New Social Networks for Lawyers

Omar Ha-Redeye writes on slaw.ca about two new social networks for lawyers: Lawyrs Looking for Alternative Social Networks and Social Network on Jurafide for American Clients.

Jurafide.com is a networking and marketing site that facilitates communication between U.S. clients and non-U.S. lawyers.

Lawyrs.net looks like a social networking platform for lawyers with some group discussions and legal news. 

Omar signed up on Lawyrs but finds that it is missing the ability to pull in your contacts and see who you know is in the site. A fatal flaw.

I did not bother signing up for either one. Legal OnRamp seems to be the dominant site in the world of social networking in the legal field. I previously wrote about my bad experiences with LawLink and ABA's LegallyMinded. I still hold out some hope for Martindale Hubbell Connected. So, I am skeptical that either of these two companies with no apparent connection to the US legal market can provide an interesting online networking platform.

Lawyers and the Social Internet

Kevin O'Keefe, of Real Lawyers Have Blogs, put together his thoughts on what are the best social internet places for a lawyer or law firm to spend their resources: Lawyers and Social Media - It the Big Three. Kevin picks Blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn.

As usual, I agree with Kevin.

Every professional should have a profile on LinkedIn. Lawyers may rely on their law firm website, but lawyers do not stay at the same law firm for their entire career any more. I was at The Firm for 13 years, but everyone else I keep in touch with from law school had moved to a new place. I was the last person who was still at the same place. LinkedIn is great at keeping track of your job history. LinkedIn is the place to answer the question: How Ddo I know you? When I am planning to meet someone I always run a Google search and a LinkedIn search.

I have found this blog to be a wonderful networking tool. I have created and maintain many relationships through this blog. There is no better way to stay connected, develop your expertise and showcase your abilities than through a blog. It has been tough for me to give up on this blog since moving from knowledge management to compliance. (And obviously unsuccessful.) Compliance Space will come out of the dark in the near future. Although most of you will not be interested in it.

Twitter has exploded as a idea tool. As with most people, I was skeptical of what to do with a 140 character messaging system. But the open design has produced remarkable results for me.The micro-blogging aspect allows me communicate with people in a quick and easy way. Bigger thoughts end up in the blog. Lots of the background communication happens in Twitter.

I also use Twitter for research. Several times a day I search for "compliance", "FCPA", "CFIUS," "Ethics", and lots of other compliance terms. These tweets connect me with people, news, thoughts, thought-leaders and a plethora of information that helps me with my new role as Chief Compliance Officer.

One of the challenges of taking the new position, in this new area was the great network I had developed in the knowledge management and enterprise 2.0 areas. LinkedIn, blogs and Twitter are helping me to rapidly build a new network in the compliance area.

Facebook is great aggregator of information. I use it largely by having Facebook applications pull posts from blogs, my twitter updates and other sources rather than using Facebook as the primary creation point.

Unlike Kevin, I am still trying out new social internet sites. I still think Legal OnRamp has a bright future. Martindale-Hubble Connected has huge information repository that could create an incredibly powerful tool.

I try others to see what may develop. Eighteen months ago, I thought LinkedIn was boring and would not amount to much. I was wrong. It took a while for Twitter to catch on. I jump on others just to grab my name and to see what may happen. Usually I just waste 10 minutes to create profile (unfortunately, much longer for ABA's LegallyMinded), see who else is there and explore the feature set. I have long list of bookmarks for dead social internet sites.

As with Kevin, I spend the vast majority of my time with the big three. You should too.

Intel's Social Media Guidelines

Intel has published their Social Media Guidelines.

I like their approach of giving users guidelines for they should and should not do. The context is to place the responsibility on the individual. It is that person who is creating the content. They are responsible for the content and the consequences. I think it is a great balance of encouraging people to interact with responsible behavior.

These guidelines are actually a great starting point for a law firm. You just need to add in a section about not creating attorney client relationships and a section about attorney advertising disclaimers.

