Instant Messaging: an "elegant solution" for general practices

My family lives in rural NSW, where there is a chronic doctor shortage and it can be difficult to recruit new practitioners. So I really loved the story my mum told me about her most recent trip to the doctor. She wasn't able to get an appointment with her regular doc, and saw a new doctor who hadn't been practicing very long. This doctor wasn't sure about the correct prescription for my Mother's condition. But instead of spending time surfing around medical databases, or knocking on the door of the doctor next door, she sent an Instant Message. Within seconds she had the name of the appropriate medication - from two different doctors.

This practice probably has 5 or 6 doctors and probably hasn't even heard of "Enterprise 2.0" - but by using a free application such as MSN they have been able to dramatically increase the sense of presence and support they can provide this new doctor. She can confidently request assistance from her colleagues while knowing that it won't significantly impact the time required by her patient - or theirs (especially as they can choose not to respond). It would be interesting to know if this will consequently increase the likelihood of this practice retaining their new recruit - which would definitely be a plus for the rural community.

Some might consider Instant Messaging to be a relatively "old" form of social media - but there are still so many ways it can be used innovatively to solve basic problems and increase efficiency. It's great that small businesses are realising this as well.

Legal Professionals and Web 2.0 - ALLA presentation

I have loaded a copy of my conference presentation up to Slideshare - there are notes for relevant slides too.

Professionals and Web 2.0: Findings from the CCH whitepaper

View more presentations from Linda Moore.

You can also read the full paper (yes I actually submitted an article - it was like being back at uni!) on the ALLA conference site. A number of the papers and presentations are now available - I'll let you know my favourites over the next week or so.

ALLA sidetrip - Kakadu!

I haven't posted any of my notes from the ALLA conference because I am still recovering from the holiday to Kakadu that I took on the side! If you're a fan of birds, crocodiles, aboriginal rock art or sunsets you might like to have a look at my pics on flickr. I'll blog about some of the most interesting papers here or on CCHatter over the next week.

On my way to ALLA

I’m sitting at the airport about to board a plane to Darwin for the Australian Law Librarian’s Association conference.  I’m super excited about the conference this year – the theme is evolution and many of the papers explore how legal research has changed and is changing. 

I will be giving a presentation that draws on the findings of the CCH “Professionals and Web 2.0” whitepaper and explores what Web 2.0 means for the creation and dissemination of information – and what THAT means for information providers such as CCH!  I will put the presentation up on Slideshare next week.  In the meantime you might like to check out these two posts on www.cchatter.com.au – they are based on some material that didn’t quite make it to the final draft of the paper.

Lawyers and Web 2.0: what are the implications?

Today I started work on my paper for the ALLA Evolution Conference. The topic is Professionals and Web 2.0, and will to some extent be a presentation of the results from our Professionals and Web 2.0 whitepaper. But I also want to dig into the implications of Web 2.0 for legal research, current awareness, publishing, and libraries.

For example, the Canadian law blog Slaw won the 2009 Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing, presented by the Canadian Association of Law Libraries. It is considered to be a legitimate source of "high quality materials for use in understanding and researching the law." Yes, a Web 2.0 resource has just been lauded as a high-quality publisher in the league of Insight Press, CanLII, and Canada Law Book (just a few of the previous winners). But how do you go about evaluating web 2.0 sources and differentiating them from each other? What differentiates Slaw from Wikipedia? Yes I know this is somewhat obvious but what specific factors make you trust it more?

I would love to hear your thoughts about how you use web 2.0 sources and the implications this has for:

• legal and general research, including evaluating sources
  
• news and current awareness
• the legal publishing industry
• law libraries and KM

I'll be incorporating any insights proferred into my paper. You can tweet me or post longer observations as comments on this blog - I'll be posting on these topics over the next month or so as I put the paper together.

Who are you and why should I buy from you?

Just found this fantastic presentation from the Business Marketing Associations' "Unlearn" conference. A fantastic illustration of how markets and technologies change but the fundamentals of the business relationship don't.



I found a link to it on one of my favourite blogs, WebInkNow. I also noted that the author of WebInkNow, David Meerman Scott, is coming to Sydney and Melbourne in September. Here's the tag for his course: "Instead of explaining what Social Media is, David specialises in showing Marketing and PR experts exactly how to use it."

Now if only I could justify another training course LOL!

Oh well, there seems to be a blog specifically for the Australian masterclasses with Australian examples, so I'll have to get stuck into reading that instead.

Bookmarking tools for private communities

I've been on the lookout for a tool or site that would allow a private community to share links and discussions. There has been a real need for this among a group at work, as we explore innovative ideas and resources. At the moment we all use different tactics - I use Delicious, there is a share drive folder (ugh), and of course there's the ubiquitous link in an email.

Here are a few tools I've considered over the past year, I would love to hear any other suggestions.

Delicious
I've been using Delicious as a personal bookmarking tool for over a year now (click here to see my collection). It has some great features:

• Integrates with your favourites in Firefox or Flock browsers - if you add to your browser favourites you can also publish it to your Delicious account. You can also set up a button in your links bar that will publish a site directly to Delicious
• Also offers web-based posting of links for when you are unable to access a buttonbar plugin
  
• Fantastic predictive tagging facilities based on your existing personal tags and how other people have tagged it.
• Great search and sort facilities - eg you can browse one tag (such as web2.0) and then refine the list with an extra tag such as "twitter"
  
• Public access - share the links you've tagged eg "web2.0" with other people
• RSS feeds for your account or for a particular tag - so people can automatically receive notifications of any sites you've tagged eg "Web2.0".
  

However, Delicious falls down a bit when it comes to creating a community for sharing links.

• it lacks privacy settings which limits its use as a potential business tool for security reasons
• there is no group function (although an individual can create a network of other individuals). This defeats the concept of a collective library of tags and sites, as they can only be added to an individual's account. Also, I would like to have the facility to add and remove eg team members as they come and go.

Ning
Ning allows for the creation of a private or public community. Have a look at this Library 2.0 community to get a feel for it. The individual community can set up a huge variety of features:

• Welcome page
• Personal profile page
• Forums
• Blog aggregators
• Post links
  
• Post videos and images
• Chat
• And more

Ning is a fantastic tool for creating a community site, but it's not really a bookmarking tool. While it allows you to share links and bookmarks, there is no way to organise and sift through them.

Diigo
I came across this yesterday so I'm still exploring it. However it's looking pretty good:

• Both a personal bookmarking tool and a group tool
• Adds a toolbar to IE, Firefox and Flock for quick bookmarking or post directly to the website
  
• Allows you to highlight and annotate sections of a website that you bookmark
  
• search for a particular tag or view a tag cloud (I don't feel this is quite as functional as Delicious)
  
• Create private or public communities
• Administrator can easily add and remove users

Microsoft Sharepoint
Sharepoint has the advantage of sitting directly behind the firewall, however it lacks the "plug and play" functionality of eg Diigo which is so easy to set up. It also sits outside of the workflow - while both Delicious and Diigo allow you to click a button in your toolbar to bookmark a site, I suspect you would have to do the good old cut-and-paste to add to a list of links in Sharepoint. Also, Sharepoint out-of-the-box functionality is not maximised for easy web 2.0-style browsing and searching - no tag clouds, and essentially no easy way to tag in the first place. It would require extensive modification to make it as friendly as online sites - which means involving IT or developers, and that of course means it's no longer a "lightweight" solution.

I'll be playing with Diigo over the next few weeks and will update you on how it goes. I suspect the main barrier will be whether our firewall allows sufficient access.