the [non]billable hour

(Nearly) Free Sarbucks Wi-Fi

If you are on the road a lot, and find yourself in the occasional Starbucks, you can get (nearly) free daily Wi-Fi for the cost of a single cup of coffee each month. Get a Starbucks Card, register it online, and use it at least once a month, and you'll get two consecutive hours a day of complimentary Wi-Fi.

Of course, if you've got an iPhone, or want to pretend you do, you get the free access anyway.

You Gotta Try PicLens

Trust me on this one. If you EVER view photos or other images in the web, you've got to try PicLens. Easily the coolest thing you'll see on your computer this year. Don't believe me? Check out this demo. I love it!

Size Matters

If you are still tooling around with a small computer monitor (or worse, your staff is), check out this post from the WSJ's Business Technology Blog. It is time to supersize:

Researchers at the University of Utah tested how quickly people performed tasks like editing a document and copying numbers between spreadsheets while using different computer configurations: one with an 18-inch monitor, one with a 24-inch monitor and with two 20-inch monitors. Their finding: People using the 24-inch screen completed the tasks 52% faster than people who used the 18-inch monitor; people who used the two 20-inch monitors were 44% faster than those with the 18-inch ones. There is an upper limit, however: Productivity dropped off again when people used a 26-inch screen.

Heading to Techshow (For Just One Day)

I'm going to be swinging through Chicago this week, and figured I might as well stop by Techshow -- my favorite legal conference.  I'm not speaking this year, and will thus be relegated to a free exhibit-hall pass (Tom, can you hook me up?) I'll be hanging around Wednesday and part of Thursday.  I hope to see you there.  

More PowerPoint Resources

Need some more PowerPoint inspiration?  Check out this amazing resource list from Meryl's Notes Blog.  Lots (and lots) of great stuff.

I LOVE Tripit

If you travel at all, you have to check out Tripit.  You can forward all of your travel confirmation emails (from airlines, Hotwire, Expedia, hotels, etc.) to one email address and Tripit organizes your itinerary for you.  I've been using it since the early beta period, and I love it.  Highly recommended!

Tags: Tripit, travel

Monitor Client Web Sites with Dapper

You are keeping up with all your clients' web sites, aren't you?  Well, one way to do it is to use Dapper with your handy-dandy RSS reader.  Dapper can take any site (or portion of it) and turn it into any number of formats for you.  Very slick!           

Tags: Dapper, RSS

NPR = Free Music

Have eclectic tastes in music?  Want some free?  Check out NPR Music.  It is an amazing treasure-trove of cool concerts, studio sessions, musician interviews and profiles.  Awesome! 

Whenever I'm looking for something new (or old) it goes right up there on my "to check out list" with Wolfgang's Vault.

STL Blogger Meetup II

There's another STL blogger meetup set for December 14th at Lewelyn's Pub in Webster Groves, Mo.  It starts at 6:30 pm.  The last one was a blast.  Though I'll arrive late, I hope to see you there.

A You-Tube for Legal Docs? Check out DocStock

Here's a profile of DocStock, a site allowing people to find and share professional (including legal) documents. 

The profession is changing, my friends.  What are you doing to be ready?

Web 2.0 Replaces Lawyers Again?

Brian Benzinger at Solution Watch writes about a new service called Tractis, which "allows you to negotiate and execute worldwide legally binding contracts online."  Significantly, the service also has sort of a contracts wiki that allows folks to upload contracts and templates that can be edited, commented upon, tagged and shared.  Very cool/scary for lawyers.  Find out for yourself and take the tour.

Just GOOG it for Info.

Need to dial directory assistance?  Use Google's 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) for all your directory assistance calls.  It is FREE and gives you the option of pushing the details of the listing you're seeking directly to your mobile phone via SMS.  So far, it isn't ad-supported either.  Program it into your cell phone now.

Thanks to Cool Tools for the tip.

Travel Tip: Wakerupper

If you are on the road a lot and have grown tired of trusting your hotel's wake up call, check out Wakerupper.  It is a free service that will call your phone at a pre-determined time and read you the message you asked it to.  Thanks, Lifehacker.

