I noticed this evening that they’ve added a beta “browse bar” feature. Seems that, in a nutshell, you can use that address to simply browse from one bookmarked site to the next. Great for creating a to-read list, or even a nice quick check of a handful of sites you want to look at.

Go here, for example, to “browse” my latest bookmarks one at a time instead of just seeing the list of links.

And yes, it also supports tags, simply add the appropriate tag to the end of the address, like this http://delicious.com/browsebar/mikemac29/photography

Nice. Think I might have to consider creating an ediscovery reading list this way and sharing it with others. Could be a very useful tool to help attorneys and others stay on top of ediscovery news without the need to click through articles or use an RSS reader themselves.

What other uses can you come up with?

Writing this from my iPhone using the Wordpress app. I like the ability to write quick posts fe anywhere, but like email on my phone, anything that will require a lot of typing will have to wait until I’m at a keyboard!

On the other hand, this is a great way to handle comments, I can approve pending comments, delete spam comments or even reply to comments quickly, just so long as I have my phone with me.

So, as you’ve probably noticed, the blog is now running on Wordpress, and the blog home page is now being redirected to the main page of the site. There is still much work to do, to tweak the layout and work on pages, etc. but I think this is pretty much where we’re going to stay for now. I managed to pull in all of the blog posts and comments in from Blogger, but also decided to leave the static blog pages in place so as not to break 8 years of links from outside sources. Of course, I turned off the ability to comment on those too. If I can ever get a decent redirect solution in place I might take those pages out, but I’m not holding my breathe on that one. The existing RSS feeds, however, have been updated, so if you’ve been getting the full blog feed, or the tech, litigation support, or photo only feeds you should continue to see everything you were before.

Still, running Wordpress now opens up some new possibilities, so I’ll be looking into some of those, and experimenting along the way. First, though, I’ve got to clean up some of the loose ends that the transfer left behind this week. Then we’ll get into some of the new things!

In light of last week’s announcement of changes at Blogger, I’ve decided to go ahead and take the plunge. I’m going to be converting this blog over to Wordpress. Of course, with over 8 years of customizations to the site, it’s not going to be a simple process to convert everything, so just be aware that it’s going to be going on if/when you see some things looking wonky around here. In fact, the site will probably disappear for a few hours sometime later this week, as I move it to a different server in preparation for the Wordpress install.

Of course, since I have to be in court tomorrow, nothing starts until I’m comfortable with the knowledge that I won’t be spending any of my evenings and weekends working, at least long enough to see this transition through. Given the industry I work in, you’ll forgive me if plans change and I have to put this off a little bit.

Last week, I was fully prepared to be working long hours for the entire month of February, and things changed suddenly. It’s the nature of the business really. You never know when, or if, a case that you’re preparing to go to trial, will settle. It often ends up with us doing a whole lot of prep work, only to find that it never gets used, but you still have to do all the work the same way for every case, because some of them don’t settle and you have to be ready to go in court!

Anyway, consider yourselves warned, and hang on. It’s going to be a bumpy ride for a bit, but I think we’ll all be better off in the end for it!

Google’s Blogger platform rolled out another new feature this week, one that many users of Blogger have been waiting for, and once again, one I can’t use.

See, ever since Blogger rolled out “new” templates a few years ago, the ones that support widgets, and began building all sorts of cool widgets for their users to use on their blogs, they have pretty much only worked on adding new features to those templates.

The problem is, if you, like me, use Blogger to publish to your own site through FTP, and not to Blogspot, you can’t use the new templates, and thus, all of the new features of Blogger, are not available to you. The Blogger team over at Google seems to be blissfully unaware that, long long ago, many folks actually used Blogger, and continue to use Blogger, so that they could publish static HTML blog pages to their own sites, at their own URL, with their own hosting, without the Ad bar being added to their templates.

As I think about it, the last time Blogger added a feature that we could, you know, use, was categories, or maybe comments? (Upon further review, scheduled posts were available regardless of where you are publishing within the last year) Any way, it’s been awhile. Almost all of the innovation at Blogger now seems to be around widgets, and other tools for use with Blogspot hosted accounts. Those of us who don’t have those, get nothing. I can’t help but wonder if the fact that Blogspot hosted accounts have ads on them is the reason?

It’s almost enough to make me switch this blog to Wordpress too, except I don’t have nearly the time to move 8+ years of stuff to a new platform!

Update: Seems I posted this a bit prematurely, as Rob Fahrni has pointed out that Blogger is actually going to eliminate support for using FTP to publish to your own site.  So, it appears I’m going to be spending my time moving this to Wordpress or using some sort of Google hosting/redirect, which doesn’t really interest me at all.

