August 2005 Archives

Microsoft gives, Microsoft takes away. Live Meeting, formerly Placeware, is my web conferencing tool of choice, primarily because I could use their recording tool to record training sessions, including the audio from the conference call. (Webex can't easily integrate the audio yet, and uses it's own proprietary video format.) I typically would download and edit these recordings using Camtasia, taking out empty air at the beginning and end, and/or announcements unrelated to the session, then post on the Intranet for those who couldn't attend the live session.

Then Live Meeting when through an upgrade. When I tried to edit the first recording after the upgrade, Camtasia hung up, unable to process the recording. Knowing that we would have major training needs in a few weeks that involved lots of recordings, I started trying to work out the problem. The nice people at Camtasia were mystified. Then I realized that the pre-Live Meeting upgrade tapes processed fine, so I contacted Microsoft.

Several emails to Live Meeting/Microsoft support later, the truth comes out. According to support, the new version of Live Meeting uses a different codec, the ACLEP.net Audio Decoder and the Microsoft Screen Codec video decoder V7 codecs for audio and video, respectively. Camtasia isn't compatible with these codecs. I was instructed to try using the free Microsoft Producer program instead to edit the videos. Okay, sure, I've got plenty of time to learn another software program.

Yesterday was the day. I figured out how to cut clips in Producer, created an intro to the Live Meeting segment I'd edited, and life was, well, if not good, at least okay. Then I tried to produce the file. Producer bombed just like Camtasia. Another day of my life gone, with nothing to show for it. :-)

You may be wondering why I'm telling you all this. The truth is, this entry is really a cry for help. Does anyone have a solution to this problem?

In the meantime, we can still make our own recordings using Camtasia, and, of course, those are editable. Though I've also noticed that screen recordings played in Windows Media Player don't fill the screen in 100% playback mode and are slightly fuzzy. This is also a relatively new development. The quality just isn't that good, though it's readable. (I'm recording and viewing at the same resolution.) I thought it was something I was doing until I played one of Microsoft's Producer tutorials, and noticed the fuzziness on THEIR recordings as well. So I'm expecting that we will have to start distributing the Camtasia Player to anyone wanted a clear video. What fun. Installing new software always goes over well with users and technology folks in an enterprise environment.

I hate it when technology takes a step back.

Did you know that Tim Stanley, formerly of Findlaw fame, offers a new RSS service called Auto Recalls? Or that there is a web site out there called PatentMojo that helps patent professionals create watchlists for patent searches, using RSS feeds, of course?

Then you (and me both!) obviously don't know everything there is to know about RSS. But Robert J. Abrogi does, and he summarizes for us in his Law Technology News article, The Power of RSS.

If you're having difficulties convincing your co-workers or boss about the importance of RSS, just print this article out for him/her. It ought to do the trick.

I said I'd take a break from blog-related stuff soon, but we're not done quite yet. I'm not the only one obsessing about blogs this month. The July/August issue of ABA's Law Practice magazine is almost completely about blogs and includes such articles as:

• It's Not Your Father's Web Site: Lawyers in the Blogosphere
• Ethics and Lawyer Blogs
• How to Start Your Own Weblog And Make the Most of It
• Between Lawyers Roundtable: The Future of Legal Blogging
• The Blogger Diaries | Stepping onto the Cutting Edge

I'll try to take a break from blogs-related stuff shortly, I promise. But before I do, I wanted alert you to a couple more places to look for blogs, should you be so inclined; this time the library and law-related ones.

Law Library Blogs and Blogs by Law Libraries or Law Library Associations is compiled by Bonnie Shucha, UW Law Library. So far, she's identified 74 blogs related to law libraries. By the way, Bonnie also writes Wisblawg, which, while Wisconsin specific, also covers other items of interest to those of us outside that great state. I learned about Blogpulse on Wisblawg.

If you would like to expand your blogsphere expand out to the non-law library world, there's plenty out there, and LibDex tries to keep track of it all.

For law-related blogs, don't forget about the Directory of Law Related Blogs.

All these blogs ought to keep us busy for a while!

When is a blog not a blog? When it's a cheap and easy content management system instead. Bill Machrone discusses some of the non-traditional ways use you use blog software in his column, I Blog/I Do Not Blog.

Related Article: Create a Policies and Procedures Manual with Movable Type

It's always a bit of a commitment to switch to a new email application or web service, and such a change will almost certainly come with some measure of inconvenience. So if you're considering making a switch, as I did recently, you might want to make sure you're making an informed decision by reading Web Mail: Fully Loaded from PC Magazine.

