Jeff Brandt asked on Twitter at the end of the conference if the educational sessions or the networking opportunities were more valuable from the conference. I my 140 characters on Twitter I replied that I thought the networking was more valuable, but the firm wanted to see the quality sessions for the money spent. I wanted to take a minute and explain that in more detail.

Obviously, the organization paying to send you to ILTA, or any conference, is going to be looking for those quality educational sessions, and what information you bring back from those sessions that add value to them. That’s expected, and ILTA provides plenty of great sessions. I know I’m bringing back some ideas I will be implementing from the sessions I attended, and think they will provide great benefit to the firm.

At the same time, though. I am also bringing back lots of little tips and ideas that I picked up outside of the educational sessions, from conversations I had with folks, sometimes well into the morning hours. While those tips I picked up informally might not quite equal the value of the formal educational sessions, those conversations do something that the sessions could never do, they formed connections, or enhanced existing connections, that I will take with me going forward. These are folks who I will continue conversing with, even if it is just online, sharing information, ideas, tips, stories, etc. The educational sessions, good as they were, are done. The relationships are not.

I know that some of the folks I met for the very first time this past week, I will continue to be in touch with, and continue to gain knowledge from being connected with them. That’s a value that may be hard to put a dollar amount on, but it’s much higher than any one week’s worth of sessions could hope to be.

I’m looking forward to continuing the conversations.

Just wanted to toss out some links to some more stuff from ILTA this week. I will have another post with some thoughts about the benefits of the conference, but for right now, I have a couple of things I wanted to get out to folks.

First of all, if you attended our ILTAU session on Weds. morning, and were as disappointed as I was that there was some Outlook configuration issues that prevented us from really digging in to that PST by creating rules to filter things out of the inbox, I did go back to the documentation site that Sean Brady started for the session, and add some documentation on using Rules, and the Organize function in Outlook 2007. Check it out, or if you weren’t able to make it, check it out for some information on what we talked about.

Secondly, I had the pleasure of doing a quick interview with Josh Gilliland, of the Bow Tie Law Blog, about Social Networking benefits, and the e-discovery issues with social media. It was great to finally get to meet Josh after many years of “knowing” each other online, and the having some discussion was fun, and a good example of exactly the sort of benefits you get from the conversation at ILTA, above and beyond the educational sessions.

Lastly, for those I met at ILTA (and there were more people than I could possibly name!), or those who I didn’t get a chance to see in person but have connected with online, I wanted to share the places where you can connect with me, beyond the blog.

LinkedIn – http://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemac29

Twitter – http://twitter.com/mikemac29

Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/mikemac29

But, enough about me.

Well, technically Sunday was day one, but Monday was day one of the educational sessions, so I’m calling it day one.

Jason Jennings got things going, with a great keynote where he discussed the “5 Secrets to Put Strategic Unity on the Fast Track”. Among the many good points made by Jason, one of the things that really caught my attention was his description of the shared traits of the leaders of the best companies in the world, and how those traits affect the rest of an organization. For example, these leaders were happy to share their plans, their knowledge, and their strategy. They wanted everyone in their organization, and everyone they did business with, to understand the purpose of their work, and their place within the overall purpose. Given that, I couldn’t help but wonder if those of us who are practicing this whole idea of sharing and learning from one another in the online world, are in fact, practicing leadership?

We are, after all, on the forefront of sharing ideas and knowledge openly. We’re open to new ideas, and also open to letting go of old ideas as we acquire more knowledge. We’re accountable to the folks we share with, they’ll know if we start passing off bad information, or straying from the truth, and they will call us out on it. I also like to think that those of us living in this space, who really want it to benefit our careers, are also good stewards, both of the information we have and share, and also of the attention and time spent by those who follow us.

Social Networking as part of leadership training? Maybe, it’s worth thinking about anyway.

The rest of the day for me was spent in the Litigation Support track, and the one thing that really jumped out at me in those sessions, and also from a breakfast discussion at a Cowen Group event this morning, was the things that need to be in place before we can even think about implementing project management disciplines. Simply put, legal project management depends on measurements and workflow processes. You have to define the processes and document the work well before you can think about what to measure, and how it fits into a project management process. Same thing goes for making technology and strategy decisions, you have to understand how you work, what work you do, and what your end result looks like before you can make the correct decisions. It’s an idea I’ve been working on quite a bit, and one I’m determined really takes quite a bit of time. Others are further along this process, but it takes work, and it takes buy-in from management, which can only come from having good measurements to show the value. So we measure and document and try to spot the trends and the patterns that will inform us of the best way to plan for the future.

Good data can only help, right?

As always though, above and beyond all of the educational sessions, having the chance to catch up with old contacts, meet some online friends in person, and make new connections is the biggest benefit to being here. Again, it’s that network of folks who are willing to share what they know that is the best resource we walk away from at the end of the week. I look forward to building it even more!

I spotted this on a post from Advocate’s Studio about Siftlinks, and thought it was worth a shot to replace the now-dropped ReadTwit. I just got started with it, and my impression is that it’s better than nothing, really. It doesn’t go through and grab the post from the link within the tweet, but it does at least show me the links. That’s something, at least. Hopefully, they will make some improvements including grabbing the full article being linked to, and give me some filtering options.

I guess, for now, my filtering options are to stop following people who post useless links, right?

Back in January I wrote about Readtwit, an application that grabs links from your twitter stream and turns those links into one nice RSS feed. It hasn’t been perfect, but there is definitely some value in that.