Intel could have added some specific recommendations for some high profile sites. Of course the sites are changing so often that it might be hard to keep the policy up-to-date.

I also like how Intel integrate these guidelines with other policies like the Intel Code of Conduct (.pdf) and the Intel Privacy Policy. (That may be the new compliance side of me revealing himself.)  This modularity avoids duplication and inconsitencies.

Law Firms Banning Facebook, Twitter and Web 2.0

Back in June of 2007, I came across a story about Facebook at Law Firms. A Magic Circle firm had banned Facebook, then abruptly lifted the ban. The decision was made because Facebook has "business benefits as well as social uses."

In the 18 months since then, web 2.0 and the social internet have grown immensely. Twitter has come roaring onto the scenes. There are three attempts at creating social networking sites for lawyers: Legal OnRamp, Martindale Connected and the ABA's Legally Minded. The number of law firm blogs has nearly doubled in those 18 months.

Are any law firms still banning access to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, blogs, YouTube or other web 2.0 sites? Let me know. You can leave an anonymous comment or drop me an email at kmspace@dougcornelius . com.

If you have been reading this blog, hopefully you have come to the conclusion that web 2.0 tools are great for lawyers, create lots of professional development and create business opportunities. Maybe there are some firms out that there that have not seen the light. Let me know.

LegallyMinded - The ABA Tries To Get Social

The American Bar Association launched LegallyMinded, a social networking site targeted at lawyers, paralegals, law librarians, law students and anyone else in the legal market. Being a student of social networks for lawyers, I thought I would sign up.

I encountered my first problem when they asked me to have a username rather than my real name. The statement was to use your real name. But they do not allow spaces in the username.Someone else had already grabbed the "dougcornelius" username. I am stuck with dougcornelius1.

The next problem was the lengthy six step sign-up process. No other site makes you add so much information. I singed in with my ABA identification so I would expect they would carry over my ABA information. I was wrong.

The next challenge was trying to connect with people. They offer an interactive map showing people with similar interests closer to you. It seemed to make little sense to me. Right next to me was someone who runs a small rural practice. Not me.

The site shows people with their username instead of their real names so it is hard to figure out who is who. My first search was to find out who joined as dougcornelius. No luck in being able to search the site for people by name. Of course their real name is hidden anyhow.

I moved on to the group function. There were two dozen in place, none of which held much interest for me. Five were focused on law students or law schools and three were focused on geography. So I set up a group for compliance since I noted Bruce Carton from Securities Docket and Compliance Week was on the site. I could not find a way to invite him to the group.

They have a blog feature so I tried that out. I copied in some posts from my Compliance Space blog to try out that feature. The publishing and editing of the blog platform is really poor.

The ABA Journal published a piece in the December 2008 issue: The ABA Gets Social.

“We set out to do something different,” says Fred Faulkner, the ABA’s manager of interactive services in Chicago. “We looked at a lot of the professional and social networks, and the gap we found was that there truly wasn’t a good site that was a cross between professional and personal networking.”

“We’re filling that gap by offering the best features of sites like LinkedIn and Facebook and adding a bunch of content from the ABA and other high-quality content sources.”

I think they missed the mark with LegallyMinded.

Bob Ambrogi is trying to test it out, but he can't even log in: ABA Launches (Buggy) Networking Site

Social Networking for Lawyers and Legal IT

I had the pleasure of hosting a lunch meeting for the International Legal Technology Association to talk about Social Networking for Lawyers and Legal IT.

I was joined by Jenn Steele and Bob Ambrogi in talking about Facebook, LinkedIn, blogging, Twitter, Legal OnRamp and Martindale Connected. We looked at the ways we each use these tools and how the audience used the tools. We also talked a bit about policy and rules for using these sites.

Here is the slide deck we used. You can also get the slides with our notes on JD Supra: Social Networking for Lawyers and Legal IT.

Social Networking

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social km)

(We deleted the slides on LegalOnRamp and Martindale Connected because we "borrowed" them from another presentation.)