To cut to the chase, their editor's choice went to Yahoo! Mail, for all the right reasons. It includes an address book, calendar and notepad which can be synced to your desktop computer or PDA. Yahoo! Mail offers virus protection and spam filters. I've never tried the PhotoMail beta, which allows you to automatically insert thumbnails of your photos into your email, but that's almost enough to tear me away from Gmail, since I'm a dedicated Yahoo! Photos user.

Almost, but not quite. Though Gmail doesn't have all the features of Yahoo, it runs faster than Yahoo Mail, almost as fast an a desktop application. And after all, speed is of the utmost importance when using email. Then there's the fact that the banner ads on the free version of Yahoo are a little more than I can take.

Though I'll tell you a secret. I still use Yahoo for my address book because I can sync my contacts. Gmail's address book is just too primitive to be bothered with. Oh well, nothing is ever perfect! At least they're both free!

I've had an article sitting on my desk for a couple of weeks waiting to be blogged, but I couldn't find the full text on the PC Magazine web site and I wanted to wait until I could link to it. I tried again, and it's still not there. As far as I can tell, PC Magazine is no longer making all of their articles available for free, though some columns are available shortly after publication. And here I was blaming their search engine for not find the most obvious and current stuff! I did, however, find KeepMedia, where articles from PC Magazine, and others, can be purchased for a dollar. I've never used KeepMedia, but I will link to PC Magazine articles on KeepMedia when blogging them in the future so you have an easy way to get the full text of referenced articles. If you have any experience with this service, good or bad, please let me know!

RSS is really such a simple concept. Publish RSS feeds, then let those that are interested subscribe to them. No fuss, no muss, and so far, no spam. Not much in the way of ads yet, either, though that's likely to change.

Just as intranets became popular after the introduction of the web, businesses are starting to see how RSS feeds can be an efficient way increase communication within an organization without increasing employee's email burden. InformationWeek's article, Order from Chaos Via RSS, explains how businesses such as Disney and Microsoft are implementing RSS.

RSS feeds are handy because they can be automatically created when new content is added to an application or web page, reducing the need for employees to wander the intranet looking for updates, or digging through emails trying to find the really important stuff.

Watch for RSS feeds to really take off as the tools to read them become more commonplace. Start asking for RSS capability from vendors now.

You may have noticed a cluster of posts on blog-related resources here on LawLibTech, and there's a few more to come. I should explain that I recently gave a presentation on blogs, so I'm a little hyper-aware of such things, and want to keep track of handy sites/posts for next time.

For someone getting started with blogs, the first question might be, "How do I find interesting blogs?" While I'm familiar with the law-related resources for finding blogs, that might not be the highest priority for everyone. The thing is, I don't really know my way around the non-law stuff. I simply haven't ventured out much though I really do have other interests, (dogs come to mind, as you might have noticed). But I already monitor about all the blogs I can handle. If I start watching the REALLY interesting stuff, I may never get back to the work-related information. It's the same reason I avoid video games.

So that's my excuse. Which is why I thought this post, Blogging Intro for Inquiring Minds, worth remembering. As suggested, I decided to subscribe to Blogdex; after all, it's probably good to know what the masses are talking about. Links are included to Rebecca Blood's history of blogs, as well as the State of the Blogosphere, which can definitely provide fodder for future presentations. And this is where I spotted 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web, which I read on the train home this evening, and I happen to think is quite brilliant.

Considering the fact that this relatively short post contains a ton of blog-related information, I don't want to lose track of it. That's a good enough reason for me to blog-it.

Blawg.org has started a new category for law firm feeds. It makes perfect sense for law firms to provide RSS feeds of at least their marketing materials, and sure enough, some are doing just that. The first entry in this category is Hogan & Hartson. That's all well and good, but finding this feed from their home page is, at best, unlikely. Help me out here, does anyone else see where it's linked? But paste this into your aggregator, and you too can monitor Hogan's press releases.

Lacking from this entry are those firms that have offered blogs, and naturally, include RSS feeds for those blogs. Those are included under the applicable subject matter.

The July/August issue of Law Practice Management has several good articles on blogging:

• It's Not Your Father's Web Site: Lawyers in the Blogosphere
• Ethics and Lawyer Blogs
• How to Start Your Own Weblog And Make the Most of It
• Between Lawyers Roundtable: The Future of Legal Blogging
• The Blogger Diaries | Stepping onto the Cutting Edge