Like most of you, my gmail account was integrated into Google’s new “Buzz” social networking tool, and unlike many in the blogosphere, I decided to give it a little while before commenting on it. So, after using it for a few days, and seeing what the “early” commentators had to say, I’d have to say that I think Google really is too little, too late to this game, and that Google has no idea how normal people use social networking tools, or email for that matter.

See, here’s part of my problem with Google. Months ago, I wrote about Google Wave, that it was underwhelming, but that I had faith that Google would continue to add to it and make it something useful. They haven’t done anything useful to Wave yet, but here they are rolling out Buzz as the new “This is going to be great” application, only it’s not, in it’s current format, great, or even good for that matter. Given the past few months with Wave, I have no faith that they’re going to really improve this much, and as it stands now, it just sort of sucks. Like Friendfeed, it can pull things from other sources into Buzz, but currently those sources are severely limited. Twitter, Reader Shared Items, Flickr, Picasa, and maybe a blog feed. That’s it. It’s not Friendfeed on steroids, it’s Friendfeed on diet pills.

Those aren’t even the only Google products that I am have been expecting improvements to, that never seem to come. I don’t use Google Reader’s shared items feature, because there’s no way to tag items, which would generate different RSS feeds based on those tags, or items you could follow based on a tag, so that I could use shared items on both of my sites at once. Delicious does that, has for years.For that matter, Google still hasn’t integrated Google Reader’s shared items with Feedburner’s link splicer feature, and they own both of those! So I have to use Delicious if I want to be able to put daily “links” in the RSS feeds for my blogs, not that I care, because again, I can use Delicious to send different tag groups to different blog feeds right now too!

So now, they roll out Buzz, and integrate social networking into email and Google Reader, two places I don’t actually want social networking. (And I’ll leave the ridiculously stupid idea to autofollow your Gmail contacts and the privacy implications alone, since they’ve already sort of acknowledged that was a bad idea.) They’ve hacked their way into two products I actually do use, Gmail, and Reader (as an RSS reader only), and made them more annoying. They’ve decided that I want to follow the people I email most frequently, which is where they are too late to this game. The people I follow on social networking sites, like Twitter and Facebook, are not the people I email the most. When I need to send them a message, or see what they’re up to, I go there. My Gmail account is for people who aren’t connected to me in those places. I use email to interact with people about my various websites, give them a way to contact me for help, and, occasionally, I get an offer to get a copy of a book for review, or a request from someone doing research, etc. I reply to those people, about that subject, but that hardly means I want to start following them on Buzz. Again, the people I want to follow, I already do! I don’t need them added to Gmail or Reader, and most of them don’t have Google Profiles anyway. Why would they? They have Facebook and Twitter profiles, and are easily accessible from there.

Seems to me that someone in Google has been charged with making a social network, no matter what. So they’ve tried Profiles, only there wasn’t any incentive to use those for much. Then they tried Wave, which showed some promise, but confused people too much to really grow beyond the geek crowd. So, they looked around at the various Google services, saw the large number of users on Gmail, and decided that if they couldn’t make a truly revolutionary product for social networking, they would just glom onto that user base, and add Buzz to existing Gmail accounts. Voila, millions of users! An overnight success!

Personally, I haven’t seen an iota of value from Buzz. The only place I see the potential for usefulness is in the mobile version, which can show you Buzz going on nearby, but even that doesn’t interest me all that much as a every day tool. Might be great when tailgating at an OSU game or some other big event, but when I’m looking at Buzz from the office, or my house, not so much.

Still, I’m going to leave Buzz up and running for a little while longer, but I fully anticipate that I’ll either be turning it off completely, or unfollowing everyone and leaving my “buzz” posting so those who really want to use it to follow me can. Just don’t expect me to reply to you there. I’m already interacting with folks in plenty of other places.

In an otherwise maddening post about his experience with a law school student, Craig Ball makes an interesting “throw away” comment:

We look to the crop of eager young lawyers to be inherently more adept at e-discovery than we who preceded them. After all, they have iPhones.

Craig (who I assume was being facetious), is confusing the comfort level of using technology, with an understanding of technology. They are not the same. Younger attorneys may have an advantage when it comes to using their PC or smartphone to get work done, by virtue of having grown up in a world where this is the norm. Much the same way that older folks used to joke about getting their 9 year old to program the VCR, that doesn’t mean the 9 year old knows how the VCR works. She is just comfortable using the menu to program it because she’s never not had one. Expecting that, because this young girl can program the VCR means that she will, undoubtedly, also understand how video tape gets written to, how the VCR adjusts for different playback speeds, how the broadcast is received by the television, etc. is folly. The ability to use an iPhone has nothing to do with knowing how to create a data-map, a deep understanding of PST files, using hash values to locate duplicate files, an understanding of metadata and forensics, or the hundreds of other things an attorney may run into in the course of an eDiscovery project.

