While this isn't earth-shattering news, it is another example of the influence of social networking: With the growth of social networking comes a change in blogging protocol. In the past, when mentioning a person in a blog post, bloggers would have to decide where the hyperlink would direct the reader, usually to the person's website, or blog--if they had one. Sometimes the link would be a direct link to person's bio page or "About Me" page on the blog or website. Often, there just wasn't a good link. However, the tipping point is coming as more and more hyperlinks are now directed to a person's on-line profile at one or more of the popular social networking sites. With this explosion of on-line profiles, it is possible to mention more people and add more links to blog posts. That, too, can benefit the search rankings for the blogger.
Just one more way social networks are changing the way people do business!
Matt Homann has more good ideas than just about anyone else I know. And when it comes to legal
"conferences" there is no one who does it better. I attended the first LexThink event in Chicago a few years ago, and still think it was one of the more rewarding learning experiences I have had as a lawyer. Several years later, I engaged Matt to consult on a legal conference I was co-organizing, to make it more interesting and vibrant for attendees. Once again, his ideas were a hit.
So I am pleased to learn that Matt has designed and organized LexThink Innovate, the latest in his LexThink events (I hate to call them "conferences" because is is so unlike other legal conferences). Billed as part "unconference", part retreat, LexThink is meant to engage and challenge all participants. It requires thought, participation, and deeper commitment to action than your typical CLE conference. Rest assured, this is not a marketing consultant selling you an expensive service; Matt is a former practicing lawyer who has devoted the last five years to rethinking how lawyers can come together to innovate their law firms.
Matt's latest innovation for LexThink Innovate? It is the first "Name Your Own Price" legal event. Yep, you pay the value of what you think you got out of it--after you attend! Guaranteed. In short, he's turning “you get what you pay for,” into “you’ll pay for what you got!”
With that kind of creativity and confidence going in, you know it is going to be different. I don't know exactly what Matt has in store, but if it is like his past conferences, it will be well worth every penny.
Based on Apple's astounding success with their App Store, several phone makers have or will soon follow with their own versions of on-line application stores. (I have over two dozen apps on my iPhone and I continue to be amazed at their usefulness and, in some instances, their playfulness!) These apps really expand the functionality of phones beyond the applications that come installed on the phone. So if you are in the market for a new phone, check out what else is available (or will soon be available) to help you in your business before you buy the new smart phone:
I regularly subscribe to just two podcasts--This Week In Technology (TWIT) and Lawyer2Lawyer from the Legal Talk Network. Although I have been a faithful subscriber, I have not been a faithful listener as of late. (The short mea culpa story is that I used to listen while commuting to work, but lost my iPhone-to-car-stereo transmitter that makes listening a snap.)
Last week, I had the pleasure of participating in the North Carolina Bar Unconference with Lawyer2Lawyer co-host, Bob Ambrogi, and realized I had been missing some good stuff on his podcasts. So with new FM transmitter cable in hand, I listened to the last three Lawyer2Lawyer podcasts this week. It didn't take long to recall why I had been a faithful listener in the past.
Bob, and his co-host Craig McLaughlin, use a talk show format to cover a variety of topical issues of interest to our profession. Recent topics include the future of the billable hour, lawyers using Twitter for marketing, legal implications of closing Guantanamo prison, looking at Abraham Lincoln the lawyer, and a legal perspective on the economic bailout.The guests are always first-rate, the host's questions are always probing, and the resulting podcasts are always valuable.
I am pleased to say it didn't take me long to get back in the habit of listening to Lawyer2Lawyer. Rest assured, I'm not the only faithful (albeit, renewed) listener--Lawyer2Lawyer was chosen by lawyers in 2008 as the Best Podcast by the ABA Journal and its readers.
Subscribe via iTunes or listen directly from the Legal Talk Network website.
The current economic recession is having an impact on the legal profession, but like in any financial turmoil, those who plan ahead get ahead.
Despite a natural reaction to cut expenses and hunker down to weather the economic storm, entrepreneurial lawyers are still pressing ahead with business plans. Entrepreneurial lawyers are using this brief slowdown in their billable hours to add new practice areas, learn new skills, expand their marketing efforts, cross-train staff, and make informed decisions about the future of their law firms. There is no better place to that than the upcoming ABA TECHSHOW.
The 2009 ABA TECHSHOW features almost three full days of outstanding educational sessions covering e-discovery, Web 2.0 marketing, e-mail management, "techno-ethics", document management, affordable collaboration tools, and much more.
Despite a slow-down in transactional work, litigators know the now-constant march of e-discovery will not wait for the economy to recover; savvy rainmakers know that now is the time to invest in learning new marketing techniques that utilitize new social media, such as LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook to expand your business into a larger marketplace; and law firms of all dimensions can benefit from the amazingly perceptive forward-thinking of ABA TECHSHOW keynote speaker, Richard Susskind, author of the provocative new book,The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services, and author of the 1996 landmark book,The Future of Law: Facing the Challenges of Information Technology. And those are just a few of the sessions and activities at the conference.