Justify that Messy Desk

From an 2002 New Yorker Essay from Edward Tufte: 

Paper enables a certain kind of thinking. Picture, for instance, the top of your desk. Chances are that you have a keyboard and a computer screen off to one side, and a clear space roughly eighteen inches square in front of your chair. What covers the rest of the desktop is probably piles—piles of papers, journals, magazines, binders, postcards, videotapes, and all the other artifacts of the knowledge economy. The piles look like a mess, but they aren't. When a group at Apple Computer studied piling behavior several years ago, they found that even the most disorderly piles usually make perfect sense to the piler, and that office workers could hold forth in great detail about the precise history and meaning of their piles. The pile closest to the cleared, eighteen-inch-square working area, for example, generally represents the most urgent business, and within that pile the most important document of all is likely to be at the top. Piles are living, breathing archives. Over time, they get broken down and resorted, sometimes chronologically and sometimes thematically and sometimes chronologically and thematically; clues about certain documents may be physically embedded in the file by, say, stacking a certain piece of paper at an angle or inserting dividers into the stack.

But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that "knowledge workers" use the physical space of the desktop to hold "ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use." The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven't yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to "recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay" when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains.

Ah, now I know the piles are there for a perfectly good reason.  Thanks to Stephen O'Flynn for the tip.
 

Personal Technology Challenge: 10 Things

I really liked this post in Zen Habits titled The 100 Things Challenge.  The essence is that you cut your personal possessions down to 100 things.  Things that are shared, non-personal stuff, books, and tools don't count.  It got me wondering about our personal technology burden.  How many different programs, web applications, tools, toys and gadgets do we accumulate?  How many of those do we use everyday? 

I'm going to cut my tech burden down to ten items for the next 30 days.  This includes hardware, software and web apps.  Here's my initial list:

1. MacBook Pro
2. iPod
3. Treo
4. Google Reader
5. GMail
6. Google Notebook
7. Entourage
8. MindManager
9. Keynote/Pages
10. ScanR

What's on yours?

TED's 100

From the TED Blog:  100 Websites You Should Know and Use.  Some pretty cool sites here, especially under the category, "Curiosity and Knowledge."

Meet Musicovery

I LOVE Pandora, and listen to it almost all day long.  Today (courtesy of VSL), I found Musicovery.  Hard to describe (think Pandora meets a mood ring meets the Visual Thesaurus) but if you like music, check it out.

Did You Know?

Here's a video you may have seen, as reimagined and updated by XPLANE, my new employer.

LinkedIn Tips.

If you are new to LinkedIn, or want to figure out ways to use it better, check out this guide from Web Worker Daily.

What Can Google Do?

Here's an interesting look at all of the Google Labs products from Mashable.  Worth a look, especially if you spend all your Google time in the search box.

OCD for Presenters

Here are some great tips for the road-warrior who does a lot of presentations from Escape from Cubicle Nation.  Too many to list, and all are worth a read.

Idea Garage Sale: The Technology Bin

These are a couple of leftovers in the tech bin that I've found, used and/or just wanted to share:

• Review Basics:  Online, secure reviewing platform for video, images.
  

• Concept Share:  Another online collaboration platform.

• CircleUp:  Email or IM a question to a group and get back a single result with everyone's answer.

• ScanR:  One of my favorite apps.  Turns your camera or cameraphone into a scanner and business card reader.

• Jott:  Love this one too.  Call a number, leave a message, and get it converted to a text email sent to you or to someone else.

• iPolipo:  Schedule meetings automatically, share your calendar selectively.

• TimeSnapper:  Automatic screenshot journal.  Answers the question: "What the hell did I actually do today?"

• PlaceSite:  Local wireless platform that could work in conferences or small groups.

• Gaboogie:  Conference calling service that calls you and your attendees.

• Fidg't:  Uses Flickr and LastFM tags to visualize your network.

• ProfileFly:  Ties all your contact, profile, and bookmark links together on one place.

• Pando:  Share large files through email and IM.

Also, check out this Google Document with a bunch more links from the ABA Techshow Presentation.

Father's Day = E-Mail Detox Day

Tim Ferriss suggests fathers take a complete break from e-mail on Father's Day.  I'm in.  Anybody else?

Address the Email Last

Quick email tip from Tricks of the Trade:

If you are sending an email with an attachment, add the attachment first, then compose the message, and then add email addresses tothe send line. Now there's no chance you'll have to send the ever-popular "whoops, forgot to attach the file" follow-up.

In fact, it's a good practice to always put the email addresses of the recipients in last, to ensure that an errant carriage return or mouseclick won't fire off the message half-baked.

Cool Tool(Bar) for Clients?

