[The following column originally appeared in print in November 2008. I am republishing it as part of my continuing effort to maintain an archive of my published columns. Important note: I have not updated this since its original publication. While most of the sites remain as described, some may have changed. All information was current [...]
The current issue of the Boston Bar Journal (PDF) is devoted to Web 2.0. It includes a brief essay of mine, “The Future of Online Networking” (page 18 of the journal and page 20 of the PDF). The gist of my essay is summed up in this:
The future of these sites, at least within the legal profession, promises more than mere connections. Networking will remain a key part of the picture, but as more sites compete to serve the legal profession, they will offer more diverse and practical suites of tools.Networking sites will morph into broader, online communities for legal professionals. Along with connections, they will offer community, content and collaboration. They will be places where lawyers will not simply network with each other, but also work with each other and share resources with each other in more substantive ways.
The Boston Bar Journal is the magazine of the Boston Bar Association.
Law.com has my review of LegallyMinded, the ABA’s new online networking site: ABA Social Network Fails to Connect. Here is a paragraph that sums it up:
Ambitious as it is, the site falls short on execution. It jettisons features that should be central and weighs itself down with others that are useless or redundant. It is as if the ABA came late to a crowded race, barefoot and with bricks in its backpack.
I had an earlier post about it here.
Here is a good article from The Plain Dealer on lawyers’ use of Twitter: Twitosphere drawing in a steady stream of twittering lawyers. I am among the twittering lawyers reporter Alison Grant interviewed for the piece.
The professional networking site LinkedIn today launched a private beta of a new feature, Connections, that allows you to better manage your lists of LinkedIn connections. The key feature is the ability to group your connections by assigning tags to them. Once grouped, you can then send messages to the entire group simply by selecting it. Thus, you could tag certain people as “friends” and then simply select that category to send all your friends a message.
The tagging feature starts out in a sort of smart mode. It pre-assigns tags based on connections it can decipher. For example, connections who were law school classmates of mine were already tagged “classmates.”
The new feature also incorporates “type-ahead search,” which lets you type just a couple letters in the search field to be taken to the matching name within your list of connections.
I received an e-mail from LinkedIn today inviting me to try it. I am not sure how many invitations went out, but I know from monitoring Twitter that I was not alone in receiving it.
OK, I’ll admit up front that I am biased about this video, given that my son Ben Ambrogi produced it. And although it is addressed to educators, it is actually a useful overview for anyone who is new to Facebook. Ben produced this and a series of other video tutorials for a San Francisco-based company, Inigral, where he works part-time while attending the University of San Francisco. Inigral has developed an innovative Facebook application for use by colleges, universities and secondary schools.
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2310388&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
Facebook for Educators from Inigral Inc. on Vimeo.
The share of adult Internet users who have a profile on an online social network has more than quadrupled in the past four years, from 8 percent in 2005 to 35 percent now, according to a new Pew Internet study of adults and social networks. Not surprisingly, use of social networks still remains much heavier among younger adults, with 75 percent of those aged 18-24 using social networks compared to 7 percent of those 65 and older. (Full report in PDF.)
Law.com today published my article, Sixteen Reasons to Tweet on Twitter. This is the same article I mentioned last week, Tweet Sixteen, that was first published in Law Technology News. The version published today does not require registration or a log-in.
The American Bar Association has jumped on the social-networking bandwagon with a networking site of its own, Legally Minded. I wrote about it earlier today at Legal Blog Watch. As I said then, a bug in the site is preventing me from completing my registration. Fred Faulkner, the ABA’s manager of interactive services, told me earlier today that they’d experienced this log-in problem in earlier testing but thought it was resolved. That was just after 9 a.m. As of 7 p.m., I’m still not able to log-in. Not a great start, but the site looks good and I look forward to getting access at some point so that I can provide a more complete report. Meanwhile, check out my write-up at Legal Blog Watch and then try Legally Minded for yourself
Law Technology News has posted my latest column, Tweet Sixteen: 16 Ways Lawyers Can Use Twitter. (LTN requires registration to read articles, but it is free.
When it comes to social media, I tend to be an evangelist. But even I could not grasp why so many lawyers were all atwitter over Twitter. What value could there be in a microblogging tool that limits each post to 140 characters?So I strapped on some wings and gave it a try. In no time at all, Twitter turned me into a songbird ready to sing its praises.
Read the rest.