While this conference is about technology and important business issues facing our profession, it is not just for the technology guru in large firms. The conference has over a dozen sessions specifically for the solo and smaller firm lawyers in America. This conference is by and for lawyers, featuring the best educational sessions and networking opportunities of any legal conference all year.
OK, call me a bit biased--I sit on the TECHSHOW planning board. However, as a practice management advisor to law firms across the US, my goal is to help lawyers succeed in the business of practicing law. Because I know what this year's sessions, speakers, and activities have to offer, I can whole-heartedly recommend you join us for what could likely be your most profitable three days all year.
Join us April 2-4 at the Chicago Hilton. Register before the February 28 early-bird deadline, and be sure to book your flights to Chicago now because there are some great airfare deals from many parts of the country.
Is it just me, or are the spellings of Internet-related words changing before our very eyes? I mean, let's start right there with the word "Internet". In the early days, the "Internet" was the Internet. It was a proper noun. (There now is the entire limit of my knowledge of grammar.) These days--a mere 15 years later, it seems that it is now the "internet". In trying to figure out whether the world is changing or people are getting sloppy with their spelling, I headed out to Google to check a few web sites and suddenly got distracted: Google asked do I mean "web site" or "website". Suddenly I knew how Louis Black feels: Ooooooowww, it felt like my head was going to explode!
Web site or website? In the 90s it was ALWAYS two words, but now it seems to be missing the space and turns up as one word. Is this a grammatical attack or is it an effort to save millions of people from hitting the spacebar a few times less per month?
Thank God, "spacebar" is one word or my head would have exploded before finishing this sentence.
So what's the deal? How can any self-respecting blogger figure out what is correct or what is perceived as bad grammar. I ain't never been a bad speller before.
So I turned to Wikipedia for some quick information and was greeted by this discussion of "Internet capitalization":
In formal usage, the word Internet is traditionally treated as a proper noun and written with a capital first letter. . .In English grammar, proper nouns
are capitalized. However, critics argue that some things that are
unique yet distributed, such as "the power grid", "the telephone
network", and even "the sky", are not considered proper nouns, and are
thus not capitalized.
Since the advent of the 'dot-com' era, a significant number of publications have switched to using internet. Among them are The Economist, the Financial Times, The Times (of London), and the Sydney Morning Herald. As of 2005, most publications using internet appear to be located outside of North America although one American news source, Wired News,
has adopted the lowercase spelling. Throughout the English-speaking
world, including North America, lower-case "internet" is more prevalent
than Internet in informal sources, such as blogs, personal web pages, and chat rooms.[citation needed]
In the Internet standards community, which includes the IETF, usage
historically differentiated between the common noun (lower case first
letter) and the proper noun (upper case). That is, "the Internet"
referred to the Internet, while "an internet" (lowercase i) referred to any internetwork or multiple inter-connected Internet Protocol networks.
Another example is IBM's TCP/IP Tutorial and Technical Overview (ISBN 0-7384-2165-0) from 1989, which stated that:
The words internetwork and internet is [sic] simply a contraction of
the phrase interconnected network. However, when written with a capital
"I", the Internet refers to the worldwide set of interconnected
networks. Hence, the Internet is an internet, but the reverse does not
apply. The Internet is sometimes called the connected Internet.
The Internet-internet distinction fell out of common use after the
Internet Protocol Suite was widely deployed in commercial networks in
the 1990s.
I'm sure glad that's settled! Lots of good information and hyperlinks, but why didn't the Wikipedia entry just say that people are using both these days and leave it at that? Or are they letting me choose to follow the New York Times or The Economist, the Associated Press or Wired News? Oh my God, Louis, I feel the pressure building again!
OK, so maybe the evolution of "website" and "web site" will be more clear and easier to understand.
Dictionary.com cites this entry from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Houghton Mifflin 2006):
web·site or Web site
(wěb'sīt')
n.
A set of interconnected webpages, usually including a homepage,
generally located on the same server, and prepared and maintained as a
collection of information by a person, group, or organization.
Usage Note: The transition from World Wide Web site to Web site to website
as a single uncapitalized word mirrors the development of other
technological expressions which have tended to take unhyphenated forms
as they become more familiar. Thus email is gaining ground over the forms E-mail and e-mail, especially in texts that are more technologically oriented. Similarly, there is an increasing preference for closed forms like homepage, online, and printout.
Much easier to grasp that explanation, which also conveniently brings us to the last spelling battle: Is it "email" or "e-mail?" It seems that the hyphen is getting squeezed out here too, and not one English teacher or grammatical know-it-all is crying "foul." However, before I accept the dicta in the Usage Note above, I need to confirm with another source.