How about giving your tech-savvy clients their own firm- (or client-) specific toolbar for their browsers?  Techcrunch profiles Conduit, a company that makes it easy to "roll-your-own" toolbars.  Here's the Techcrunch Toolbar, for an example.

An Unreasonable Request

I am a big fan of making Unreasonable Requests -- requests that I don't expect a "Yes" answer to, but that I make nonetheless.

I'm going to be sharing several on this blog over the following months.  Here's the first:

I need someone to redesign my blog.  I've got quite a few projects I'm working on, and need to incorporate them in a new, non-template based site.  I know what I want, but don't have the HTML and CSS chops to do it myself.  In exchange (in addition to ample credit) I will work with you to make your business better -- and I promise you'll find the trade more than fair.

LinkedIn for Litigation?

Guy Kawasaki explains how to use LinkedIn's Reference Check Tool to avoid bad bosses.  In essence, you can input a company name and a range of years to find people who worked at the company during a given time period. 

This would be a great tool for locating potential witnesses in a litigation action.  Input the plaintiff/defendant company name and the years before, during and after the actionable conduct.  LinkedIn will serve up a list of people who may know a bit about company/facts/etc.  Even better, they may no longer be employed and more likely to help you.

Another way to Bill for E-Mail

Postful is a pretty ingenious service that creates and sends written snail-mail correspondence from e-mails forwarded to the service for just $0.99 each.  This could be a KILLER application for lawyers, especially if confidentiality issues, firm branding and other details could be worked out.  Imagine being able to send real honest-to-God letters from your blackberry, without secretarial help.  Very Cool!

How to "Black Out" During Your Next Presentation

Bert Decker has a great (and easy) tip to improve your next presentation:  Use Black Slides.  According to Bert, a blacked out slide (as opposed to justing hitting the "B" key) accomplishes three things:

1. Clear the screen.  Once you’re done with the picture, graph or supporting information, you want to remove distraction, and go to a black slide so you can amplify, tell a story, or make an additional point, etc.

2. Black out the screen.  Simply put, so you can walk in front of the projector. Almost all meeting, board and conference rooms are poorly designed so that they have the projector screen right in the middle of the room or stage. It should be at the right or left, so YOU can be in the middle. After all, YOU should be the center of your presentation, not your slides.

3. Totally change your mindset.  Change he creation and emphasis of the presentation. This is by far the most important of all, and needs it’s own paragraph.

Presentation Inspiration

If you want to see some best-in-breed presentations, check out Slideshare's World's Best Presentation Contest.  Slideshare is an online, presentation sharing application.  Worth a look.

Techshow Blogger Pub Crawl Details

The Techshow Blogger Pub Crawl is all set.  Here's a map of the crawl with the times for each stop.  Here's the agenda:

 7:00 pm  Start at the Sheraton Hotel
 7:00 -  8:30  Lucky Strike Lanes,  322 E. Illinois Street, directly across from the Sheraton.
 8:30 -  9:30  P.J. Clark's, 302 E. Illinois Street, in the same building as Lucky Strike.
 9:30 - 10:30 DeLaCosta, 465 E. Illinois Street, a swanky new bar just down the street from P.J. Clark's.
10:30 - 11:30 Dick's Last Resort, 435 E Illinois Street, a fun bar right on the river.
11:30 - ?????  Lizzie MacNeill's, 400 N. McClurg Court, right next door to the Sheraton.

I hope you can make it.  Sign up here (or just join us on the Crawl).

Techshow Blogger Pub Crawl

I am heading to Chicago this morning for ABA's Techshow.  This afternoon, I'll plot a course for the First Annual Techshow Blogger Pub Crawl, and post it here.  We'll meet at 7:00 pm in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel and Towers and hit 4-5 bars within walking distance.  If you are going to be in Chicago for Techshow, or live there and want to join us, please sign up here.

Oh, and don't worry if you can't join us at the beginning.  When I post the schedule, I'll let you know what bars we'll be at (and when), so you can join us in the middle or the end.

Techshow Blogger Bar Crawl

ABA's Techshow is just around the corner, and we need to do something to get the bloggers together.  Since there's nothing formal planned for us, I'm organizing the First Annual Techshow Blogger Bar Crawl.  We are going to meet in the Sheraton Hotel's lobby at 7:00 pm on Thursday, March 22nd and head out on a walking (and drinking) tour of the neighborhood.  I'll have more info on the places we'll be soon, but expect to hit between three and five bars.  I will enforce the schedule, so if you can't make the beginning of the crawl, join us along the way.

