klyjen.blog

Every couple of months, I receive a brochure advertising the works of Edward Tufte, author of Visual Explanations, Envisioning Information, and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. (Side note: he has seiminars in the DC area on May 11, 12, and 13, 2004.) Included in the brochure is a brief advertisement for The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, with an absolutely fabulous companion photograph/poster.

My favorite quote from the poster? Comrade, why are we having this meeting? The rate of information transfer is asymptotically approaching zero!

I hate hate HATE almost ALL Powerpoint presentations. They have reduced professionals to five-year olds with crayons: ooh! Add some color here! Add a swirly bullet point there! The rare, useful Powerpoint presentation tends to involve pictures and processes--things like mapping out the steps of a workflow process, for example, where the ability to move forward and backward through the process is important and something like a chalkboard or whiteboard would involve a lot of re-creating of the wheel.

See also: The Making of the Gettysburg Address using the Auto-Content Wizard

Posted by Jen at 03:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Andy Rosenberg, running for the Democratic nomination to Congress from the 8th District of Virginia (which is to say, from my town) has revamped his campaign website with a very nice and tasteful flash introduction. He and his campaign managerare still blogging (RSS 1.0 feed) and the comments are active as well. If you are local or if you are interested in the politics of Virginia's 8th District (currently represented in Congress by Rep. Jim Moran), check out Andy's site.

Posted by Jen at 06:13 PM | Permalink

1. In my TalkLeft news I found a link to The Revealer, a blog billing itself as "a daily review of religion and the press."

2. Radley Balko (of The Agitator) has a piece on Tech Central Station on God and Globalization.

It is as if the ghost of my undergraduate program has possessed NewsGator.

Posted by Jen at 05:13 PM | Permalink

Registration for LawNet 2004: A New Tradition (LawNet's annual educational conference) opened last week. This is by far the premier conference for legal technology professionals, full of substantive educational opportunities (with over fifteen different tracks of educational sessions) and ample opportunities for peer networking. Phoenix will be the coolest destination this August; check it out. (Note to vendors: there are still a few vendor slots available, I believe, so if you want an opportunity to get in front of close to 800 law firm IT decision makers, think about registering.)

Posted by Jen at 09:30 AM | Permalink

...perfectly described.

Note to sys admins: the losers here are Your Users. As edbott says--"if you've got a problem with spam, fix it yourself. Don't push it back on me." Amen. At least a few law firms attempted this sort of system for a while; I'd get a notification back after a post to a LawNet listserv; the notification required that I forward the message to [thisaddress] to bypass the spam filter. I'm certainly not going to bother with that, I remember thinking. If you want a free answer to your question, don't make it difficult for me to respond to you. Your spam problem does not mean you can impose extra costs on me and expect me to pay up.

Posted by Jen at 06:30 PM | Permalink

Following up on Friday's post, today's review of my aggregator delivered Social-Networking Vendors Set Their Sights on the Enterprise (March 19, 2004, eWeek).

"Relationships are undoubtedly one of the most valuable and least-visible parts of a business," said panelist Antony Bryden, president of startup Visible Path Corp. "The goal is figuring out how and where these relationships can be applied to business problems."

Visible Path's goal is "to help enterprise salespeople tap into their colleagues' connections," and the software apparently weights those connections as well. User privacy is maintained through a variety of "opt out" options.

This is similar to features in InterAction, often used by law firms for client relationship management. Attorneys can anonymously advertise their connections, if needed, and pick-and-choose the circumstances under which to reveal the relationships. It's a key feature, illustrated by a quote later in the article...

"Relationships belong to individuals," [Vice President of ZeroDegrees Inc. Mark] Jeffrey said. "If a company dictates to me that I have to hand over my contacts, that doesn't make me comfortable."

Older law firms attempting CRM implementations are running into this issue as well. Contacts are seen as personal, to be used exclusively to the advantage of the individual attorney, and are hoarded and protected. The obstacles to effective implementation of CRM are less technical and more ownership-of-the-relationship-driven; attorneys are instinctively driven to maintain exclusive access to a client or prospect contact instead of sharing that information through technology. While it is often acceptable for others to know of the relationship, the fear of a partner or associate taking advantage of the connection is paralyzing.

The thing is, attorneys have always shared this information--just not in a technical forum. Traditionally, attorneys learn of these relationships and business development opportunities through casual conversations with their peers. The introduction of technology into the mix, then, needs to be presented by the firm as a way of enhancing those casual conversations and driving them, rather than replacing them. The technology needs to be flexible--attorneys need to maintain detail-specific anonymity to make unauthorized use of the contact data less rewarding ("I'm calling because I know you know someone from my firm, but I don't know who it is" is never a great opening line)--and be powerful enough to proactively mine the known data to discover existing connections that have not been revealed through traditional means. That technology exists, of course; the battle is and will continue to be fostering trust in the technology.

