Scheduled Posting

This is a test of Blogger's new future date posting. If all goes well, this will get published to the site at the specified time, and I'll be sure to write up some things I've been meaning to post before we leave, that'll publish throughout the next few days. That'd be a great feature, if it works.

Interestingly, posting from Windows Live Writer still gives me the message about Blogger not supporting future date publishing, even though it does, and the post doesn't get published, it gets scheduled.

Labels: Blogging

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Excellent Customer Service, or Greasing the Squeaky Wheel?

One of the things I've long wondered about bloggers writing about good service from a company is whether they got that service because the company really cares about taking care of it's customers, or if they got that service because of who they are.

A fine example came about last weekend when Louis Gray wrote about his good experience with Disqus. Now Louis is a fairly well-known blogger, he's been listed on Techmeme a few times and has significantly more readers than I do. Louis was trying to do something that I had attempted to do, use Disqus on a customized Blogger template, with an FTP connection to my own domain.

At the time I attempted this, I posted a quick note to Twitter about it and Daniel Ha asked me to send my template to their help address and see if they could help. That was very responsive, and I was impressed. That was April 14. I've never gotten a response from them.

Louis, however, got a response the next morning, and then an additional tweak after asking for it "seven minutes later".

Louis chalks this up to "a great example of next-generation customer service, and engaging". I'm wondering if it's more a case of knowing how to get good PR where you can?

My point here is not to try and discredit anything Disqus or Louis is doing here, and it's not to whine about not getting the same treatment. If you read the comments over there, I'm not the only one who didn't get so much support and Louis isn't the only one with a great story of getting support from Disqus. If I do have a point, it's that as bloggers, especially A-list type bloggers,  I wonder if we shouldn't take what responses we get with a grain of salt. We may get great service from an organization, and may be tempted to do what we can to help that company out and tout their product, but do we really know whether our readers would get that same service, without the bully pulpit and the same audience? Wouldn't it be only natural for someone like Daniel to spend his limited time making sure a well known blogger gets first rate service, even if that means other people get less? After all, who's going to influence more people?

I'm just asking....

Labels: Blogging

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Facebook's People You May Know

A few weeks ago I mentioned that the Facebook feature for friend suggestions could use some improvements. Well, today was the first time recently that I went over to Facebook and noticed that they've made some changes to it.

They made it worse.

Now instead of suggesting people and telling you what friends you have in common, they put a larger list in three columns, and quit telling you what friends you have in common. So now, there are the same people there all the time, with no indication of why, and no way to just say "hey, I don't know this person, try again". Blech.

Update: I didn't notice until later that there is an "X" next to each suggested friend. When I hover over it, there's a message that says "don't show this person". I got excited, thinking I could actually get rid of some of these A-list tech guys that I have no interest in reading any more, let alone trying to friend them on Facebook. However, after I clicked the X for a number of them and went back to the "people you may know" list, they were right there again! Grr!

By the way, I've gotten a couple of friend requests over there from people I don't recognize, and don't have an friends in common with. If you're a reader and want to connect, I'm more than happy to, but add a message to the standard friend request, so I know who you are! Thanks!

Labels: Blogging, Personal

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Straddling Two Blogospheres

I've been writing about technology on this blog for a long time. The first posts here date back to Oct. 2001. and while I don't claim they are very good, I will claim to have been around the tech blogosphere for a very long time relatively speaking.

Within the last year, however, as I've been writing about my work with Litigation Support, I've found myself more and more drawn to law blogs, or blawgs as they are commonly called. I'd say that the Lit Support posts here are very much part of the legal blogosphere as opposed to the tech one, but the tech posts are still part of the overall tech blogosphere.