I've set up a Techshow Bar Crawl page here to register.  Cost is free.  See you next week!

Chicago Blog Conference in May

My friend Phil Gerbyshak is helming an interesting blog conference in Chicago on May 11-12.  I'm going to try to make the trip up I-55 for the event.  Check it out!

LinkedIn and Gmail

I've been a big fan of LinkedIn for quite some time, and since I abandoned Outlook (and LinkedIn's amazing Outlook plugin), I've been using the Firefox and Gmail extensions pretty regularly.  When I logged in today to invite a few of my contacts, I noticed I could import all of my contacts from my Gmail (and Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL mail) address book, and invite them at once.

From your LinkedIn home page, click on the "+Expand Your Network" button on the upper right and follow the instructions.  Very easy and very cool!

See You in NYC!

Forgive the light posting, but it has been crazy lately.  I'm off tomorrow for ALM's LegalTech in NYC.  If you'd like to meet up, drop me a line at Matt@LexThink.com or call me at 618-407-3241.  I hope to see you there.

Blawg Review Awards

Blawg Review's anonymous (and very smart) editor has posted his/her Blawg Review Awards for 2006.  This blog was named "Best Legal Consultant Blog." 

I'm honored, but the thing that struck me as I read through the list of award winners was that I know 22 of the other bloggers named, and have met at least 17 of them in person (18 if you count the Editor).  Every single one of them is someone I'm glad to know, and that but for the blog, I'd have never met otherwise.

So thank you Blawg Review for reminding me this holiday season how cool it has been to be a "blawgger."  More importantly, thank you for reminding me how many incredible people I've met along the way.

Resolutions III: December 24

Resolve to become aware of news affecting your cients before they do.*

1.  Using Google Blog Search or Google Alerts set up several searches for each of your clients.  Use their names, industry, competitors’ names, products, etc.

2.  Subscribe to the RSS feed for each search.

3.  Notify your clients whenever you see something relevant to them or their industry.

Extra Credit:

4.  If you use Google Reader as your RSS Aggregator, create a “tag” for each of your clients.

5.  For each tag, Google Reader allows you to create a unique URL for that tag that you can share with your clients.

6.  Give each of your clients their tag’s unique URL and everytime they open it in their browser, they’ll see everything you’ve “marked” for them to read.

*  This post will be expanded into a longer how-to in January.

Christmas Comes Early

If you are a music lover, you HAVE to check out the Concert Vault.  It features 300 complete concerts, from bands in their prime, all free to stream on your computer! 

Right now, I’m listening to an all-acoustic concert by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young that was recorded at the Fillmore East in NYC in1970.  From the website:

David Crosby - guitar, vocals
Stephen Stills - guitar, upright bass, piano, organ, vocals
Graham Nash - guitar, piano, organ, vocals
Neil Young - guitar, organ, vocals

This is the acoustic set on the fifth night of the legendary six-night run at the Fillmore East. The Four Way Street live album contains recordings from this run. This entire run of shows capture CSNY hot on the heels of success from the recently released Deja Vu LP and was during the group’s most prolific phase, as all four were working on solo albums that would soon define them as individual artists.

Highlights include the Buffalo Springfield gem, "On the Way Home," and a rare nod to Graham's past with The Hollies "King Midas in Reverse." David also sings "Triad," the controversial and unreleased song he recorded near the end of his tenure with The Byrds that was featured on Jefferson Airplane's Crown Of Creation LP. Material from the first CSN album is well represented, as are a few sneak previews from the solo albums then in progress. Neil Young's medley is also a wonderful sequence.

The acoustic set closes with a short but lovely rendition of "Love the One You’re With."

Simply amazing!

Don't Make Me Feel Like an Idiot When It is Your Fault

Warning, rant ahead.  Logged in to Technorati this evening.  Clicked on a link from “My Account” page.  Here’s what I got:

 

If I did something wrong, don’t make me feel like an idiot.  That goes double WHEN I FOLLOW YOUR LINK ON YOUR OWN PAGE! 

LinkedIn for Lawyers?

From TechCrunch:

LinkedIn, a social networking website primarily focused on business connections has added a section to their site that allows users to recommend service providers — a yellow pages based on user referrals. From web designers to doctors, users rate service providers in a thumbs up, thumbs down voting system similar to Digg.

Here’s another article article with more:

In the case of LinkedIn's directory of service providers, users can search narrowly for services recommended by friends, or they can widen their search to friends of friends. Failing that, a global search capability is offered to allow users to search across the full LinkedIn network.