So over to the dictionary at NetLingo.com--a site known for understanding text messaging acronyms and more. The NetLingo dictionary lists it both ways because, well, people spell it both ways. Our old friend Wikipedia introduces a third option--"eMail"--as an original spelling of the word, but I haven't seen that spelling in years. Once again, Wikipedia lists competing dictionary and style guides that advocate one spelling or the other. Help me stay calm, Louis!
Finally, I found The Fiction Desk, a blog for fiction writers that took a novel approach to the issue. (Yes, pun intended!) Although the blog looked at the spellings in various dictionaries, it also looked at how leading technology and media companies use the word:
Apple uses email
Microsoft usually uses e-mail but sometimes email
Adobe uses both
Google uses email
Yahoo uses email
CNN uses e-mail
Perhaps maintaining the famous “BBC balance”, the BBC website uses e-mail within news stories but seems to use email on the rest of the site
The New York Times uses e-mail
direct.gov.uk uses email
usa.gov uses both
In short, there is no one right answer. All that research, but I'd be right anyway I decide to spell it. Both spellings are correct. That's not the way it was when I was in school. Maybe that's what's wrong with America today. Or maybe that's what's right with America today?
I recently posted this to the ABA TECHSHOW Blog, and cross-post here:
They
seem to have exploded around us: those new profile-housing, connection
building, relationship highlighting, social and business on-line
networks, such as LinkedIn, Legally-Minded, Plaxo, Facebook,
and others. They are now hard to ignore.
Many of us receive multiple
invitations almost daily to join these networks. The evolution is often
the same: first we ignore the invitations and the world of social
networking. But after we receive more invitations, then our curiosity
is piqued. So we create an account with one network (often LinkedIn),
fill in the basic profile, accept a few invitations, then ignore it.
But after accepting a few more invitations we decide maybe there is
something to this new social networking thing, so we add more to our
profile and attempt to add to our out-bound connections. Next thing we
know, we are spending several hours a week tweaking or expanding our
on-line social presence. The time consumed becomes greater and greater,
but to what end? Where is this all headed? What return will I get on my
investment of time and energy? What will happen if I don't adapt now?
As
businesspeople, we need to learn to manage our on-line networks so they
work for us and not waste our time. We have to learn to understand the
potential and limits of this new technology that may
significantly change the way we interact and communicate with
colleagues, clients, and potential clients. There are tools to help,
such as Ping.fm and TwitterFeed, which make it easier to "write once/update many", but it takes time to learn the benefits and pitfalls of social networking.
Be sure to join us at TECHSHOW 2009 to
learn more about social networking and other new technologies to
enhance your business presence and increase the flow of new clients
into your firm.
After years of debate, Wi-Fi Internet has come to commercial air travel. Although the technology has been authorized by the US government for several years, and Virgin America Airlines has used it for their own on-board entertainment system, several airlines are now rolling it out for use by passengers.
Delta, American, and Virgin America are all offering Wi-Fi Internet service on limited flights at present, but have plans to expand across their fleets in 2009. The service is priced at $9.95 for flights of three hours or less, and $12.95 for longer flights.
It's not hard to see why airlines are looking for ways to increase revenue on a per passenger basis. However, flight attendants are not happy with in-flight Wi-Fi. In addition to safety concerns about terrorists communicating while on-board, the flight attendants union is concerned about policing passenger use of appropriate web surfing, according to an article in the International Herald Tribune.
Other commentators have suggested that wi-fi Internet access will make the skies less friendly by taking away the last quiet sanctuary of the wary business traveler. Let's face it, being stuck at 37,000 feet without being connected to the rest of the world is a perfect excuse to catch up on sleep, in-flight movies or a good novel. With in-flight Wi-Fi, anyone with a Wi-Fi-enabled smart phone will now have no excuse not to clear out a few hundred old e-mails while in flight.
Those passengers with Skype on their laptop computers may even have to join in a few more boring conference calls rather than shutting down for a little shut-eye. It is unclear at the moment whether these in-flight services will support VoiP.
I do use my flight time to catch-up on work via my trusty MacBook Pro, but I also like to relax a bit. If nearby passengers will now be able to talk about surgical procedures or the finer points of selling candles at house parties, I think I may have to start packing a parachute. (Yes, I have noise-canceling headsets, but they only help so much!)
I have looked forward to Wi-Fi for years, but now I am having second thoughts. I have not flown early Wi-Fi adopters American or Delta (for good reason, in my book), but I do like Virgin America. I fly United much of the time, but they are going to be slow to roll it out this year, starting first with the LA to NYC flights. In any event, I hope to give it a try soon. In the meantime, let me know your Wi-Fi experiences on recent flights.