One thing that I can say that I've been proud of over the last 6 plus years of blogging; I've never been anywhere close to an A-list blogger, and I've never gotten involved in any of the petty BS that tends to play itself out in the Tech Blogosphere every few months, at the very least. I won't point out cases, or names, those of you who've been around as long as I have can probably think of 5 examples just off the top of your head. I've been perfectly happy to sit over here in my own little corner, sharing information and ideas with other techies, instead of worrying about getting on Digg, or Techmeme, or how much my Google Ads were bring in, etc. (disclosure: I've never run ads and never made any money from this site, any money I made in Amazon Affiliate links, which was infinitesimal, was added to my own donations to child abuse support and prevention organizations.) I've enjoyed it and learned from it far more than I ever thought I would, that is reward enough in itself.

As I've moved over into paying more attention to the legal blogs though, I haven't seen any of that behavior. Given the reputation of lawyers, I actually would have expected it more, but I haven't seen much of it at all. For sure, many lawyers are blogging just to get attention, and bring in business, but I think, given the nature of legal work, and the existing ethics rules in place when it comes to offering legal advice, criticism, it keeps things on a somewhat mature level.

Maybe I just haven't been around the legal blogosphere long enough to have noticed. On the other hand, maybe there's just something about the human nature that, absent strong ethical rules, causes the lesser of our qualities to come to the forefront every now and again for a good airing? I'm not sure, but I'd be interested in a conversation about it.

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:37 PM | 2 comments | Links to this post

 
One good use of Friendfeed

OK so I found one good thing about Friendfeed, when Twitter has issues showing you all the updates from the people you follow, Friendfeed does a good job picking up the slack.

Of course when you only have 10 people you're following on Friendfeed as opposed to the 96 on Twitter, you're still missing a whole bunch of stuff. Here's hoping Twitter gets the problems figured out, sure makes the service less useful when you don't know whether your friends are updating or not! :)

Anyway, if you're following me on Twitter and and not seeing updates, keep an eye on the Friendfeed page.

Labels: Blogging

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Trying out something new - Disqus

So I've been thinking for awhile now about ways to increase commenting around here. Mostly because I want to hear what you guys have to say, as opposed to just having a conversation with myself. I know most of you read this in some feed reader or other, so coming here to comment requires some effort, and I want to make it easier.

That's part of the reason I setup a FriendFeed, because it sets up an easy way for people to comment on things I'm sharing, albeit on their site instead of here, but still a conversation is a conversation, even if it's not hosted here.

Another piece I want to try out is Disqus, which again, allows me to setup an easy place for people to comment, only this time it integrates with the site, and if it works, should give me some other options. This post is my first attempt at seeing how well this works, if at all. We'll see what happens!

Update: Apparently, it's fudged, am trying to figure it out now.

Labels: Blogging

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FriendFeed, aka I'm a sellout.

I'm still not in favor of any service that takes a full post feed and turns it into a headline one, but I wanted to conduct my own little experiment with what the service looks like from a user perspective, because obviously it's become a huge hit with many in the blogging world. Part of me just wants to see if there's something that I'm missing when I look at it. So, I created a feed and subscribed to a couple of folks over there. Maybe using it for a few days will change my mind. I doubt it, but stranger things have happened.

Anyway, if your one of the Friendfeed users, here's my feed:

http://friendfeed.com/mikemac29

Also, while I have your attention, tell me why you use it. What's the big attraction? so far, I'd have to say I don't really see it.

Labels: Blogging

Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:07 PM | 1 comments | Links to this post

 
Friends are Hard to Define

I've been randomly taking a look at Facebook's "People you may know" feature over the last week or however long it's been available. It occurs to me today that this feature is actually a perfect example of the limits of the "friend" definition on Facebook and other social networking services.

Here's an example. I have some friends on Facebook, and also MySpace, who I only know through one of my websites. For the sake of example, let's look at my fellow Friends in Tech members, very few of whom I've met, and who live in pretty diverse geographical areas. Between all of us, we're spread pretty much all over the country, but we also interact fairly regularly online and are friends in that sense, so many of the FiT members are also connected on social networks like Facebook. That's to be expected.

