The Massachusetts Lead Law makes it illegal to refuse to rent to families with children under six, or evicting or refusing to renew the lease of families with children under six, because of lead paint. MGL c. 111 s. 199A
I have not made much progress with Facebook after my previous post: Facebook for the Enterprise. I edited my profile and added a few friends.
With the arrival of a huge class of summer associates, I am planning to gauge their use and poke them for ideas on how it could be used to improve the enterprise.
Since my previous post, Facebook has announced that they are opening the site as a platform for developers. So far they have six applications labeled as business. None of them seem particularly useful for the enterprise.
See more:
Collaborative Thinking: Facebook: From Site To Platform
What happens when you do not use the “magic language” from Goren? (See my Earlier Post: Magic Language for Offers)
You more than likely have an enforceable agreement.
That was set out in McCarthy v. Tobin, 429 Mass. 84, 706 N.E.2d 629 (1999) when the
Greater Boston Real Estate Board form of offer was found to be enough to make an enforceable agreement. In that decision, the SJC particularly noted the preprinted language: ” NOTICE. This is a legal document that creates binding obligations. If not understood, consult an attorney.”
The latest casualty of not using the “magic language” is in Kruker v. Shoestring Properties, 68 Mass. App. Ct. 644, 864 N.E.2d 24 (April 12, 2007).
Robert Niles, editor of Online Journalism Review, questions: Are blogs a ‘parasitic’ medium?
“Could the blogosphere survive without the reporting provided by newspapers and TV networks?”
Nicholas Carr in his Rough Type blog responds: In praise of the parasitic blogger. “I think sets blogs apart, as a literary rather than a technical form, is that they offer the opportunity for a writer to document his immediate responses to his day-to-day reading.”
What is missing from both posts is how blogging, and especially the “parasitic” blogging of referring to news articles from “real” news sites, affects searching and search results.
Google is built on popularity. The more links to a website, the higher it appears in search results. The more blogs that refer to an article, the higher that article will appear in search results. The “parasitic” blogging referrals drive attention to the article.
As to my “parasitic behavior, ” I post references to articles and news because I want to put them in context and be able to find them. In so doing, I am able to communicate them to the readers of the blog, including me.
I think the same reasons and impact carry over to blogs inside the enterprise. Bloggers in the enterprise would post references to articles, documents and ideas inside and outside the enterprise so they can find the material and they can communicate the findings to others in the enterprise. Some of the content would be original thoughts to provoke discussion and communicate new ideas. My guess is that the bulk of the blog posts would be “parasitic” referrals to other sources of original material. Either way, the ideas are being communicated to the enterprise.
Scott Gavin (Enterprise 2.0 Evangelist) put together a slide show: Meet Charlie – what is Enterprise2.0?
It is a nice, glossy overview of Enterprise 2.0 technologies and their uses, but very light on how they work and fit in the organization. It certainly has enough pizazz to attract the attention of those who do not know much about the Enterprise 2.0 technologies and how they fit into an organization.
Michael Hyatt of Thomas Nelson Publishers announced that they have redesigned their intranet to be a wiki: From Where I Sit: A Practical Tool for Collaboration.
The wiki was put in place because the intranet was static; you had to go through IT to get a change.
As James Dellow pointed out [Marching the intranet retreat], using a wiki may just be a cheap web content management system.
The flaw in the Thomas Nelson intranet was the inability of a user to contribute content. An intranet should be about viewing content contributed by users. Although an IT group may be really interesting, they should not be the gatekeeper of user content.
The Thomas Nelson intranet must have been very static for it to be replaceable by a wiki. I imagine it was like my firm’s first generation intranet that consisted almost exclusively of html pages that you had to edit with FrontPage.
Our current intranet is now much more of a portal, pulling information from other systems and displaying it for the user through the web interface. The most popular tool on our intranet is our photobook application (which is true for most intranets). The photobook information pulls information from the HR database. I would hate to have to maintain the phone directory on a wiki.
Using only a wiki for your intranet prevents you from incorporating other systems into the intranet. You can link to another system that is acting as a portal, but that would propel you right out of the wiki.
We are currently redesigning our intranet, moving it from Sharepoint 2003 to Sharepoint 2007, and trying to figure out how to include wikis in the new design. DO we have one big wiki for legal content or do we have several wikis focused on different areas of legal practice and administrative areas.
Scott Neisen of Attensa pointed out a post by Mike Gotta: Getting Over “Fear-of-Blogs”.
Mr. Gotta proposed four categories for the application of Blogs: Internal Communication, Project Management, Community Building and Business Process.
Internal Communication.
In a previous post, I pointed out the virtues of using a blog for internal communication: Better Communication through Blogs, Wikis and RSS. I have focused on this category in the past because I think it would be an easy transition for the communicators. I see the challenge in weaning the communication consumers from getting all of their information in their inbox.
Project Management.
I have thought about using a blog as a communication tool within a project team, but I have doubts about how successful this would be for a legal case. I thought of using a blog to keep track of key decisions and information for an ongoing legal matter. However, on most legal matters there is too much communication among the working group. Emails flow constantly. I think having a common location for lawyers to deposit, share and read email would be more effective and more easily adopted than using a blog. It would be great if that email repository had an RSS feed so the group would know when a new message is added.
Community Building.
Blogs can be effective as a personal knowledge management tool [See my previous post: Why Blog? My Reasons]. The question is how that carries over to an application within the enterprise. I see two options for deploying blogs in the enterprise:
Option One: Set up a blog for a practice area of lawyers, allowing any of them to post information and comment on the information.
