Category Archives: Internet

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Blogging is About Writing

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I found an interesting post from Problogger about creating better blog posts. His tips include things such as:

Don’t Just Show, Show and Tell: It’s time to get back to show and tell. Blogs offer amazing ways to present multimedia information, but you still have to tell us about it. You must show and tell in order for your point to be fully understood. Words may not do it alone, but a picture is not worth a thousand words when fed through feeds and search engines. You must have the words.

Write Clickable Titles: The keywords you use in your post titles tell potential visitors what your post is about. If they don’t get it, they won’t click it. If they do click, and the content doesn’t match, they won’t be back.

Make Your Point in the First 200 Words: You have less than a second to capture your reader’s attention. If the user on your site, feed, or search engine summary doesn’t “get the point” in the first two or three sentences, you’ve lost them.

Present a Problem, The Solution, and The Results: Don’t present a solution before the reader understands there is a problem. Present the problem, give us the solution, and then lead us through the results and the benefits of the results. When readers follow along with the process, they better understand how it works and why it works for themselves.

Read his whole list of 30 tips here. Although the article is not written for a legal audience, almost all of his tips apply equally to legal blogs.

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Tips for Generating Traffic for Your Blog

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Via a link from Grant Griffiths’s blog Sunflower Media Concepts, I found a blog post by Nicole Black and her Sui Generis blog where she provides 10 Tips for generating traffic on for your legal blog. Her tips are:

  1. Decide why you’re starting a legal blog
  2. Determine who your target readers are
  3. Create a blogroll
  4. Consider adding a link to Evan Schaeffer’s Legal Underground
  5. Make sure that Tom Mighell is aware of your blog
  6. Add your blog the legal blog directories
  7. Submit blog posts to Blawg Review
  8. Read Lexblog
  9. Regularly link to other blogs in your posts
  10. Submit relevant comments to law blogs somewhat similar to your own

Check out Nicole’s entire post where she expands on each of these tips.

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Wireless Network Security

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PC World has a nice article on security on wireless networks. The articles address both how to secure your own wireless network as well as how to ensure that your communications are protected when you are using a public hotspot.

In the article, the author talks about something that usually gets very little attention: the use of VPNs at public hotspots. With respect to VPNs, the article states:

The best way to protect a public wireless link is by using a virtual private network, or VPN. VPNs keep your communications safe by creating secure “tunnels” through which your encrypted data travels. Many companies provide VPN service to their mobile and offsite workers, so check with your IT department for connection instructions.

You can also use a paid service such as Boingo’s Personal VPN (free trial with Boingo subscription, $30 to keep), JiWire Hotspot Helper (10-day free trial, $25 per year) or Witopia personalVPN ($40 per year). All three of the services are simple to install and use.

You have one more security option: If you don’t mind connecting through your home or office PC, you can log in to a public hotspot securely by using such remote-access programs as LogMeIn or GoToMyPC.

If you have questions about wireless security, this is a good article to check out.

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How to Find a Hotspot

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HotspotrHave you ever been somewhere and wondered how you could find the closest hot spot? Hotspotr gives you a way to find those hotspots. It is a user supported site in that it allows you to add hot spots that you know of.

In addition to the web interface that is available, you can also access the site from your mobile phone or Treo at m.hotspotr.com.

The site can clearly stand to have a few more hot spots added to it. However, it never hurts to have another resource to use to try and find a hotspot.

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RSS in Plain English

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RSSI believe that RSS is a wonderful technology and that if more people actually understood what RSS was and how it worked, a lot more people would use it. I have planned for quite a while to do a blog post on RSS, what it is, and how it works. In this case, my procrastination has paid off.

The Common Craft Show has a great short video that explains RSS in plain English. This is a great video to teach people about RSS.

[flv width=”320″ height=”240″]http://www.blip.tv/file/205570/[/flv]

Thanks to Kevin O’Keefe at Real Lawyers Have Bogs for the link to this video.

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Full Text RSS Feeds

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RSS FeedThere has been a recent flurry of posts about why bloggers should use full text rather than excerpts in their RSS feed. These discussions can be found at blogs such as Real Lawyers Have Blogs, Sunflower Media Concepts, Burning Questions, and DennisKennedy.com.

I have always preferred full text feeds over excerpts. I figured that if a reader went through the trouble of setting up an aggregator or an RSS reader, that probably meant that the RSS reader was where they wanted to read the blog posts. I could be wrong about this, but I agree with the guys above that Full Text RSS feeds are the only way to go.

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Google 411

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Via Bonnie Shucha at WisBlawg I discovery another cool new offering from Google: Google Voice Local Search. Dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any phone (especially your cell phone). You can then search for any business in the city that you identify. You can search by either the business name or the business category.

As described by Google:

As part of our ongoing effort to make the world’s information universally accessible, we’re testing a free service called Google Voice Local Search. Using this service, you get fast access to the same local information you’d find on Google Maps. But you don’t need a computer, you don’t need an Internet connection, and you don’t even need to use your cell-phone keypad. It’s voice-activated, and you can access it from any phone (mobile or landline), in any location, at any time.

As with Google’s other products, this one is free. Given that this is still in its experimental stage, I am sure that there are some kinks to be worked out. However, this looks like another great, simple and useful idea from Google.

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How Much are Housing Values Like a Roller Coaster Ride?

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Via the Freakonomics Blog is a nifty video that demonstrates how much housing values really are like a roller coaster ride. The Speculative Bubble Blog has taken real estate values from 1890 to the present (adjusted for inflation) and plotted them as a roller coaster.

To see how housing values change over time, take the ride.

The question I have is how can we use this technology to explain a complicated graph to a judge or jury?

Watch for the year to flash in the bottom right hand corner. Unfortunately, on the You Tube video, its rights under the You Tube branding. You can clearly see the year on the Google Video site.

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Google Broswer Sync

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If you use multiple computers, you have likely been frustrated by the fact that your browser bookmarks aren’t the same or that two browsers are not set up the same way.

Once again Google, has come to the rescue with Google Browser Sync. In Google’s own words:

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.

I recently installed Browser Sync. Like most Google products, Browser Sync works simply and easily. Installation was a breeze and the sync process was seamless. After using this extension for only a short period of time, I am sold on it.