Doug Cornelius .com

I felt a little bad about calling LawLink boring. Not because I said it was boring (it is), but because I did not give any advice for what would make it less boring. Since Steven Choi stumbled across this site, I might as well continue with my thoughts.

I found LawLink to be like an elevator pitch: “Let’s do LinkedIn just for lawyers.” As Steve Choi pointed out, there are only a few thousand members. It is shame that he did not give them a reason to come back after they joined.

Look at the ABA’s LawLink site: www.abanet.org/lawlink/. “Lawlink provides quick access to important legal information from the American Bar Association and other resources. Each site is selected and evaluated by a member of the ABA’s Legal Technology Resource Center staff. ” Now that is information that I would come back for.

Look at the LawLink for New South Wales: http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/ There is information worth coming back for. (If I was in New South Wales)

Steven said that I should promote the blog in the LawLink classifieds. The classifieds look pathetic with most of them devoid of entries. I would be embarrassed to post something in there. Frankly, I found the existence of a dating section in the classifieds section to be repulsive for site that is targeted for professional relationships. Yes lawyers need love, but it seems to clash with the LawLink Mission:

• To help attorneys build professional relationships with other attorneys.
• To help attorneys leverage their existing professional relationships.

I would be interested if there were an aggregation of blawgs on the site. That would provide at least some substance.

LinkedIn provides a way for you to upload you contacts and see who in the network. It also matches other contacts in the network you may know based on college and law school attendance. LawLink does not provide a way to start that hunt for people you know.

To fair to LawLink, LinkedIn is also pretty boring. There is not much to do except see if anyone new has joined the network and answer questions.

I missed the early days of LinkedIn and Facebook, so I do not know how they got people to come back after their first look. I assume that there was some interesting information, cool feature or string of communication that caught their eye.

I think LawLink suffers from the blank wiki page syndrome. You can’t just put up a blank wiki and expect people to contribute. You can’t just put up an empty social site and expect people to be social (especially lawyers).

Steven says that LawLink will be rolling out new features. I am still waiting for something to catch my eye to get me to go back.

According to the The LinkedIn Blog, starting on Friday the 28th you can start adding a picture to your LinkedIn profile: A Photo is Worth a Thousand Words.

“Adding a profile photo is one of the most commonly requested features for the LinkedIn profile, primarily because many people (like me) tend to recognize their colleagues and classmates more reliably by face than by name.”

With the summer associates getting ready to finish up their program, I thought it would useful to get their take on the use of social network sites. The summer associates consist largely of law students who will be graduating from law school in 2008 and starting at the firm as attorneys in the fall of 2008.

I am still gathering data from the survey, but I though I would put up some preliminary information.

• More than 80% have a Facebook account
• Of those, 2/3 check Facebook at least once a day
• Only 25% have a LinkedIn account
• Of those, only 10% check LinkedIn once a week, with the rest answering rarely
• Only 20% have a MySpace account
• Of those, 1/4 check it once a week, with the rest answering rarely

Common Craft is at again with a new video: Social Networking in Plain English. This is a great introduction for those of you wondering what Facebook and LinkedIn are all about.

The Common Craft Show also has great videos on wikis and RSS feeds.

The Motley Fool posted a story: Getting LinkedIn to the Next Hot IPO. I particularly liked the story’s characterization of the other big social network sites:

MySpace: “chatty teens”
Facebook: “giddy coeds”
LinkedIn: “LinkedIn caters to the white-collar crowd, hungry for leads, recommendations, and job opportunities. Let’s call it a networking social site instead of a social-networking site, because it’s really all about corporate networking at LinkedIn.”

Rueters has the full press release on the IPO. In that story, Dan Nye, the company’s chief executive, describes LinkedIn: “LinkedIn is a productivity tool. We expect people to come to LinkedIn and accomplish tasks, then move on. We have no intention of becoming a social site. We want to remain focused on productivity that is important for professionals.”

Here is my profile in LinkedIn. I found it easy to find, friends, colleagues and co-workers and add them as “connections.” Over the course of the last week since I set up my account, I have created 36 connections and have 16 outstanding invitations.

Web Worker Daily put up this story on 20 Ways to Use LinkedIn Productively.

LinkedIn is another social site that I have been curious about. So, as I did with Facebook, I signed up and explored. [Here is my profile in LinkedIn.] I have not had the opportunity to add much information yet. It certainly is more grown up than Facebook. But Facebook seems to be much more rich in features. Although the vast majority of features have no value to the workers in an enterprise.

I even added the LinkedIn button on the blog this morning.