Jenn Steele is the Director of Information Technology at Morrison Mahoney LLP.  She holds an MBA from the Simmons School of Management and a B.S. in Biology from MIT, with a minor in Expository Writing.  Prior to Morrison Mahoney, she was the Director of Information Technology at Donovan Hatem LLP from 2002-2007, and the Senior Applications Specialist at Burns & Levinson LLP from 2000-2002.  She has also held positions in the health and human services industry.  She is the author of Leading Geeks, a blog focusing on best practices for leading technologists (www.leadinggeeks.blogspot.com).

Robert Ambrogi is an internationally known legal journalist and a leading authority on law and the Web.  He represents clients at the intersection of law, media and technology and is also established professional in alternative dispute resolution.  Robert is a Massachusetts lawyer, writer and media consultant and is author of the book, The Essential Guide to the Best (and Worst) Legal Sites on the Web.  He also writes the blog Media Law, co-writes Legal Blog Watch and cohosts the legal affairs podcast Lawyer2Lawyer.

Social Networking for Lawyers - The What, Why and How

Carolyn Elefant recently released an e-book entitled Social Networking for Lawyers - The What, Why and How (.pdf)

Courtesy of the Avvo Blog: Treat For Avvo Blog Readers

Why Social Computing Aids Knowledge Management

I stumbled across this CIO.com article by Michael Fitzgerald : Why Social Computing Aids Knowledge Management. (I missed it originally because it was not listed under the Knowledge Management articles on CIO.com.)

In fact, social computing represents a third wave for KM: the set of tools and processes companies use to create, track and share intellectual assets, says Patti Anklam, an independent consultant who is focused on KM and social networking. Anklam says the first wave involved digitizing and tracking documents using tools like content management systems. When it became clear that it was too hard to share those documents, companies adopted collaboration tools. With social networks, companies are extending knowledge management to make it easier to connect employees and information.

"A framework for knowledge management consists of understanding what you need to have in place so that people can connect and share with each other, and then...connect to people outside of their own current, small personal networks," Anklam says.

Social Networking - Marketing Boon, Malpractice Nightmare or Simple Boondoggle

The recruiting manager has created a firm FaceBook site. The marketing director is encouraging all the lawyers to join LinkedIn. The firm's general counsel is freaking out over the possible ethic violations and malpractice possibilities. The older lawyers simply aren't sure what to do. The younger lawyers are wondering what all the hoopla is about. We explore social and business networking, the potential problems and rewards and what you can do about it.

Speaker: Jeffrey Brandt, Chief Information Officer and Chief Knowledge Officer at Crowell + Moring LLP

My Notes:

Jeff started off with definitions of social networking and a long list of web 2.0 sites.

He got focused on this areas because of overly exuberant people at his prior firm. Nobody talked to the risk management people to talk about the ethical and bar regulations that apply to lawyers.

Jeff is a big fan of LinkedIn (His profile: Jeffrey Brandt).  He also uses Plaxo (although much less so), Twitter (but he is not sure what it is all about),  and Facebook (but is seriously lacking friends).


Facebook and MySpace are for kids. Except that there are 100 million + user of Facebook and it is the fourth most trafficked site on the internet. All of them cannot be kids

LinkedIn is a fad.  Of the Fortune 500 companies, 499 have director-level profiles in LinkedIn. Barack Obama used it to extend his campaign.  In looking at LinkedIn, for many law firms, the number of profiles has doubled over the last year. If it is fad, it is a powerful one.

Second Life. Sun and Intel hold meetings in Second Life. Companies have set up storefonts in Second Life.

Less than 10% of people on the ILTA listserv have a formal or informal policy on social networks.

Jeff noticed that there were problems with some of the profile information for attorneys in LinkedIn. Marketing had pushed it to raise the personal profile of the attorney and to raise the profile of the firm. It also works as a "who knows who." It is a great way to address alumni networking and classmate networking.  It is a great information update tool.

Facebook has a lot of potential for recruiting. The recent college graduate crowd uses Facebook a lot.

Malpractice Nightmare?