I was able to spend my lunch hour yesterday taking in this webinar by Kevin O’Keefe, and I have to say, it was pretty good. I thought Kevin did a good job tying social networking and blogging with traditional business networking, and also giving folks who are looking for ways to get their firms and attorney’s interested in blogging some good ideas to mull over.

The big takeaway, for me, was that blogging for the firm is similar to blogging here, but also not. Here, I really am just trying to share information, and learn from other folks who either leave comments here or have their own blogs and continue the conversations there. I have developed lots of relationships with people in a variety of areas, most of whom are not potential clients of my firm, but who do have a lot to offer me in terms of ideas and tips. When I talk to an attorney about blogging, for them, it really is more strategic than that. The number of page views don’t mean anything if the people reading aren’t potential clients that you are connecting with, and no matter how great the content may be, it isn’t going to foster those relationships that bring in business if it’s not the information these folks want to know. You have to know who you want to reach, and what they want to read, in order for the blog to be useful to them.

Anyway, that was my quick highlight, you can check out the recording and grab the slides for yourself, Kevin has the links,  if you’re interested.

Since this is the first post of 2010, I thought I’d make it a nice list of all the ways you can connect with me, the content of this site, or both!

Blog RSS Feed
Subscribe by Email
Become a fan on Facebook
Comments RSS Feed
RSS Feed just for posts tagged Tech
RSS Feed just for posts tagged Litigation Support
RSS Feed just for Photography
My Flickr
Twitter
LinkedIn
Facebook
Friendfeed
Delicious Links

Not to mention the other site I run, for child abuse survivors, and all of the many ways you can interact with that content as well!

So there you go, no matter what services you use or where you like to hang out on the net, there should be a choice for you to keep up with things being posted by me. I thank you for the interest in what I’m doing and talking about, and look forward to connecting with all of you, wherever it may be!

Here’s to a getting your 2010 networking goals off to a good start!

I have been messing around with some things on my other blogs tonight, and it occurs to me that the current email subscription to this blog, is sort of a pain for me. (Not that anyone really noticed when I quit sending it out, it was never a very popular way to follow the site.)

On the other hand, I realize that Feedburner has an email subscription service that wouldn’t actually require me to do much more than turn it on, so in the interest of making the blog available in any way you could want it, now you can subscribe by email to get all the blog posts on the same day they are posted.

Now back to your regularly scheduled program….

Later this afternoon I’m going to be doing a presentation/demonstration of Social Networking Tools for a firm committee. I’m using this post to demonstrate how you can write in one place, and then use the power of RSS feeds and the tech/social media tools that exist to have that post appear in many different places.

So, if all goes well, by the time I show this to the committee, this should have already posted to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and a handful of other places, all without me having to engage with any of those sites, and those of you who follow me or are connected to me will have had the opportunity to see it, read it, and maybe even respond to me, without ever having come to my blog to do so.

That’s how you leverage technology to improve your social networking contacts when you’re crunched for time!

I finally got a chance this week to look at the new Twitter Lists feature, and I must say, now that I’ve seen it in use, I get it a little better than I first did. When I first heard about it, I honestly thought, “Yeah so what, I already have groups in Tweetdeck, I don’t care about lists.”

Now that I’ve seen exactly how it’s implemented though, I come away with a couple of new thoughts. First, I see now that what you’re building when you build lists isn’t necessarily just a group of Twitter users, it’s an actual timeline that others can “follow”. So, for instance, instead of looking at a group of users that someone else put together and finding new people I might want to follow, I can take the lazy way out and just follow the timeline. Then, when I want to check in on that topic, I just click over and see what that group of folks is talking about. Probably the best example I can give for this is on my sports twitter account, where I was added to a list of NY Islander fans. That would be an awesome timeline to pay attention to while the Islanders are playing, wouldn’t it? Again, there may be some folks in there I want to follow myself, but since I don’t have time right now to spend going through it, this makes things way easier on me!

It’s also a easy way for someone new to Twitter to find traction. Now, instead of trying to help them find good people to follow, and helping them figure out how to interact with them, I can point them to a list, let them look at that timeline and get a feel for what they can do with this tool in that way. It gives them a head start compared to the days of signing up and then wondering “now what?”

The second thought I had was that this really increases the visibility of things I tweet, including blog posts, in a way that may be harder to measure. I have over 800 followers on my main twitter account who may see anything I tweet, but now I’m also on a handful of lists, which have followers of their own, where things I tweet will show up. So, suddenly, there’s another chance that something I say on Twitter will be seen by others outside of my existing circle of contacts.

On the downside, building a list when you have a significant number of friends can be a bit time consuming, as you have to go through the list and add them one by one. An importer from Tweetdeck groups to Twitter lists would be an awesome tool, if anyone is paying attention and has the skills to build that.

All in all, it’s an interesting little feature that I’m looking forward to playing with, and more importantly, seeing how others use in their own social networking workflow.