Making the system work will depend on whether LinkedIn users bother to write recommendations for other businesses, building on an existing feature within LinkedIn that encourages colleagues to recommend other colleagues.

It also could draw in new users. Most LinkedIn members currently are executives, professionals, sales people and other office workers. The new directory could attract trade workers.

Are you ready for this?

Blog to Visit the Horizontal City

My friend Dave Gray has written a great post about why people (should) blog.  I’m fortunate to see Dave almost every week, and have talked blogging with him a lot.  He really gets it, and I promise you, you’ll see his “horizontal city” idea again.  A lot.  Go read his post now. 

What a Cool Club! How'd I get in?

OK, this one caught me completely by surprise:  I was named to a list of the Top 100 Legal Technologists in the world (pdf here) by London’s CityTech Magazine.  Very cool!

LexThinking Again 2.0

Dennis, JoAnna and I are working on a few new LexThink! events.  The one that’s almost ready for prime time is described here in Dennis’ post.  Check it out. 

Last Week on My Idea Surplus Disorder Blog

Here are the posts from last week on my Idea Surplus Disorder Blog:

• The Ride is the Retreat
• Idea Market II FAQ
• The Return of Think Tank Tuesdays
• Strategies that Work for Work
• Question of the Week
• Creativity Links, October Edition
• Question of the Week
• Is Networking a No-No?
• If You Think with Two People, and They Think with Two People …

 

This Week's Idea Surplus Disorder Posts

As I posted yesterday, I’ve started another blog called Idea Surplus Disorder.  Here are my posts so far.  Check it out.

Brainstorm Brilliantly

13 Ways to Think About It

In What Ways Might We …

Question of the Week

Creativity: Stop, Start, Continue and the Power of One Percent

The Return of Think Tank Tuesdays

Forty-Twenty Productivity

Focus on What is Possible Instead of What is Not

Creativity Hacks

You Might As Well Jump!

Revenge of the Mac Lover

Here’s an extreme example of the power of the blogosphere.

Step One:  Write law.com article about how Mac’s suck, with at least a few technical innacuracies.

Step Two:  Follow up with blog post about article, taking on”Mac Jihadists.”  81 comments and counting. 

Step Three:  Watch others pick up your article and criticize you in their own blogs. 

Step Four:  See how at least one of the critical articles makes it to the front page of Digg.

Step Five:  Watch your online reputation take a major hit.

It is only a matter of time before some of these blog posts show up on the front page of Google.  As it stands now, using Google’s Blog Search, a post titled “Stupid Larry” is the first result.

I know Larry and like him.  I’ve presented with him at ABA’s Techshow.  He’s a very smart guy, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this is all part of a plan to demonstrate how blogging works — a subject he writes and speaks about frequently.  However, it is also a cautionary lesson in the power of blogs and citizen media.  I will say this, I bet his article is the number one page (by far) served up by law.com this week.

Don't Play the Line

I have a bunch of cool stuff coming up tomorrow, but for now, here’s a bit of a time-waster:

First, check out Line Rider, a fun little flash game that you will love.

Second, watch this YouTube video of an amazing Line Rider drawing.

Third, go back and play Line Rider again and again, while marvelling about how cool the video was.

Fourth, curse me for telling you about this.

Don't Forget the E-mail Clause in Estate Planning Doucments

Saw this on Lifehacker:  What happens to your email when you die?  Suggests (linking to a CNET article) attorneys press clients to include password data in estate planning documents so heirs can get to your email, photo sharing, music, and other online accounts when you die.

Is anyone doing this?

Women Want a Story

Here’s a fascinating article from iMedia Connection on what motivates men and women to purchase things.  The whole thing’s worth a read, but what jumped out to me were these paragraphs that discuss how others’ purchasing decisions impact men and women differently: 

Men are willing to make a purchase once it has been demonstrated that someone else was successful with the same purchase; kind of a, "that worked for Joe, so it'll probably work for me" mentality.

Women posit things differently. It's good to know if something worked for Sally; it's better to know what Sally's motivations were for her purchase. Success in itself isn't meaningful unless the conditions leading to success are the same. (So much for women not being cut out for the sciences!) This can be thought of as, "it may have worked for Sally, but Sally bought it for reason A and I'm interested in reason B, so the same purchase might not work for me."

If you have testimonials on your site, and want both men and women to be impressed, this is important stuff.

Pheeder for Client Communication?