Posted by Jen at 04:35 PM | Permalink

It is from last week, but I must have missed it. The Network That Really Matters includes information about how CRM and social networking applications are converging to create business opportunities. (Noted here for my own reference as much as anything else.)

Posted by Jen at 09:58 AM | Permalink

We are building an internal site for a particular practice group. The option of including a newsfeed, the content from a blawg, has been proposed, and I'm stumped by the (legal and) ethical questions that might surround this sort of activity.

Reminder: I am not an attorney, so bear with me. My gut reaction is--publishing the full content of someone's newsfeed would be inappropriate, even with attribution. On the flip side, this is what is happening with news aggregators, with versions driven by an individual's subscriptions or more general (think News Is Free).

But what happens if you publish only the excerpts, with links to the full content? Does the distinction between an internet site and an intranet site make a difference? Could an intranet site be considered an aggregator for a practice group? Does the proliferation of news feeds make this sort of distribution the next obvious step? And, even if this is legal, in the sense of not breaking any known laws, is it ethical? Is there a personal/non-commercial versus commercial use distinction that would come into play in this situation?

Any thoughts would be appreciated...I am drawing a distinction here between my understanding of "fair use" (quoting something from a blog, for example) and something like "e-plagiarism" (posting the full content of another person's blog in place of generating your own content).

Posted by Jen at 05:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Can RSS relieve information overload? This is the question asked in this article posted today on eContent Magazine. (The answer, by the way, is a resounding yes: Although RSS is only just beginning to make headway into the mainstream enterprise computing environment, it has great potential to help knowledge workers gather information more efficiently. What makes the news aggregator so useful is that it collects information effortlessly from the sites you previously needed to visit.) We had a spirited discussion about RSS and news aggregators on one of the LawNet list-serves last week, with a few IT Managers "seeing the light" and writing to ask me about how we are using NewsGator here.

News aggregators are (in my not so humble opinion that I shared freely on the list-serves last week) a "best of both worlds" approach to managing the knowledge you get from websites of all varieties. Conceptually, news aggregators help users (like me!) manage the web. I have no interest in e-mail newsletters, for the most part, because they clutter my inbox, my blackberry, and come to me at their own schedules whether or not I'm interested in seeing them at any given point. Historically, many websites offered a "subscribe to be notified when items change on this site!" option, which was great for what it was worth, but generally unmanageable. Those sorts of newsletters are "pushing" information to you, whether you want it or not; the "unsubscribe" option has become as complex as "quitting the gym." Also, the owners would sell or share my e-mail address, and the last thing I need is more unsolicited mail. (Another downside...having my information delivery tied to my e-mail address generated havok when that e-mail address changed.)

On the flip side, if you have 15, 50, 150, or 500 websites you want to follow, visiting all of those pages daily to check and see if they had been updated would be equally unmanageable, and if you skipped a week, you'd miss information. That sort of "pull" technology for information was clunky as well, and you waste valuable time visiting pages that have not been updated.

Here is the best of both worlds part....with my aggregator, I can subscribe to a site, but I do not have to provide the site manager with my e-mail address. I don't have to visit the sites to see what is new, and I'm not giving out my e-mail address in exchange for the privilege of receiving notifications. For many feeds, I can read the content right from my aggregator, which is faster than visiting the site and allows me to get updated while I'm not connected to the web. And when I'm done, I'm done--no need to notify the owner of the site or jump through hoops to unsubscribe. Instead, I simply delete the feed.

I like NewsGator in particular for a variety of reasons. I can categorize and organize my feeds, allowing to me "catch up" on the most relevant information while leaving other posts for "when I have time." I am just beginning to play with the cross-section of NewsGator and the new Search Folders in Outlook 2003, but the potential for granularity is mind-boggling. Feeding the information into Outlook, especially in law firms, provides the posts in a format that attorneys are familiar with, and training becomes a non-issue. For many attorneys, the concept of news aggregation would be enough of a hurdle; throwing in a new, seemingly-complicated interface at the same time might turn them off of the concept entirely.

Posted by Jen at 05:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I will be representing the LawNet Interface Software SIG (LawNet's special interest group for InterAction users) at the LMA conference in Orlando, Florida this week. I will be at the Interface Software booth in the exhibit hall; if you or users from your Marketing Department plan to attend, please stop by and introduce yourself. I will have swag (always a plus!) and information about the SIG's upcoming webinar series on Data Quality in InterAction.

This series of webinars will open with an overview of data quality options in InterAction, followed by an in-depth look at two of the primary tools for maintaining data integrity--the Data Change Management features and Application Collaboration. While all three webinars will be of interest to everyone working with InterAction in your firms, the third will be of particular interest to the individuals in your department who are responsible for configuring Application Collaboration. Registration will begin later this week at PeerToPeer.org; click on the "Meetings" link.

Posted by Jen at 12:30 PM | Permalink