It reminds me of the many organizations who’s use of social media is being directed by a 20 something employee fresh out of college who happens to have 500 friends on Facebook or Twitter, as if that somehow magically qualifies them to direct marketing strategy. It’s simply not the same thing.

Both of these examples bring to mind something else that has bothered me for a long time about the “generational diversity” presentations that I know you’ve all heard over and over, and which was described so well by Manager Tools just last week. In this case, just because an associate is young, doesn’t mean they are better with technology. Some are, and some aren’t. They are individuals, not an composite of the “average” for people their age, or from their culture.

For example,  if you meet another 41 year old, male, white Litigation Support Manager, chances are, they are a lot different than I am, you might want to take notice of that. Heck, they are probably less grumpy, if nothing else!

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, if the trend for 2010 coming from LegalTech is toward efficiency, can we assume that law firms, finally, are starting to realize they are just like every other business?

Also, does the fact that the legal industry is just now starting to look at using technology to be more efficient prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that law firms typically lag behind other businesses? I think it does, after all the entire tech/internet revolution is about communicating and sharing information more effectively. Believe it or not, law firm IT departments don’t put in new infrastructure and tech tools just to make you uncomfortable, it really is to help the attorney’s they support work more efficiently. Other industries have implemented tools in the name of working smarter. law firms have typically lagged behind in that regard.

Then again, as someone who works with technology, I do have to wonder if we are keeping that priority at the forefront of our minds? Our job is not to limit the amount of network congestion, or make sure no possible harm can come to the PC’s that sit on the desktops of our users. It’s to make those users more efficient. I do wonder sometimes, when I talk to other IT pros, if that’s their first priority.

As I spend much of my time trying to come up with ways to market the Litigation Support services we provide to the attorneys in our firm, I keep coming back to this idea. How do I convince them not just that the tools we have are solid, and useful, but that they do, in fact, help them be more efficient in their work? It’s a tough sell, but one I have to make if I’m going to get any of them to reconsider how they practice and how technology might help them. If anyone has had some rousing success with that, leave a comment and let me know what you did! I can always use the suggestions.

In several recent conversations on Twitter, and elsewhere, I’ve been noticing a bit of a trend. Seems like some of the “add-on” services that use Twitter to piggy back the social aspects of their own service, FourSquare being a prime example, seem to have an interesting effect on how followers interact with some of the folks in their tweetstream. I’m seeing many more people start to unfollow users of these services, because they don’t use them, and just don’t care.

Case in point, I don’t use any of the geolocation services. I have somewhere around 900 followers, and my rough guess would be that maybe 100-150 of them are actually local to me. That means that if I were to start tweeting all of my FourSquare “check-ins” they would be totally irrelevant to 80% of my followers. They aren’t local, they aren’t going to be meeting up with me, and they likely aren’t looking for reviews to every single place I eat out, or get a haircut. So, for me, and many others who are using Twitter to interact professionally with people who work in my industry, as opposed to people who are local to me, these services make no sense.

To many others, it seems like they really are trying to be local in their tweets. There’s a lot of meeting up, sharing local places of interest, etc., and that’s not exactly a bad thing. On the other hand, if you’re one of those folks, especially if you’re not local to me, please understand why I don’t want to follow you. The value your tweets bring me is diminished by the number of geolocation tweets you post. You and I are trying to accomplish different things. I think, as twitter grows, you’re going to see more of this. There are lots of different people using hte service now, and there is likely to be some segmentation of it’s users. I happen to think the use of geolocation services is one area where you’re going to see this, and Twitters new “local trends” is going to exacerbate this. Again, I, for one, don’t care about local trends, because the vast majority of people I interact with on Twitter aren’t local. If they were, I might care about that, but I’m not primarily looking for what’s happening in Columbus, I’m looking for what’s happening with the legal industry and ediscovery.

So, if you want to be local, and also be universal, perhaps you should consider leaving your foursquare interactions over there, instead of bringing them all to twitter? It’s going to be awfully tempting to unfollow you when you try and mix the two. You might want to decide which is more important to you, and then your followers can decide for themselves too. Soon, we might just see very distinct groups forming on twitter, folks who want to be local and are posting constant location updates and yelp reviews, and those who aren’t, and don’t. Shall the two ever meet again? I have my doubts.

