a race among the various vendors. Being last in this game will probably be quite expensive.

After not seeing much value in the Martindale-Hubbell – LinkedIn deal and after waiting (and not alone) to see more value come from social networking, I admit Lexis may be on to something. What many of us have been waiting to see is some definable business value to come from social networking. There is some value in building up your network, but leveraging those connections into a business proposition has much greater value.

LexisNexis owns the InterAction CRM software, having purchased Interface Software. They announced at the ILTA conference that the next release of InterAction (Version 5.6 SP1) will include LinkedIn functionality. Contacts within InterAction can include LinkedIn icons which will pull in the LinkedIn tools, focused on how you and those you know are connected to the contacts. This adds the power of social networks directly into a CRM application.

This new connection between InterAction and LinkedIn equals business value.

Some firms will be challenged by this value. Social Networks are not universally valued by firms, as they can threaten IT and data security. And they challenge the dogmatic hoarding of contacts by many lawyers.

Whatever a firm’s point-of-view, overlooking tools that bring value to your firm and clients is not good business.