Tools

Cool Online Tool: Scribd

Bill Gratsch — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:04:38 GMT

Ran accross a really cool online tool this week, iPaper from Scribd:

Scribd is a free, web-based, document sharing community and self-publishing platform that enables anyone to easily publish, distribute, share, and discover documents of all kinds. E-books, presentations, essays, academic papers, newsletters, photo albums, school work, and sheet music are just a few of the different kinds of documents you can publish and share on Scribd.
Scribd provides:

A simple yet powerful method of publishing and distributing your own electronic books and documents in a variety of formats - for free.
A vibrant global community of eager publishers, readers and collaborators that offer great content and constructive feedback.
A massive, perpetually growing library of open, community-generated content.
A secure, flexible private document managment system.

I don't know how long it has been available, but here is an example of iPaper at work: Warren Buffett's Annual Letter to Shareholders, which is normally posted as a pdf. Seemed faster and more efficient than viewing via Adobe Reader (even after it finally loads). It also apparently allows you to post other formats for easy online viewing without having to first convert to pdf. Finally, you can embed the a document into your own website similar to the Buffett letter example above.

Give the tool a test drive. Good stuff.

2 Posts to Check Out: Case Management, Search Marketing

Bill Gratsch — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 11:51:04 GMT

A couple of interesting posts to point out for a Monday morning.

Dan Goldstein at Page 1 Solutions offers some commentary on search marketing and lawyers: in his post Stop Thinking Like a Lawyer:

I am constantly amazed by the lawyers I speak with who want to show up for searches that consumers would never even consider typing in. If you are a lawyer, you have to remember that your training and experience put you in a whole different place than your clients. They don't think like you do - and they don't search like you do.

Tom Collins at More Partner Income writes about Case Management Alternatives for the Law Firm:

Last week I had the opportunity to serve on the faculty of a Tennessee Bar session on technology. During the day-long meeting, I served on a panel dealing with case management options. Vendor representatives on the panel included Legal Files, Time Matters™, Amicus®Attorney, and Prolaw®.

Mr. Collins' post is fairly detailed and lays out some of the key benefits of the various products as well as talking about how law firms should approach case management software. He ends his post with the following paragraph, which I thought was right on point and is a piece of the software implementation process that too often gets overlooked:

In many respects, any tool you use for case management is a blank sheet of paper. To successfully implement case management, you have to be committed to training and investing the resources to set up the system to fit your practice areas. You have to continue to invest to keep your system fine-tuned to those needs. It is not something you just take out of the box and start using. What comes out of the box is just the beginning.

The Web 2.0 Video Everyone is Talking About

Bill Gratsch — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 12:22:57 GMT

Amazing how quickly a video clip can make the rounds these days.

Here is the clip Web 2.0 in just under 5 minutes. It was provided by Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University, which is a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography. Here is the companion blog post, The Machine is Us/ing Us Discussion, if you want to know more. Good stuff.

New Feature: Blawgosphere Statistics

Bill Gratsch — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 22:30:49 GMT

A new feature was added to Blawg today that displays some high level statistics about the blawgosphere. In large part this has been added in response to visitor feedback and I hope the community finds the statistics useful. You will see these statistics on the home page and right column at Blawg.com.

I don't claim that every single blawg in the world is currently part of Blawg's directory or captured in these statistics. Indeed, I am very confident in saying that there are more blawgs out there. The numbers are increasing by the day and it would be nearly impossible to immediately add every new blawg worldwide. This may change in time, but for now consider these statistics the low end estimate of the blawgosphere.

Here are the current numbers:

Total Blogs:   1,220
Active Blogs:    888
Total Posts: 41,458
Posts Today:     547

The main question you may ask is what is the difference between 'Total' and 'Active.' The answer is simply whether a given weblog is actively posting new content. Time frames for posting new content are very reasonable and based on what I have seen over the last four years in tracking blawgs. My experience has been that some people take breaks, for myriad reasons, and then ultimately start re-posting. In short, a blawg may not be active at a given date in time, but that does not mean it is abandoned. For those blawgs that are clearly abandoned, they simply will be removed.

I hope these statistics start to give some sense of the growing size of the blawgosphere, both in numbers of blawgs and posts. If you have any thoughts or comments on these or other statistics that you would like to see, please feel free to let me know by clicking here.

Resolutions, YouTube, MySpace, Marketing and Advertising

Bill Gratsch — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 12:53:09 GMT

Ari Kaplan wrote a nice article for Law.com this week, saying Don't Break Your New Year's Resolutions on Technology. In the article, Mr. Kaplan highlights some interesting uses of web technologies, including a lawyer who produced a video for YouTube and another who has developed his own MySpace website. According to the article, neither lawyer suggests that new business started knocking down their door as a result of their initial forays onto the web, but both felt the effort was worthwhile.

This latter statement made me think about all of the more traditional marketing and advertising that is done by lawyers. I don't pretend to be an expert on either subject, but looking strictly at the question of whether lawyers get a good return on investment for any of their marketing and advertising, it seems to me that some common sense can be a reasonable guide. If a lawyer spends money on a billboard advertisement, perhaps he/she will know how many cars a day drive by the sign. Perhaps they are even sophisticated enough to use a special phone number available only on the billboard, so as to capture how much new business or leads they get as a result of the billboard. Or, maybe, they just ask each potential new client 'how they heard about us?" Similarly, an advertisement in print media may come with metrics such as number of subscribers and maybe follow up surveys wherein an attempt is made to gauge how many people recalled the advertisement or the name of the lawyer of firm behind it.