Unfortunately, today they announced that they are closing up shop.

So, anyone know of any other tool doing something similar that I should be checking out?

So I’ve seen a number of the techie folks writing about how they’re removing their Facebook profiles, due to various policies of the Facebook team, or the lack of stability in some of the features, etc. I can’t say that I agree with everything the Facebook folks do, nor am I in love with all the games and other features of the service, but this past weekend was a great example of why I’m most definitely not giving up on it.

I’m not walking away from the place where dozens of my friends and family got to be part of my birthday celebration, even though the wife and I were traveling. The place where I got to watch video of my 4 year old niece sing “Happy Birthday” to me, and the place where I learned my cousin gave birth to a little baby girl, who I will share a birthday with from now on.

Over the last couple of years of using Facebook, I’ve gotten to know coworkers better, learned about the adult lives of kids I grew up with, gotten back in touch with extended family that I had done a crummy job with keeping in touch with over the years, and connected with various folks that I’ve only known online.

Like all social networking tools, it’s not the technology and it’s not the policies, it’s the people. I want to keep up with the people I’m connected to on Facebook, and the technology makes it easier to do exactly that. Removing my profile would hurt me a whole lot more than it will hurt Mark Zuckerberg.

You might feel differently, you might not be getting the value I get from it, or you might be able to get the same value with another tool, and that’s fine. We all have to make our own decisions, and far be it for me to try and decide how much value you are getting from your Facebook connections, but do take a minute to think about whether those contacts are maybe more important than a little annoyance about policy and procedure.

Earlier this week I was reading Kevin O’Keefe’s post about what you really learn about blogging from lawyers who give it up, and I was reminded about some conversations I had about this time last year.

As I was preparing to talk at the ILTA09 conference about social networking, I had many conversations inside and outside of my firm about the concept. One of the things that struck me was how many people looked at Twitter or Facebook and just dismissed them out of hand. Generally this was followed by a comment along the lines of “I don’t care what anyone is doing, why would I spend my time reading that!” (aka “I don’t care what you had for lunch”)

What occurred to me as I explored the reasoning behind those sorts of comments was that, frequently, these people didn’t really see the benefit in networking offline, let alone online. Yes, social networking tools allowed them efficiently connect with more people than had been possible, but these people didn’t really understand the benefit of being connected to people in the first place. No wonder they thought online networking was a waste of time. To them, it is!

So if you’re trying to be you firms champion when it comes to blogging and social networking, it might not hurt to remind people of the basics of networking in general. You’d be surprised how many people don’t really get that.

We’ll have to wait on the details, but will the recent announcement that Yahoo! and Facebook are going to be tying their services together actually mean that us amateur photographers can stop trying to decide whether to share our photos on Flickr, or Facebook, and be able to tie the two groups of contacts together without leaving folks who only use one of the two services out in the cold when it comes to commenting?

I sure hope so. I get tired of trying to troubleshoot the current methods of sharing my recent Flickr photos on Facebook, let alone knowing that many of my family and friends won’t click through to Flickr the same way they will to a FB album. Yet, I also get tired of all the photo tools I like on Flickr not being available on Facebook. (Sharing different sizes, letting others use my photos in blog posts, etc.)

We’ll see what happens.

According to an email I received, and confirmed by logging into the site to see for myself, you can now “share” links to news items, blog posts, etc. on LinkedIn. you know, like you probably already do with Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, etc.

I can’t help but wonder if LinkedIn isn’t a little too late to this game. Does anyone really follow LinkedIn that closely to see when one of their contacts shares a news item? Personally, I don’t really spend that much time looking at my connections updates beyond their new connections, and then occasionally I’ll look for shared news items or discussions on the groups. I generally find interesting items being shared on Twitter and Facebook enough as it is. I don’t know that I need a new source for that.

That being said, I use to Blog application on LinkedIn and include the Delicious once-daily summary of shared links there, so I do sort of already share my links on my profile page, but I’m convinced none of my connections ever really look at that. Maybe one or two would see a shared item as a status update? Perhaps a test is in order, eventually.

I was very excited to see the new release of Tweetdeck, and no not because it integrates with FourSquare now. It’s the global filters that had me excitedly downloading the update as soon as I heard about it.

In fact, it was the promise of being able to hide all updates from foursquare from the folks I follow that was most exciting about it!

After a couple of days of use, however, it’s not as exciting as I thought it would be. It seems the filters work on a bit of a hit and miss basis. Sometimes I enter a filter and it removes everything that matches in the timelines, other times it doesn’t. Sometimes I enter it and it doesn’t remove anything currently in the column, but does filter things later, sometimes it does the opposite. As of right this minute, it seems to be working. (I’m filtering #Lost, because I’ve successfully made it the entire existence of the show without having ever seen a minute of it, so I don’t care about the finale tonight.)

The other thing that seems to only sort of work, is groups. I’ve seen a few occasions where it takes Tweetdeck a few minutes to filter the groups. I can see all my friends tweets in the all friends timeline, and I know some of them should also show up in one of the groups I created to make sure I see those folks, but there’s nothing showing in my groups column.

I assume the problem has something to do with the speed at which the filters and groups are being pulled down from the Tweetdeck server, or something ike that. Maybe lots of folks setting up filters all at once has created some problem. Whatever it is, I hope they get the hiccups worked out, because when global filters work, they are lovely!