Have ten client appointments you have to cancel tomorrow because you got stuck in trial?  Don’t have the staff to do it for you?  Try Pheeder.    Here’s how it works:

Enter your phone number, plus the numbers of the friends/clients you want to contact.

Pheeder will call you so that you can record your name and a message.

After you hang up Pheeder will call all of your friends. Pheeder will tell them they got a message from you and then it will play your message.

If any of your friends records a reply to your message, Pheeder will call you back so that you can hear their replies.

There is no step 4. This is pretty simple really. So give it a shot!

I haven’t read their privacy policy, and don’t speak to the ethical issues of offloading client numbers and a message to a third-party service, but this is yet another cool Web 2.0–ish application that gives a peek into what’s possible.  Did I mention Pheeder is free?

Pzizz for Free!

I love Pzizz, a computerized napping application, and have blogged about it before.  If you want a FREE license, go vote at My Dream App and you’ll get an e-mail with the download information.  Trust me on this one.

The Thirty Day Rule for Technology Purchases (and Irrational Client Demands)

I liked this idea from Get Rich Slowly:

The 30-day rule is a simple method to control impulse spending. Here’s how it works:

1. Whenever you feel the urge to splurge — whether it’s for new shoes, a new videogame, or a new car — force yourself to stop. If you’re already holding the item, put it back. Leave the store.
2. When you get home, take a piece of paper and write down the name of the item, the store where you found it, and the price. Also write down the date.
3. Now post this note someplace obvious: a calendar, the fridge, a bulletin board. (I use a text file on my computer.)
4. For the next thirty days, think whether you really want the item, but do not buy it.
5. If, at the end of a month, the urge is still there, then consider purchasing it. (But do not use credit to do so.)

I can think of so many places this would work.  First, for those firm technology and gadget purchases or upgrades, sit on the impulse for a month.  If you still think you need it, make the purchase.

Second, if you have an irrational client demand you do something that you don’t think is particularly prudent (like filing that motion to compel to get the lawnmower back from their neighbor in the middle of winter), suggest that you wait 30 days, and if they feel it is still important then, you’ll do it.

Wanna Blow Stuff (Photos) Up?

If you need to blow up some digital photos for use at trial (or just because you want some really big photos), check out Pictopia.  (Via Cool Tools)

Web Two Point What?

Here’s a great introduction to the much-hyped, often overused term “Web2.0” that’s worth a read.

A Lawyer's Blog Should ...

It has been a while since I’ve pointed you towards my friend Yvonne DiVita’s blog.  If it isn’t in your rotation of regular reads, it should be.  If you want to know why, check out her recent post, A Business Blog Should … 

 

Set Expectations Via E-Mail

Here’s a great tip via Email Overloaded:  In your e-mail signature, include something like Bob Walsh does:

(I usually check email every few hours during the day.)

Things I Like

I’m playing around with Amazon’s new “AStore” product.  It allows me to build a virtual storefront with products I choose.  I’m going to change it every month with new and cool books, magazines, and gear that I personally recommend.  Check it out and let me know what you think.

Be Phone Tree Free

Got an e-mail the other day from Marcin Musiolik, alerting me to his company’s new project called Bringo!  Here’s how it works:

1. Find the company you'd like to call by category (credit cards, mortgages, loans, health care)
2. Enter your phone # (we will never disclose your phone number to anyone, not even your mother!).
3. Wait a few seconds while we navigate the phone tree.
4. When we call you back, pick up your phone and you're done. No more phone trees.

Looks pretty cool.  Try it out and let them know what you think in the comments to this post.  And if you think your clients or customers would use this service to contact your firm, it’s time to rethink your telephone answering options.

UPDATE:  Marcin tells me they are adding law firms next month.  I’d sure not want to see mine on there.

Advice for "Contact Us" Pages

Here’s some good advice for those “Contact Us” pages on the web:

Problem: Contact options are limited. …

Solution: Give customers more control of how to contact you. Provide plenty of options: phone, form, e-mail, and chat. Let them contact you their way. RADirect offers a telephone number to talk to an engineer, as well as a short form and a chat option when available. The e-mail form guarantees a response in one business day. If you click on "Speak to a System Engineer" in the nav bar, you're guaranteed a response in two hours from the point of action.

Problem: People are left to send and pray. So many contact forms and "thank you for contacting us" pages leave visitors frustrated. They don't provide any information on what to expect when someone contacts the company via form or e-mail. Visitors w