practicehacker

See if you can tell who Foursquare is targeting in it’s first TV Spot

Posted via email from practice (redux)

No Law Practice for me, Thanks

funemployed (noun) (fun-em-ploy-d)

def The state of being without a job yet having lots of time to enjoy activities during work hours. i.e. Rex is funemployed so after his workout he blogs and twitters with his other funemployed friends

def Unemployed individuals who use their free time to explore themselves while waiting for a job to tumble into their lap or try to fall ass-backwards into money. i.e. Man, I love being funemployed – don’t you [INSERT ANNOYING LEGAL BLOGGER/TWITTERER NAME]

See Also

funemployment (noun) funderemployed (adverb) i.e. I used to wonder how legal bloggers and Twitter bums managed to write all day while maintaining a job or law practice. Now I realize that most of them are funderemployed or funemployed altogether.

Let’s face it: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn squandered their potential. Instead of becoming knowledge or trade hubs, they’re essentially virtual singles bars. All 3 of these networks are so choked with ads, scams, and come-ons that companies trying to turn a legitimate buck have turned to so-called opinion or “thought” leaders (anyone from Ashton Kutcher to Robert Scoble) in order to cut through the chatter. Fair enough, but lawyers still aren’t going to buy a product because it’s being pushed by an actor (even if it’s a dream-boat like Ashton). And as the authors of this piece in Social Media Today point out, professionals get online for reasons not common to the average user, including:

• engaging with others in their discipline
• collaborating on their projects or cases
• learning about innovations in their field
• sharing and discussing their experiences
• reinforcing their referral relationships
• accessing and sharing hard to find info

So why is there such a yawning gap between what professionals want in social networks and what the networks deliver? And to make matters worse, most social media campaigns are basically re-packaged website or blog content grafted onto the flavor of the month; an approach which is transparent and ineffective.

Why don’t social networks and advertisers observe the same rules that we professionals observe among ourselves, i.e.

• trust is built by giving freely
• one good turn deserves another
• value speaks for itself – no BS
• be patient – teach don’t preach
• respect my time and intelligence

If social networks and marketers respect these principals will they gain traction with professionals? How should I know? But I’m sure that if they ignore these points I’ll be gone before they can sell me anything.

Just got my invitation to Google Wave. Should be called Google Crack. I’ve been online for 5 hours and still want to experiment but I’m about to pass out. To put it in perspective, I heard about the invitation at 8:30 Friday night. It is now 6:40 Saturday morning. I’ve been tooling around with Wave since 2:45 AM (didn’t sleep last night, okay?).

Turns out that Wave isn’t that complex (despite appearances). The most apt description I’ve heard yet was offered on Bwana.tv where the host referred to it as an open-sourced real-time multimedia platform for communication …. that just happens to draw on nearly all Google’s media properties – e-mail (gmail), video (YouTube), games, pictures (Picasa), IM (gTalk), social networking (Orkut), documents (Google Docs), real-time online collaboration (Google Docs again), etc.

The  point is his tool could really, really change the way we communicate with each other and with clients. It’s that useful. I’ll keep my readers up to date. So far so good.

P.S. In true Internet, word-of-mouth, hacker fashion I got my invitation through a longtime online contact I originally met blogging, who got it from a contact of his, and so on.  You could say we scarcely know one another but he helped me become part of the 100,000 who got Wave invites. Thanks for that bro!

Wave is Google’s open-sourced real-time multimedia platform for communications, combining e-mail (gmail), video (YouTube), pictures (Picasa), IM (gTalk), social networking (Orkut), and real-time online collaboration (Google Docs).