But, in either case, it seems to me that attempting to specifically measure how much new business a lawyer or law firm receive as a result of any advertisement or marketing effort is an inexact science. That is, they may never know exactly how many new matters from existing clients or new clients themselves resulted from the effort. And, that is okay with most. Mainly, because they believe that these efforts are all part of a larger, longer term effort to raise awareness of the lawyer and/or law firm and the skills and knowledge they can offer. At the end of the year, if the lawyer or firm increased business by, say, 20%, they dollars spent on advertising and marketing could be deemed as money well spent (i.e., a nice return on investment).

Which brings me back to the lawyers highlighted in Mr. Kaplan's article. I am not suggesting YouTube and MySpace is for everyone. For many lawyers and law firms, use of such sites simply would not fit into their overall image and strategic plans. Instead, podcasting, a weblog or online advertising might be a better fit. However, for those who do believe YouTube and MySpace fits, the use of such sites are not much different in my mind than a billboard or phonebook advertisement. At the end of the day, the goal in each case is all about raising awareness.

One of the lawyers in the article is a solo who handles petty drug offenses. Another is just starting a solo practice in Florida from scratch. They may well have determined that in raising awareness via the web, they are also using the most likely platform for reaching their potential clients. Potential clients who may be more likely visiting websites like MySpace and YouTube every day rather than leafing through a phonebook somewhere.

In the end, my common sense look at legal marketing and advertising tells me that when you are dealing with an inexact science, trying new mediums and communication streams is not a waste of time. You don't have to jettison the methods you have used for years; but maybe augmenting these methods with something new could pay some dividends. Read Mr. Kaplan's article, check out some of the great blawgs from Legal Marketers for ideas, and just think about what new technology you may want to try this year...it is still January, after all, so there is plenty of time for all of those resolutions.

Google, Applied...Blawgosphere Search

Bill Gratsch — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 21:47:40 GMT

Catching the wave of Google's Custom Search announcement today, I thought I would offer up my own bite of the apple, a blawgosphere search incorporating Blawg's directory.

More to come on this later, but for now, give it a whirl here:

http://www.blawg.org/blawgsearch.html

blawgcoop - the blawgers co-op

Bill Gratsch — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 20:00:09 GMT

I have been noticing recently a few blawgs utilizing the domain blawgcoop.com. Investigating a bit further, I found a blawg editing and hosting service called just that, blawgcoop.com.

The site provides this overview: "Are you a 0L (pre-law), law student, law professor, or legal practitioner? Would you like to have a weblog running movable type or wordpress w/out the hassle of setting that up for yourself? If so, blawgcoop is for you. The goal of blawgcoop is to provide law bloggers, or blawgers, an inexpensive but robust home for blawging."

Judging from the site's blawgroll, there are a handful of blawgs up and running on this service. I have not heard anything specific about the service and the features it may offer, so if you are interested, you may want to investigate on your own. Just follow the contact links on the site itself.

Tip: Quick Subscribe with Newsgator Reader

Bill Gratsch — Sat, 11 Sep 2004 08:00:00 GMT

For anyone using the Newsgator feed reader, here is a quick tip that I have found useful (and I cribbed this from a recent Newsgator feed item):

"Sometimes when browsing the web, you'll notice a site you wish to subscribe to. You can do this right from Internet Explorer in two different ways.

First, make sure NewsGator is running. Then, use one of the following methods to subscribe:

Right-click on a feed

If you see an orange XML icon like this , or a link to a feed (typically with text like "Syndicate this site" or something similar), you can subscribe immediately by right-clicking on it, and selecting "Subscribe in NewsGator" from the popup menu..."

As I always try and include a blawg's feed (if one exists) next to a mention of the blawg itself, if you wish to quickly subscribe to the feed, just follow the instructions noted above.

Tools: RSS Calendar

Bill Gratsch — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 18:18:23 GMT

You have to appreciate the wide variety of uses that developers are finding for the headline syndication formats (RSS, Atom, RDF, etcetera) that have evolved alongside weblogs.

RSS Calendar is one such example. RSS Calendar allows you to input your calendar into its online system, which in turn outputs your calendar as an RSS feed. The feed can then be shared and consumed by anyone interested in the calendar using many of the top feed readers on the market. Moroever, each feed item can be directly imported into your Outlook Calendar.

I signed up (it's free) and gave RSS Calendar a test using NewsGator as my feed reader. It all worked just as advertised.

How would people use such a service? In my mind, people administering a large group calendar could benefit. In the legal vertical, think of an extranet site where a multitude of parties collaborate and communicate on a legal matter (e.g., Superfund cases). The person responsible for making sure everyone involved in the matter gets calendar updates may face a time-consuming task of frequently emailing Outlook appointments to large groups of people. In addition, each time an appointment is sent out to the entire audience it may be that only a fraction of the people actually care enough about a given calendar item to actually add it to their personal calendar.

I like the idea of the site administrator being able to send out a monthly calendar in one shot. Site users receive the entire calendar in their reader, preview items of interest from the various appointments, and then pick and choose which appointments they will import into their own personal calendar.

Finally, since the calendar is now "XML-friendly," I wonder if law firms could grab the feed and display it on a practice group intranet home page (i.e., the Environmental Law group's internal home page)?

Functionality aside, ideas like RSS Calendar offer good food for thought and makes one wonder more and more about the future of information-sharing.

Blogger Knowledge Base

Bill Gratsch — Sat, 03 Jul 2004 08:00:00 GMT

For users of the Blogger weblog editor, Google has posted a new knowledge base called Blogger Knowledge. Starting at this page, you can find links to all sorts of tips and tricks related to Blogger, including ways to customize your weblog and add new features and functions. The articles are typically concise and brief, and seem to be genuinely useful. On the whole, Blogger Knowledge is a nice addition.