Seems like just a few days ago that I was in front of a room, in Vegas, telling people about the importance of using rules, and any other sort of filtering mechanism, to get stuff out of your inbox so that the high-priority items are more easily located.

Imagine my surprise when I saw that Google is trying to automate that task in Gmail by identifying your “priority” items.

I will be really interested to see how well this works. The biggest hurdle to anyone getting a better grip on email productivity, in my opinion, is that thinking about rules, coming up with a strategy, implementing rules, and tweaking as time goes on, is work. It takes some time and effort invested to tame the inbox in order to help ourselves get to higher priority items quicker. If Google can automate that to some degree, it will go a long way toward that goal. We shall see, but I’m looking forward to having a priority inbox for my Gmail account. I’m sure I’ll have more to say once I’ve seen it in action.

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?

I found myself in a precarious position today, having to remove a redaction reason from hundreds of images in Summation. As it turns out, there is no official way to do that in the program itself, short of editing every single redaction one by one.

Luckily, I was able to find the bit of text in the annotation file that tells Summation what text to put over top of a redaction, and so I was able to “fix” the problem of coders leaving in the default redaction reason instead of blanking it out, but I needed a tool to make that change across those hundreds of files at once.

Luckily, I found Replace Text (Formerly ReplaceEm), a free tool which is designed for exactly this type of scenario. Once I had the proper term to look for, all I had to do was point the tool at the Markups folder in Summation, and problem solved!

I’ll have to write up the details of what I needed to locate in the annotation files and submit it to Summation. It’s not a supported fix, but at least they’ll know what to look for in those files!

I’ve searched the blogs, and the forums and don’t see where anyone else is having this issue, but over the last few days I’ve saved a number of links to Delicious, but they don’t show up in my list of bookmarks, nor are they included in the RSS feed of recent bookmarks. (Thus they don’t update the list on the side of the blog, nor in the daily RSS feed of the blog)

However, if I go back to the same page and try to save it again using the Delicious Firefox extension, it shows as already having been saved. Saving it again changes nothing.

Anyone?

I saw Craig Ball’s review last week and made a note to look at it further. I do agree that there is definitely a place for an easy to use, and inexpensive write blocker. Just think of all those times when an attorney just wants to look at what’s on a drive, but has to wait patiently (ha, right!), for you to make a copy to work from in order to preserve the original. With this little beauty, you’ll be able to take a peek on the drive without fear of anything getting written, within a matter of a few minutes.

That might be worth remembering when it comes time to make some budget decisions. Seems like a nice little tool for a nice little price!

In the span of two days this week, I’ve noticed that Seagate is coming out with a 3TB drive for $250, and then over at the Bowtie Law Blog, a challenge to make using hosted ediscovery review tools less expensive.

So let’s see, I can buy 3TB worth of storage for my machines, for a measly $250, but if I get sued and need to send my documents to an attorney to review, it’s going to cost me $760 per month for just a few GB? (Using Josh’s estimate, which doesn’t seem far off compared to what I’ve seen quoted)

Does anyone else see a problem here? Technology is making it easier, and cheaper, to store data. The legal industry, however, is making it more and more expensive to be involved in civil litigation, mostly due to the amount of data there is. Somehow, our industry needs to catch up and find efficient ways of dealing with data. The lawyers and vendors who do this, will survive, while those who don’t, simply won’t.

Still think you can continue to practice law the same way you have for 20-30 years? Not likely.

Well, besides the integrated inbox and threaded conversations that we’re highlighted as new features of the iOS 4 mail program. Apparently, the Gmail integration also changed the default action of “trashing” an email. Nope, doesn’t delete it from your Gmail accounts, it archives it. Whoops!

It’s not nice to change the default action without telling anyone!

Read more about how to change it, if you want to, here at the Apple site.

This evening has proved to be a night of upgrades. Actually, I did more upgrades than I had planned because they went so smoothly. Scary, I know.

First on the agenda was the upgrade of my iPhone 3GS to iOS 4. I had read a number of horror stories about the upgrade, and therefore delayed it for a day in order to make sure I had a plan in case things went wrong. Once I had convinced myself that I would be able to deal with the common problems, I pulled the trigger, and it actually only took about 30 minutes, and was completely smooth. Everything seems to be working, and I am really enjoying folders and the integrated inbox. Haven’t really tried to do any multitasking, but then again that wasn’t one of the major selling points to the upgrade for me. I was more interested in the simpler interface thanks to folders!

So, feeling good about updates, I started hitting the WordPress updates to version 3.0. Four WordPress installs and less than those same 30 minutes, all is well on that front too. Oh and yes, now that WordPress offers Multisite, I might have to look at combining those four installs into one, or at least two, one per domain, but that’s another project for another day. I don’t know enough about how it works, or how I would merge the databases together to attempt that right now. I do like the new look of 3.0, and am looking forward to digging into the details more.

Besides, my visit to a friends house on Sunday to do some technical work for them went smoother than expected and now these projects have also taken less time than I thought they would, I should probably quit while I’m ahead this week, eh?

OK, I don’t usually ask for much around here, but today I am asking for a favor. You see, I’m going to be part of a hand-on session at the ILTA conference this year, and I’m currently working on putting together a PST file to use as part of our demonstration. (We need to get this submitted early so it can be incorporated onto all of the PC’s in the hands-on session.)

Anyway, since we’re using this PST as a demo, I can’t put anything in it that is specific to work I do for my firm. I’ve been filling it with all sorts of newsletters and email lists, but I also need some good, honest to goodness work emails, only they have to be generic. So, if you would like to help out this little project, and don’t mind the fact that 50 or so attendees will see your email address on the email, all you have to do is send an email to my work address (mmcbride at bricker.com). It can be about the donuts in the kitchen, or the team meeting schedule or you can send me an email asking for the TPS reports. (In fact, I may just use TPS reports as part of the search and filter queries, so really, send me some of those!)

I’m hoping this will be a good demonstration on email productivity, and really, since we’ll all be in Vegas for the week instead of the office, what better time to learn about how to locate the important stuff piled up in the inbox!

Thanks everyone!