You can inadvertently create an attorney-client relationship? Absolutely! LinkedIn Answers is particularly problematic. The big problem is that these web-based answers last forever. So there is a permanent record of the legal advice that you give. It is okay to say give me a call.

Social network profiles need to be in compliance with local bar rules and ethical requirements. Recommendations and specialties can be particularly problematic. Of course they must also be truthful.

The problem is that firms are not addressing the use of these sites. Blocking them is useless. Your employees will still access the sites outside of the workplace. If they say they work at the firm, the conduct of that person on the internet will get attributed to the company.

Law firm management need to wake up and pay attention to these issues. Social networks are here to stay and are to be avoided at the firm's risk. Well established procedures and policies can help manage and reduce risk.


My ILTA Schedule

Social Network Site Survey

Last summer, I surveyed The Firm's summer associates to see how they use some of the popular social networking sites: A Survey on the Use of Social Networks and Updated Social Network Site Survey. I ran the same survey this summer to see what changes have happened over the past year.

• 90% of the summer associates have a Facebook account. That is an increase over the 80% result from last year.
• 66% of those with Facebook accounts check it at least once a day. This is the same percentage as last year.
• Only 25% of those with Facebook accounts would use it for business purposes. This a big drop from last year, when 75% said they would use Facebook for business purposes.
• Only 13% had LinkedIn accounts and only 13% have a MySpace account. These are similar numbers to last year.
  

My take away is that the wave of Facebook users is continuing to roll into law firms and they use it frequently.  If your firm choses to block Facebook, you are cutting your junior lawyers off from their network of contacts.

These summer associates do yet seem to grasp the business purposes for Facebook, but may quickly realize that their Facebook "friends" will quickly become their colleagues, clients and potential clients.

You can download the raw survey data: SocialNetworkSurvey2008[.xls]

What is your take on Facebook for law firms?  Please leave a comment.

Connectivity Powers Talent: Leveraging Employee Social Networks

According to a recent survey, 83% of workers rate relationships with co-workers as a critical reason for joining and staying with their employer, and alternatively, one in four people quit a job due to feelings of isolation. Organizations that provide talent with tools to connect, build and manage their personal and professional networks, bond people to each other and to the organization. Moreover, organizations that offer employee social networking have an edge in attracting talent who thrives on these tools to exchange knowledge and ideas.

Mike Gotta, Principal Analyst at the Burton Group, presented this webinar, sponsored by SelectMinds.  The webinar was a production of the Human Capital Institute.

Social structures are influenced by team location:

1. Co-located teams interact primarily as face-to-face
2. Virtual teams interact primarily through electronic means with occasional face-to-face
3. Far flung teams rarely interaction face-to-face

In this world of electronic communication, is "where you are" still important?

Mike proposed that people are less likely to contribute to a centralized storage system without the personal positive recognition. Workers may feel they are giving away their value and may feel alienated due to physical location and lack of reciprocity.

You should humanize people.  A sparse photobook makes you look like a mere phone number.

How does technology affect the social interaction:

• Email - inbox is overloaded and conversations are fragmented
• Instant messaging is promising but the interruption issues need to be resolved
• Portals can work, but they suffer from poor navigation, there is a lack if interaction and there was little personalization
• Content management systems are difficult to use and poor user experience
• Discussion forums suffer from overload and clutter
• Virtual workspaces get cluttered but turn into a file dumping ground

Can Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 help?

• Blogs can help you to communicate
• Tagging and social bookmarking enable user-centric discovery and findability
• Micro-blogging (twitter) is the is the next-generation water cooler
• RSS feeds offer an opt-in information delivery to employees
• Wikis enable co-creation and co-ownership of information. You can build communities around shared interests
  
• Social networks allow for flows of communication, information and collaboration

A corporate "facebook" can act as a destination and social hub.  The enterprise should look to taking down artificial barriers to communication and collaboration.  By opening the lines of communication and collaboration you can tap into a bigger pool of talent and knowledge.