The problem comes in when you consider that to Facebook, any friend is a friend in the same sense. It pulls the "people you may know" group from your friend's contacts. Just because they know someone who I also know, doesn't mean I know them, and in the Internet age, where I'm interacting with folks from all over the world, let alone the US, the chances that they have many, many friends that I know nothing at all about, increases dramatically.

I've got people on my friends lists who I've worked with in the past or people who my wife works with, who are mostly local to us. I've got people on my lists who are regular readers of this blog, and people who are regular readers of my child abuse blog. I have folks I met at a legal conference, and people I've known from my years in IT. Do you think those groups of people would know each other just by virtue of knowing me? I may be a link between them, but I'm a tenuous link at best.

Wouldn't it be better if we could better define our friends and this matching feature actually took that data into account when suggesting people we might know? Instead of being presented with a list of people who are local to someone I only know online, wouldn't it be better to see only the other online friends that person has, and vice versa for people I know and see in real life on a regular basis?

I think that'd be a whole lot more useful than what I'm seeing at Facebook right now, and I'm hopeful that someone over there will take a really hard look at using the Friend List feature, and someone at Myspace is taking a long look at using the friend groups feature to help push this further along that path. Is anyone listening?

Labels: Blogging, FriendsinTech, Tech

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Another Feed

I listed a bunch in that previous entry, but I forgot one. There's a feed for the comments, rare as they've been of late, here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheManyFacesOfMikeMcbrideComments

Now, I'm trying to figure out what I need to do to get you guys to comment more. asking for Mac helps seems to work pretty well. :)

Seriously, I know the vast majority of you are reading this in a feed reader, and not on the site itself, so it's unlikely you're going to do more than scan it and move on to your next item. The challenge is to find a way to get you more involved. I've got some ideas, and some things I'm working on, so we'll see how it works out. It's an ongoing experiment that's for sure, but if you have some suggestions, I'm always open to hearing them!

Labels: Blogging

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FriendFeed

I've seen numerous people talk about using FriendFeed of late, a few who even talked about using it instead of an RSS aggregator because you can put everything you're doing online in one feed and give it to people who really want to know what you're doing that much.

Tonight, I took a quick look at it and I seriously don't see the point. First off, do you really want to follow every single thing I do online? Yeah, didn't think so.

Second, and more importantly, why the heck would I take my full post blog feed and push it into a Friendfeed where it gets pushed out to you, the subscriber, as the title only? How is that more useful to you? (Is it possible that I'm missing something here? I put the feed for this blog in and got only titles out!)

Here's an idea, there are any number of feeds available to you if you want to follow what I'm up to, how about if you take those feeds, in their full length, and use a service like Yahoo Pipes, or xFruits to mix and match the ones you want to follow, instead of having me decide for you, and getting a crappy title only feed that you'll probably quit reading within a few months anyway?

Here's a start, take what you want and have a good time:

All posts blog feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/OutOfTheFryingPanAndIntoTheCube

Just Tech Posts:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MikeMcBrideTech

Just Lit Support Posts:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MikeMcBrideLitSupport

Just Photo Posts:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MikeMcBridePhotography

Child Abuse Survivor Blog:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChildAbuseSurvivor

Flickr Photos:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=19269532@N00&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

Twitter Updates:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/800069.rss

If you need more, check the right side of the blog template for even more places I am online. Again, take what you want, mix and match how you like, don't wait for me to make a feed for you. This is 2008 people, don't let some service like Friendfeed tell you how you should follow people!

Labels: Blogging, Tech

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One session I missed at Techshow

As much as I wanted to attend the session "A Real World EDD Motion Hearing", it ran concurrent with the CT Summation demo, in which I had hoped to get another look at iBlaze 2.9 and Discovery Cracker. Luckily for me, I found where Mazyar Hedayat at TechoLawyer Blog had posted some very detailed notes on that session.

