No Option for Law Firm

Their actual names are QR Codes, like the one to the left. They seem to be cropping up all over the place, including lawyers business cards.

I’m not sure about the benefits other than being a gimmick to attract attention. I posted as much this week on twitter and this led to a brief twitter conversation with @jeffrey_brandt, @emmalouwillcox, @KMHobbie and @geekchicy on the merits of QR Codes.

Some of the comments raised were:

• scan code smartphone, no typing – big advantage! Great for location based stuff (Maps)
• why should you need an app for it?!
• QR code on google.gl service link page, e.g. http://goo.gl/info/7nKy1#week
• I see biggest potential value of linking static hard copy to dynamic web content

I was also reminded of Microsoft’s attempt at its own version (as somebody pointed out “came up w/their own version of QR code. Quite silly!”), this then reminded me I did a blog post about Microsoft’s “Tag” just over a couple of years ago!

“Microsoft Tag – perfect for the paper file?”

I re-read my article and can’t help think now that a simple barcode would be as useful and so my thoughts come back to my original point made on twitter:

Are QR codes just a fad? What are benefits over urls? Seems bit of a gimmick to use an app to snap QR to get a link? Am I missing something?

And I don’t seem to be the only one, Google seems to be thinking the same. But I am going to install a QR application on my Windows Phone 7 and give it a go for a while. I’ll post what I think in the comments, but let me hear your thoughts on QR codes too.

OK the new kid on the block has grown fast, 974% last year apparently! Everyone’s talking about it, in the legal world it’s on every conference agenda. It’s big news.

So it comes as a shock when people question its value. And judging by recent articles and posts on the web the time is ripe to try and knock twitter from its podium:

• The recent Neilson reporting on the “twitter quitters”
• The big furore in the legal twitterverse with Larry Bodine’s article “Twitter Not Effective for Law Firm Marketing”
• And today Charles Christian posts he’s had enough with twitter (I would link to the post but it looks like he’s deleted his twitter account altogether too!)

And thus it get’s articles written about it, repeated and quoted in blogs and twitter itself (yes I understand the irony!)

To me though people are missing the point, twitter isn’t facebook or myspace so comparisons with them doesn’t work.  It is just a brand for micro blogging (there are plenty of others out there: kwippy, plurk, jaiku, identica etc). Yes, twitter as a brand may fail but micro blogging is here to stay.

Face-to-face, letters, telephone, fax, email, instant messaging (IM) and twitter (micro blogging)

They’re just all just forms of communication, nothing more nothing less. People will prefer one over the other, over a period of time one form may get used much more than others. But none of them are going away.

IM has been around for years, but it’s only just starting to move into the business world (outside IT depts). But in a short time it will take off in businesses and we’ll see email usage fall away, just as we saw the use of telephones fall once email exploded on the scene (don’t believe it, just ask any 16 year old how much they use email!).

Micro blogging will start to appear too in corporate environments as people experiment with laconi.ca and jaiku.

My guess though is that Larry Bodine doesn’t necessarily think twitter is a waste of time, he’s in marketing and one sure fire way to get your name out there is to shout the opposite to what everyone else is shouting (after all it was only 5 months ago that “Twitter is valuable to legal professionals”) . And everyone has taken notice, I bet Larry has more speaking engagements and requests for articles than at any time in the last 12 months!

He may actually be right on twitter not being an effective law firm marketing tool, but as for being “sucked into the black hole of buzz about twitter” it isn’t a black hole, twitter or micro blogging will be just like the telephone here to stay for a long time!

One of the benefits of twitter is the proliferation of desktop applications that are available to enhance the twitter experience (if you are still using twitter via the web then you want to try one or more of these applications). For a while I’ve used a combination of tweetdeck and thwirl with the later slowly getting less and less use.

Then this week I downloaded Seesmic Desktop and I’m a convert. They’ve basically copied tweetdecks best features and added to them.

That’s not to say I’ve given up on tweetdeck, there are plenty of opportunities for improvement in both camps. But I thought for a blog post though I’d highlight some of the things I see strengths in both and benefits of each.

Big benefits both bring over rivals:

• Multiple columns/decks, allowing you to slice up your tweet feed in ways to suit you. Either group by user lists, keep an eye on twitter searches for specific topics etc
• Integrate your facebook feed and post facebook statuses

Seesmic desktop benefits:

• Multiple accounts! This is the killer for me at the moment and my big reason for switching, you can integrate multiple twitter accounts into one application and then group people across all your accounts (I would like to see the ability to post to one of more of this accounts in one go though like ping.fm, rather than one at a time)
• Enhanced facebook integration. Not just see status timeline, but the whole facebook timeline

Tweetdeck benefits:

• Twitpic integration is nicer, like the fact you can stay in tweetdeck and not have to jump across to a web browser
• Twitscoop. See trending topics in a column/deck
• You can post to your twitter account and facebook in one post (seesmic is an either or)

There are indications that Tweetdeck will introduce multiple accounts, so maybe I’ll switch back shortly. But once that’s there, then there is probably only one feature that will make me switch again. The killer feature I’d like to see is:

• ability to either export my settings for import on another computer (regardless of OS) or better still have these stored online (in fact is it time for twitter to add groups as a permanent feature?)