Points for the Business Case:

• Aging workplace pressures to transfer knowledge
• Establish better learning environments
• Better brainstorming
• Informal feedback can improve situational awareness and decision-making
• Employees as brand ambassadors

Use Case Scenarios:

• Professional support for returning employees
• Referral programs for alumni and employee referrals
• Retiree programs to continue contribution
• Improved travel information
• Expertise location
  

Knowledge Management and Relationship Capital

Law Technology Now put up podcast on how client relationship management and social networking tools will change the way we practice law: Almost Live from LegalTech West Coast: Tom Baldwin -- Social Networking. (registration required).  The podcast was a recording of Tom Baldwin's presentation at Legal Tech West Coast. The podcast is about 12 minutes long.

One of the pillars of knowledge management is that who you know is as important as what you know. Tom surveyed broadcast emails and found that a huge portion of those email were asking for information about people.  Attorneys were looking for outside experts, internal experts, service providers, matchmaking clients, pitching clients and clearing conflicts.

Tom has found Client Relationship Management systems to be lacking.  CRM systems have grand ambitions of pulling the firm's contacts into one place.  Tom has found that most CRM systems get relegated to managing external marketing lists.

Tom has become more of a fan of Enterprise Relationship Management systems like Contact Networks and Branch IT.   ERM systems mine external email traffic to identify relationships. [My post on Contact Networks: Contact Networks - Enterprise Relationship Management.]

Tom also sees some tools coming from entity extraction. In court filings, you should be able to extract the party names, the judge and the jurisdiction. That information is in fairly standard locations in a document.  Then when looking to see what experience the firm has with a particular judge or in a particular jurisdiction, the entity extraction system can help answer that question.


One warning about the podcast. I understand that Law Technology Now needs effective advertising to make money. But this is the first podcast that inserts an advertisement into the middle of the podcast. I found it very jarring to cut off in the middle of Tom Baldwin's presentation to an ad for Blue Arc.

Lawyers and Social Networks

A new survey reveals that almost 50 percent of attorneys are members of online social networks and over 40 percent of attorneys believe professional networking has the potential to change the business and practice of law over the next five years.

The 2008 Networks for Counsel Survey was conducted by Leader Networks and sponsored by LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell. You can download the results from the Leader Networks' site.

Of lawyers aged 25-35, 67% are members of a social networking site, while only 36% of lawyers aged 46 and older are members. Forty percent of lawyers want to join a social networking site just for lawyers. (This number is close to the same percentage of lawyers who are already members of an online social network.

The curious piece of the survey is that 48% of the survey respondents thought Martindale-Hubbell should sponsor a lawyer specific social networking site. (Of course, they were the sponsor of the survey.) Second up was 28% who thought it should be the American Bar Association. Only 1% thought it should be Legal OnRamp. But Legal OnRamp is a social networking site for lawyers. Perhaps the Martindale-Hubbell brand is still viable.

The survey was pointed out by Laxmi Stebbins Wordham on The Official Blog of Martindale-Hubbell: Martindale-Hubbell, LinkedIn and Online Networking. I also came across Carolyn Elefant's take on this survey at the Legal Blog Watch: Survey Confirms That Social Networking Gains Traction With Lawyers.

LinkedIn is Now For Lawyers

The venerable Martindale-Hubbell directory of lawyers and law firms has teamed up with LinkedIn to provide a social networking function to the listings in LinkedIn.

When I go to the listing for Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in Martindale-Hubbell, I see the blue LinkedIn icon next to the name of the firm. If you click on the icon, it asks you to logon to LinkedIn to see who you know at the firm. After logging on I get a pop up that shows my two first level LinkedIn connections (Mary Abraham and Patrick DiDomenico) and a total of 131 connections through the second and third level.

Assuming clients are still using Martindale-Hubbell to find law firms and lawyers, this make the directory much more powerful. (Of course that is assuming that clients still use Martindale-Hubbell.) The interface is a bit kludgy, but the information is great. The LinkedIn connection also appears when you look at the listing for some individual lawyers.

