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.

Of course, being a geek, I have to love the fact that Google releases a comic book to explain its new browser. Google Chrome, Google’s new Internet Browser, is set for an early release tomorrow, due to the fact that some within Google leaked the information out a little earlier than planned.
From the comic book, and the blog release, it sounds like they are promising the same type of performance that IE 8.0 Beta is also promising. Tab functions that are “independant” (so if one crashes, it doesn’t bring down the entire browser); more powerful JavaScript engine; make it work on all operating systems (you know those other than Windows!); and the ultimate promise of faster and cleaner regardless of your operating system.

Now I get to try out IE 8.0 and Google Chrome and test them side-by-side!

NOTE:  I downloaded Chrome today, and so far, it is pretty tasty!!  The only thing I don’t like so far is how it handles MS Outlook’s Webmail.  The folders are not displayed like they are in IE, and it is not very good to get from folder to folder very easily.  
However, it is very fast, and I love the tabs feature and the way it previews the nine most visited sites on a new tab.  There are also a few plug-ins (i.e., FLASH) that you’ll need to get for Chrome to work right on most sites, but the downloads are quick and no reboot is necessary (unlike some browsers….)
I also thought it was funny that one of the Google Beta products called “Lively” will not work at all in Chrome.  You’d think they’d make their own products work right out of the box!

[From our friends at Hogan & Hartson]
“Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 InPrivate Browsing May Affect Online Activities.”
On August 25, 2008, Microsoft announced on its Internet Explorer Blog that Internet Explorer 8, for which Beta 2 was released on August 27, 2008, included a new suite of features designed to limit the information stored or shared when users browse the Internet. Collectively referred to as InPrivate and described in greater detail in Trustworthy Browsing – Guidance for Third Party Content Providers (rev. August 21, 2008), a whitepaper distributed by Microsoft to select web publishers and content providers, these new features include Deleting Browser History, InPrivate Browsing, InPrivate Blocking, and InPrivate Subscriptions. If these new features are successfully implemented as they are presently described in Microsoft’s documents, they may have a significant impact on a number of common Internet business practices, including online behavioral marketing and web traffic analytics.
August 28, 2008
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