Option Two: Set up a blog specific to each user.
I think option one would be better served with a wiki. Information could be more easily be connected with similar information. Information can be built upon rather than being restated. With a wiki you still have the benefit of an RSS feed so users can see changes so you still get the communication benefits.
I have given a lot of thought about option two and I just do not know how users will react. Since our platform will allow us to easily set up blogs, I think I may just give a blog to anyone who wants one and let them do what they want with it. This strategy is less about community building, and more about harnessing personal knowledge management in a way that can be easily leveraged across the enterprise. Assuming blogs get used by a large base of users, you would end up with some duplication of information: when that important case comes down, several people may blog about it.
Business Process.
I am not sold on using a blog to address a business process in the law firm. I have not encountered much of a need among the lawyers for a process that is conversational in nature.
There is one process that I have been am looking at for using a blog. Some of our transactional practice areas are sending out an email to the group that a transaction occurred and some details about the transaction. Then our knowledge management administrators harvest that information into our matter information database.
By using a blog to post information, it moves the communication out of the email and creates a searchable repository that can be tied into the matters database.
Rube Goldberg. Wired magazine has a photo spread from the 2007 Rube Goldberg Machine Contest at Purdue University to design a machine that uses the most complex process to complete a simple task: Engineered Insanity: A Gallery of Wonderfully Useless Complexity
Does your knowledge management practice bear any resemblance to these contraptions?
Contract Drafting. I recently discovered Ken Adams blog on contract drafting. Mr. Adams is the author of a A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting, published by the Business Law Section of the American Bar Association.
Dell in WalMart. Dell announced it is selling computers in WalMart. I bought my computer from Dell so that I could get the features I wanted and not pay for things that I did not want. Hopefully Dell can survive the experience. There is an interesting story in Fast Compnay about how Walmart and gallon-sized jar of pickles wrecked havoc on Vlasic.
I do not blog for fame or fortune. (There is none.)
I do not blog for you. (Although I do appreciate you taking the time to read my blog posts.)
I blog for me.
Not for narcissism, but for capturing knowledge.
Ken Adams points out in his post: Reflections on a Year of Blogging:
“To feed the blog beast, I’ve had to scour the online and paper worlds and the remote recesses of my brain, looking for issues that I hadn’t addressed previously or needed to revisit. I’ve then had to prepare analyses that would withstand scrutiny while being halfway engaging. It’s been rare for a day to go by without my doing some form of work related to the blog. …
In particular, I have a second edition of MSCD to produce. Without the blog, working on the second edition would have seemed a looming and monumental task. But now I have a year’s worth of great material to work with, and it addresses a far broader range of topics than I would have dreamed up without a hungry blog to feed.”
Matt mused in his post: Blogging: Why would I want to do that?! :
“If, like me, you’re a knowledge worker rather than a process worker, you use knowledge and information to get your work done. If you need to find information, clarify your thoughts and share them with others before you write that paper, maybe blogging is the way to help you get your proverbial ducks in a row. Maybe blogging will help you get comments from others, whether they’re peers, colleagues or people you don’t even know who are also doing the same sorta stuff as you.”
Matt coined the term “thought incubator” in one of his comments on one of my posts.
This blog is primarily a personal knowledge management tool for me: A space where I can keep information, wrap context around it, categorize it and search for it.
I blog as a way to capture information on the internet and wrap some context around it. I bookmark sites in my browser and bookmark sites with del.icio.us. (Feel free to check out my tags). [The bookmarks in my browser are for sites I visit regularly. The bookmarks in del.icio.us are for sites that I found interesting and may need to turn back to one day.] But bookmarks do not have much context. You can wrap some metadata around them by giving them tags or putting them into folders. But you really do not have much of an opportunity to say why they interested you.
I blog to write my thoughts down on knowledge management in a way that I can reuse them and adapt them.
I blog to highlight information for future knowledge management projects that I may want to start or to highlight future goals for existing projects.
The search feature of this blog allows me to quickly find the post I was looking for, even if I forgot the name of the post or when I published it.
The label feature allows we to review my thoughts, along the lines of Matt’s “thought incubator” concept and Ken Adams “material generation” concept.
Why blog? Why not blog!
Blogger and many of its competitors are free, easy to set up and learn. If you are shy, Blogger allows you to keep your blog private. (Sorry if that sounds like an ad for Blogger, but I did not know how easy it could be to setup and run a blog.)
Tom Dunlap wrote a piece on the Intranet Journal: RSS Slowly Gains Momentum in the Enterprise. It reads more like an advertisement for NewsGator, but has a few interesting quotes from Todd Berkowitz of NewsGator.
“Everyone gets too much email.”
“Information workers are drowning in content — email, newsletters, press releases, and spam. . .”
I am currently using two RSS readers.
I have been using Bloglines as an web-based RSS feed reader for many months. The benefit of a web-based reader is that I can use at work, at home or when traveling. All I have to do is logon.
I also installed an Outlook based RSS feed reader from Attensa. I am running this against some external blogs and sources. More importantly, I am also running it against the RSS feeds in our Sharepoint2007 development site. I see lots of potential in using the enterprise based RSS reader to improve internal communication and knowledge sharing.
With an enterprise based RSS reader, you can force certain RSS feeds on groups of users. So everyone can notified of HR updates, but it is moved out of the email inbox and into the RSS feed. With an Outlook add-on, there is a flag for a new message. But the flag and the message is in a separate folder, instead of my inbox. Even better, it does not set off my blackberry.
My goal would be to have actionable messages from the firm to go to my email inbox and non-actionable messages go to an RSS feed.
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