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 all of the recent discussion about creating a certification for Litigation Support professionals to measure their proficiency in working with electronic discovery, I’ve always felt a strong push against the idea, but could never really articulate what about it bothered me.

Today, in reading Chris Dale’s blog post about it, it clicked for me. Here’s the relevant part to this discussion, but you should go read all of it, and the post he links to that started this conversation as well.

My own contribution to the article goes more to the distinction between education and the need for a piece of paper to show that you have been educated. I see it as a costly barrier to entry in an area which needs recruits (nursing is the obvious parallel in the UK) and as something which aims at the wrong target. It is not the litigation support people whose actions or inaction cause the problems, but the lawyers.

I’ve seen Chris write about it being a barrier to entry and thought that, while I see his point, and it’s something that will need to be addressed, it didn’t quite hit me where my gut was on this, but the second part of this paragraph definitely does.

Here’s the situation as I see it. There are folks who work in this industry who want to be taken seriously by the rest of the legal industry. Of course, other areas of the legal industry have certifications, so we should have one too. Let’s put together an ediscovery certification to prove that we’re experts in this new and exciting area.

There’s just a couple of problems with that. Chris points out the first one, many times in a law firm, it’s not the Lit Support folks who are advising clients on collection, or writing ediscovery requests, it’s the lawyers. Yes, in a perfect world they are including the Litigation Support folks in that process, but we are far from a perfect world. The real world contains plenty of lawyers who don’t actually know enough about ediscovery to even realize they should be looking for technical expertise. Having a certified ediscovery person working in Litigation Support doesn’t mean anything if the lawyer above them is clueless about ediscovery and doesn’t get them involved. From a clients perspective who do you want to deal with, the outside firm that has a Litigation Support person who’s certified, or the firm that has an attorney who’s an ediscovery expert? It’s the attorney who’s going to be appearing at conferences, writing your requests and responding to requests, advising you on proper collection, representing you to the court, etc. The Litigation Support folks may have some input into these things, but I know which one of the two I’d want to be an expert! Unfortunately, the push for certification seems mostly to be aimed at the Litigation Support people, which is not where it will have the most impact.

The second thing the post brought to mind, for me, is that ediscovery is not the end-all be-all of working in Litigation Support. In fact, how much of the day-to-day work is dealing with ediscovery can be very, very different from law firm to law firm, or between different corporate law departments. In some firms, a litigation paralegal might be much more involved with helping the attorney with case management, and the Lit Support folks may do the heavy technical lifting, while in other firms, it’s the Litigation Support folks who are doing the work with ediscovery strategy while the paralegal works on more administrative things, and the IT department does more of the heavy lifting in terms of handling data. It’s not a one-size fits all discipline. I know, speaking for myself, that while I do deal with handling ediscovery and getting it into review platforms and production sets put together to send to opposing sides, etc. that its not the only thing I need to know about to do my job well. My job also involves quite a bit of technical work with Excel, Acrobat, Powerpoint, etc. I do a fair amount of training, and internal marketing. I work with video and audio files, I put together presentations and setup presentation equipment. Being a certified ediscovery expert doesn’t guarantee that I’d be any good at any of these other things, which are still very much part of my job as a Litigation Support Pro. Other people in this industry are responsible for some of the same things I am, and some are responsible for doing things like programming, that I don’t do at all. It’s a real mixed bag.

Do I need an understanding of ediscovery? Absolutely. I also need plenty of other things. Are there resources out there to educate myself about ediscovery? Tons! Does having a certification program offer me anything that these resources don’t already? I’m not seeing it, outside of the piece of paper I can take back to my firm as “proof” that I have worked at being educated. Maybe that has some value, in some circumstances, but I don’t see that it’s a huge priority item for many of us. We’re already swamped with work, and do our best to stay on top of things and keep informed. Many of us hold certifications that are directly related to the tools we use, and the way we work. I don’t think adding yet another, very broad, certification is going to do more than add another expense at a time when we are cutting them every way we can. Personally, if given the choice, I’d rather spend my educational budget on something else, something specific that our firm can use right now, not on getting a certification that doesn’t mean anything to our clients.

But, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s exactly what our clients want to see, the piece of paper, even if it’s not in the hands of the attorney who works directly with them!

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!

I didn’t realize those wireless mics you use in office conference centers, churches, etc. could become illegal soon if they are broadcasting in the 700MHz band. I posted the details over at the Friends in Tech blog.

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.