Final note is for people with Windows Mobile devices. Get Pocketwit! It has many of the features on seesmic desktop and tweetdeck: multiple accounts, groups and integrated twitpic.

If anyone wants an example of why you should blog or use twitter, read on!

Since starting this blog back in January I have built up better relationships with legal IT suppliers than I have ever managed with any “account manager”. Through blogging and through twitter I’ve managed to discuss their products directly with the people inside those companies who are involved with developing them.

An example today relates to comments I’ve made over the past month in regard to Workshares products, first about their recent 5.2 SR2 release and then about a possible protect workflow problem here.I’ve been contacted a couple of times by Workshare through this blog and through twitter (@jesbreslaw), but today I got some good news relating to two specific points I raised in the posts indicated above.

1. My comment on 5.2 SR2 – “The PDF Combine functionality is only available from the local file system!!”
2. My comment on how Protect and Autonomy iManage Send & File together could annoy lawyers.

Here’s what Kevin Docherty, Product Manager had to say:

I just wanted to clarify a quick point that you mention… re “The PDF Combine functionality is only available from the local file system!!”- I suspect that you are using the first Beta as the second Beta fully supports DMS interaction.

This is great news as I see this peice of functionality being really useful for things like Bible creation etc. Then on the second point Kevin continues:

yes, we know that this may provide a challenge to the basic Protect workflow. We are obtaining a pre-release version of Autonomy very soon and will be looking to get it set up ASAP. We’re specifically targeting Protect Workflow in the SR 3 version of Professional (Oct/Nov) so I will hopefully have some feedback for you around this area soon – and how we will be looking to cope with the multiple Autonomy pop-ups.

I’ve no idea how Workshare found the blog, but regardless I’m impressed that they took time to read and respond to their customers. More companies should follow suit and get their product development and sales staff on twitter and other “web 2.0″ technologies to get dialogue going with people who use their applications.

If you want dates for the Workshare releases I got told the following:

• SR2 Beta refresh– April 17th

• SR2 General Availability -  May/June

• SR3 estimated release – Oct/Nov

Caught a tweet from @DavidGurteen yesterday linking to a blog post he’d set up to log KM twitterers/tweeters. He also linked through to another site already listing “Must-Follow Twitterers on Twitter | Knowledge Management“.

I’ve had a look around and can’t find an equivalent for twitterers in Legal IT, so I thought I’d start to compile one (if there is one out there already then let me know!).

So if you work for a law firms IT department or you’re a lawyer, KM practitioner, legal librarian, ex-employee of law firm or whatever with an interest in legal IT and you have a twitter account, then let me know.

Either comment on this post, DM or @ me on twitter (@nooption) OR use the contact page on this site to email me.

My intention is to create some high level groupings of twitterers on the page, something like:

• IT Management/Project Management/Risk
• Applications/Business Systems/Desktop
• Infrastructure/Network/Servers
• Front Line Services/Help Desk/Support
• Training
• General interest in Legal IT

So when you contact me if you can let me know the grouping you’d like to appear (or more than one if you like)?

UPDATE:

The page is now up, I haven’t broken it down as above as I decided against such a rigid structure. If you’re on the list and want to be removed -or- if you want to be added to the list, then contact me and let me know!

Legal IT twitterers

Enjoy!

Is there any point in me introducing Twitter? It’s hit the mainstream press now, so like Facebook if you’re online reading this blog you probably have heard of the latest internet hit. But have you heard of Jaiku? My guess is probably not.

Jaiku was founded in 2006 and then purchased by Google a year later, it’s basically a “twitter clone”. It generated a fair bit of publicity last week amongst Google’s announcements that it was culling a number of it’s offerings.

Now I know Jaiku is never going to beat Twitter just like Microsoft Live Search is never going to beat Google. Twitter is now the defacto standard for micro blogging. So why then title a blog post in such a way that it indicates that there is some scope for a challenge?

The answer is in this paragraph from the Google announcement.

we are in the process of porting Jaiku over to Google App Engine. After the migration is complete, we will release the new open source Jaiku Engine project on Google Code under the Apache License. While Google will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase, the service itself will live on thanks to a dedicated and passionate volunteer team of Googlers

I can see so many uses for Twitter internally in a law firm. IT notifications of service interruption, legal project teams working together globally on cases using it to communicate, marketing teams communicating pitch information, you could fill a page with knowledge management use alone etc. The problem though is security. You may use Twitter now, but I bet you keep your tweets vague enough to not give any personal or confidential information away?

Now with an open source Jaiku, you can have an internal Twitter. Hosted on your own secure network. Keeping it in your own network means you don’t have to limit the content. Also with it being open source you can guarantee that soon there will be Adobe Air clients, BlackBerry clients, Mac clients etc etc

This could do for internal social networks what Twitter has already done for external!