Reading them makes me almost feel like I was there, so it's nice that Mazyar and I hit some different sessions, at least for me.

Also, he has some good notes from the session "The Mobile Office: Take your Desktop in Your Pocket", another one I missed out on.

Yes, there was quite a few really good sessions this year, more than one person could possibly attend! That's why I succumbed to live-blogging, as a way to help communicate what was going on in the sessions I was in. Hopefully my live notes were close to as helpful as Mazyar's are!

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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A few Final Techshow Thoughts

Just a few thoughts, now that I've had some time to think about it rather than live-blogging it:

1. I've never been a big fan of live bogging, but I felt like I needed to really give it a shot. Doing it over the 3 days of Techshow helped me see where the value is, but I'm still not the biggest fan. Simply put, while it allowed to me to share what I was hearing and learning immediately with folks back in our office or all over the world, (And that has tremendous value, don't get me wrong), I still think my writing sucked because I was trying to keep up. :)

2. Live-blogging and Twitter gave this conference a different feel for me personally. I'm not normally very good in social situations, but having the handful of other folks who were blogging and twittering actually follow what I was doing and want to chat with me helped me feel a bit more comfortable, even when it came time to interact with the far larger number of people who were simply attending and not reading blogs or Twitter.

3. As much as I learned in the sessions, and with the vendor booths, the most important benefit I saw from Techshow was the people. Getting the chance to chat with other folks doing what I do, the speakers, the other bloggers, etc, and share ideas and experiences will make me a better Litigation Support professional, and a better blogger.

4. I met a bunch of great people at this conference that I hope to stay in touch with. I have read some blog entries of folks who were there or speakers who I heard who I didn't get a chance to meet, not to mention all the other attendees I couldn't possibly have had time to met. Whether we met or not, feel free to drop me an email and say hello! (Email link over on the right column of the blog, or connect with me on Facebook or LinkedIn.) Being relatively new to the Lit Support world, I'd love to build upon the network of folks, and their knowledge, that I have access to!

5. Now I have to go back through all these blog posts and pull out the best ideas and bits of knowledge that I think apply to our firm and how we're doing things. I didn't stop to think about just how much I was blogging over those 3 days, but now that I look back, it's A LOT! Hopefully anyone who actually followed along with all that drivel found some value as well.

Labels: Blogging, Career, LitigationSupport, Personal

Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 8:45 PM | 0 comments | Links to this post

 
I'm done with Scoble

I probably shouldn't have stepped into the hornet's next that is Scoble's comments today, but after reading his post about Flickr not allowing his kid into their, clearly adults-only party, I felt the need to point out that some of us appreciate the opportunity to go to an event and have adult conversations and company without a bunch of kids running around. Part of his response to me was "If you want an adult night out, go to a Playboy party".

Apparently disagreeing with Robert's "family friendly" policy means it's open season for him to assume he knows what you're real motives are. I'm done with your blog Robert.

Labels: Blogging

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ABA Techshow Bloggers

Tom Mighell put out the call for anyone who'll be blogging from the ABA Techshow in Chicago next week. Naturally, I have already sent him my information. Looks like they'll be putting together a Yahoo Pipe feed of the folks who let them know they're blogging, as well as pulling in anything tagged ABA Techshow in Technorati or other blog search tools.

I'm looking forward to seeing what other folks are talking about, and maybe meeting up with some other bloggers while I'm there. If you are going to be there, let me know, or look me up! If you're not, I'll be blogging, and twittering what I'm learning, so be sure to keep an eye out for it!