As Kevin O'Keefe says, If you can't beat'em, join them.

If you have not joined LinkedIn or have not figured out what it is all about, there is a new video out from the CommonCraft gang on what LinkedIn is all about:




.

Email Deluge About Trying to Free Yourself From Email

In Saturday's post [I Freed Myself From Email's Grip] I pointed to a story about Luis Suarez trying to reduce his use of email by using platform communication tools. He is increasingly using web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 mainstays like blogs and wikis to answer the questions and host the answers to the questions.

Law firms and businesses operated for a long time with out email.  They were successful without email. There is no reason to think that email is either the zenith or the endpoint for business communications.  Email is an incredibly powerful tool. But it is a closed system where it is hard to find and very hard to reuse information.  Take a look at your email.  Wouldn't you like to have the answers to a lot of those questions saved for later use? Are people trying to turn your email into a content repository?

Based on those propositions, Luis outlined what he was trying to do in I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip.  The unexpected consequence of the article was that he received a deluge of emails from people sending him the article or their thoughts on the article: Giving up on Work e-mail - Status Report on Weeks 15 to 20. (I am a true believer; I sent my message with Twitter and put up Saturday's blog post.) 

The article about reducing email even ended up on the top ten list of most emailed articles on NYTimes.com.

Keep in mind that the goal is not eliminate email. It is a very powerful and very useful tool. But it is not appropriate for every communication.

"I am just saying that it needs to be re-purposed and used for what it was meant to be in the first place: A communication tool for one on one conversations of a sensitive, private or confidential nature. The rest should be going out there, in the open, in the public space(s), transparent and with an opportunity for everyone to contribute!"

Invigorating Online Communities

I was in the audience for this presentation at the nGenera Enterprise 2.0 Conference. The panel consisted of:

• Daniel Palestrant of Sermo.com
• Avi Muchnick of Worth1000.com and a.viary.com
• Neel Sundaresan of eBay Research Labs
• Ben Heywood of Patients Like Me
• Paul Lippe of Legal OnRamp

The panel started (appropriately enough) on how to start an online community.  There was a general consensus that you need to start around a topic or an idea. They want to share ideas and relationships with people who have similar thoughts. One panelists thought is was good to plant contributors in the communities to sustain the flow of information and conversation, especially in the early days.

Social communities can provide a lens of information. For example Facebook is way to keep track of loose ties, even though there is a lot of noise.  Important topics will get discussed by multiple people in multiple ways.  (My personal experience was that I initial ignored the Clay Shirky presentation on cognitive surplus at the Web 2.0 Conference. But enough of the people in my online communities kept highlighting the presentation to make me realize I needed to watch it.)

One panelist believes that online communities that grow rapidly are likely to have a rapid demise. All of the panelists thought of their sites as knowledge platform focused on sharing knowledge with the social aspect as a by-product. This is a sharp distinction from Facebook that is focused on social aspect with the sharing of knowledge being merely a by-product (and a very small by-product).  It takes a while to accumulate the content in a community to keep people coming back.  (I see that in any knowledge management project. The blank page is a deterrent to contribution.) As more knowledge accumulates in the system, the more useful the system becomes.

The general consensus was that general social sites are hard to keep sustained.  You need to associate the community with a business purpose and allow the sharing of substantive content.

I Freed Myself From Email's Grip

Unfortunately not me, but my pal Luis Suarez. There is a profile of Luis in the New York Times: I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip.  Luis describes how he started using platform communication tools like blogs and wikis instead of email. He managed to reduce his email traffic by 80% and still effectively communicate with his colleagues.

"Think about how to use social networking tools to eliminate spam and to avoid repeatedly answering the same question from many different people. These tools can also save you from an accumulation of online newsletters that never get read, and from those incessant project status reports that clutter many in-boxes."