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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ABA Techshow going Social

As if I wasn't looking forward to going to Chicago next month already, I saw this post last night about the event:

ABA TECHSHOW Goes Social

The Internet continues to roll out some fun tools that are great at keeping people connected and talking about a conference, whether they're attending the conference or not. At ABA TECHSHOW 2008 we plan on making use of some of these tools, and we're really excited about the possibilities. Here are some of the things we're working on for the show:
-- A blog feed that will aggregate all of the live-blogging at ABA TECHSHOW, as well as any other blog posts regarding the show.
-- A Twitter feed will update conference attendees about upcoming sessions, events, and other fun stuff, via text message or on the Web.
-- Got a camera? Bring it to ABA TECHSHOW, 'cause we're working on a Flickr feed that will show all the photos taken at the conference all in one place.
-- During the conference our speakers will discuss useful and interesting websites for lawyers and legal professionals. Our del.icio.us feed will allow attendees to create a page of links from some of the sites they learn about.
You won't have to be an ABA TECHSHOW attendee to see what's going on during the conference. But if we do this thing right, you'll wish you were :-)
If you're attending the show, look for more information on how to participate in upcoming email blasts or blog posts.

Yeah, I'll be there, and I'll be blogging/Twittering and probably taking a few photos. I'm looking forward to see who else will be!

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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Legal Tech Twitters?

I saw a post by Jennifer Leggio today about locating network security folks on Twitter, and I wondered how many people who work in the legal technology field are using twitter or other social networking apps. In fact, following Jennifer on Twitter also helped me discover Twitterpaks, which is a wiki setup to encourage new twitter users to find a group of users to follow in specific interests. I went ahead and added a Legal Tech page to the wiki. Feel free to check it out, and add yourself to it, if you're in the legal tech field and using Twitter.

Hopefully it will help, especially those of us working in Litigation Support, to connect and discuss our work.

Looking forward to connecting, and maybe meeting up with some of the legal bloggers/twits at ABA Techshow in March!

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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CT Summation has started blogging

I first caught sight of their blog this morning. It's still very much in the early stages, but it's worth keeping an eye on if you use Summation at your firm, that's for sure.

It's being written by Joshua Gilliland, Business Development Manager for CT Summation.

It'd be really nice if they used it to keep us informed of known issues, updates, etc. Seems we never hear about any of that stuff until we call in with that exact problem! We'll see if that's the case.

Welcome to the blogosphere CTSummation!

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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Pownce goes mobile, too little too late?

Not only did Pownce go public this week, but now they even have a mobile site, so they took care of my one big complaint about the service, that I couldn't really use it easily with my blackberry.

On the other hand, I've become a fairly entrenched Twitter user, with a good sized group of people I'm interacting with over there. Unless that groups suddenly moves to Pownce, I just don't see a point to using it much.

Labels: Blogging

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Movable Type Upgrade and Spam

I have noticed a sharp uptick in the number of spam trackbacks that are getting through the Movable Type installation since I upgraded to version 4. Anyone else seen the same thing? The default comment spam settings seem to be working pretty well, but whereas I never got any trackback spams getting through, suddenly I'm seeing a few every couple of days.

Then again, that site gets so few trackbacks, maybe I should disable them all the way 'round?

Labels: Blogging

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Pownce on Twitku

Looks like Twitku is getting ready to add Pownce to it's page, so you can interact with Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce all in one place.

Currently Pownce is limited, "Non-public notes not shown and no posting yet.", but I'm sure that will come in due time.

Personally, I'm still sticking with using just Twitter, entirely because of it's integration with Gtalk, which allows me to use it with my blackberry. Micro-blogging is much more useful when it can be mobile as well.

Labels: Blogging

Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:31 PM | 0 comments | Links to this post

 
Del.icio.us Feature

I realize that those of you who've been using Del.icio.us forever probably already know this, but today was the first time I saw it in action.

Today was the first time I tried to "tag" an article that I had already tagged a few weeks ago, the first time I stumbled on to it and wanted to make a note to read it. When I tried to add it to my links for today, it brought up the tagging window, but with all the information filled in from where I had tagged it the first time. That's kind of nice, since I, obviously, can't keep track of what I've tagged for the daily links part of the blog feed, and what I haven't. :)

Labels: Blogging

Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 11:00 PM | 0 comments |