Six Dimensions of Understanding Media

As readers, you realize that I am an avid consumer and tester of social media and new communication tools. An article in the MIT Sloan Management Review helped put the testing of these tools into focus for me: The Six Key Dimensions of Understanding Media. JoAnne Yates, Wanda J. Orlikowski and Anne Jackson propose a guide to understanding and evaluating the use of communication technologies in the workplace.

They propose the "Genre Model" which identifies elements of adoption and the change in patterns of communication as a tool for evaluating new technology. The model consists of six elements:

• Why - what is the purpose and expectation
  
• What - what content will be communicated
  
• Who - participants in the communication and their roles
  
• Where - location of the communication, physical or virtual, geographic dispersion
  
• When - temporal elements, like how quickly do you expect a response
  
• How - manner and form of communication, such as format and structure

The article traces some history and analysis from the business letter, to the paper memo to email. Then it moves on to a case study of Blog Central in IBM, Skype in MNI Partners, and an Electronic Bulletin Board in a large European Petroleum Company. It uses the six elements to for the initial expectation of each new communication tool and the actual use of each tool.

The method of the article is an interesting way to approach new social media platforms both externally and internally.

Knowledge Management in a Fragmented World

Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge started a new column in KM World magazine. Borrowing from Dave Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous, he calls it Everything is Fragmented.

"I wanted to build on that by pointing to the shift during the life span of knowledge management from the "chunked" material of case studies and best-practice documents to the unstructured, fragmented and finely granular material that pervades the blogosphere. So when I was asked to contribute this column to KMWorld magazine, it seemed an appropriate title; it allows me to talk about not only trends in technology but also social issues, the scientific use of narrative, and to fire off the odd invective about over-constrained and over-controlled systems."

Since I started following the Enterprise 2.0 movement, I have shifted my philosophy of knowledge management. I fall pretty close to Dave's position.

"It’s not natural to chunk up material, to make it context specific; it is natural to share, blend and create fragmented material based on thoughts and reflections as we carry out tasks or engage in social interaction."

Structured systems of knowledge and precedent are still useful. But, as Dave Weinberger points out in Everything is Miscellaneous, everyone has a different view on what the structure should be. Whatever taxonomy I create or a group decides upon, it will only be meaningful to some of the people some of the time. As the taxonomy gets more and more complex, the less useful it will be.

On many knowledge management projects, people ask for a very structured way of organizing content. Inevitably, they query the system for something that is outside the structure they requested.

The improved power of search, adding metadata and adding user comments have changed the way we should approach knowledge management.

If you are a KM practitioner I am sure you have received a request for matching the Google search. There is only one field to enter information; you just type in a few words. Obviously, the Google page rank algorithm is unique to the web and does not work well inside the enterprise.

We need a way to manipulate the search results inside the enterprise and add more context to our internal nodes of information. Google does this by interpreting links to the nodes of information (webpages). We KM practitioners need some way to replicate this ability to add metadata to our knowledge artifacts. We need to better describe them, attribute authorship, rate them and add notes to them.

That is one of the reasons that I am enthusiastic about products like Vivisimo's social search. [Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration][The Four Types of Search and Vivisimo's Social Search].

Structured systems of knowledge and precedent are very useful for law firms. As law firms we need to highlight the better forms and precedents for reuse. I believe we need to rethink how they are highlighted, where they are stored and what people can do with them to keep them organized. Organized in a way that is meaningful to each individual.

Social Networks - Claim Your Name

Dan Schawbel put together a compelling piece on signing up for social networks to claim your name or suffer. Wearing my real estate lawyer hat, it is all about three things: location, location, location.

Joining social networks does not cost you anything other than a few minutes to register and add your information. You may find it interesting. Even if you do not find it interesting today, you may find it interesting in the near future.

Claim you name on these social network sites. Even if you do not use them actively, you can generally point a lot of information at them from other collections.

Even if you have a fairly unique name like my name, there are still others out there with the same name. When I first became Doug 2.0 and started my online presence, "Doug Cornelius" was mostly about the Yuba College basketball coach. Since then, the top 20 search results in Google for Doug Cornelius all point to me. (At least as of this morning for my search).