In 1993 The New Yorker published this now-classic cartoon with the caption, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Initially created for a little chuckle, it's turned into a prophetic warning. Anyone could be lurking on the other side of that keyboard.

One example is now playing out at the websites of Scott Greenfield and Mark Bennett, who are being cyber-stalked, as you can read at the two links at the bottom. The stalker happens to be a convicted rapist, and Twitter is his tool.

And this is worth writing about as a lesson to newcomers to the blogosphere and those who think acquiring a jillion Twitter followers, or a bazillion Facebook friends, will magically lead your nascent law firm down the Yellow Brick Road to Oz. It doesn't work that way. And it could even be dangerous.

You would be foolish not heed the cautions of Greenfield and Bennett. Don't be so quick to add Twitter and Facebook buddies under the pretension that these networks give you a level of familiarity with others if that familiarity doesn't actually exist. If you don't know how to say no then you aren't an adult.

Just as social networks are used by the innocent, so too are they used by trolls, malcontents and criminals. You don't want to learn the hard way about the difference between a follower and a stalker. This is particularly true since, as Kevin O'Keefe points out, there is software that will help buy Twitter followers. He issues his own mea cupla on once touting the benefits of large numbers of followers.

I've never been a fan of Twitter and the blizzard of garbage it sends over the transom at the user. If you use the service (or any other) quality must take precedence over quantity.

As Sergeant Phil Esterhaus used to say on Hill Street Blues, "Hey, let's be careful out there."

• The Lessons of One Psycho on Twitter (Greenfield)

• The Worst Lawyer in Houston (Bennett)

Labels: Blogging, Twitter

Houston criminal defense attorney and blogger Mark Bennett is live-twittering while his protege picks a jury.

And Eugene Volokh reports on the federal rules prohibiting tweets from the courtroom.

While Twitter pretty much stinks as a means of carrying on conversations, it obviously can be used effectively to transmit small snippets of a story. Now the courts will have to wrestle with how to handle it.

Labels: Twitter

The other day I trashed Twitter a bit (Twitter and The Age of Information Overload) because I already have so many sources for information and didn't really see why I needed another one, and didn't see how it was much of an improvement over existing technology. I wrote from the standpoint of someone who had not yet joined.

Well, now I have joined. My Thursday trial was adjourned, so I opened a Twitter account (@Turkewitz), downloaded Tweetdeck, and started noodling to see if my opinion would change. After two days I now consider myself expert enough to write on the subject.

There are two fundamental issues with Twitter that exist for any social networking site: Technology and Community.

Technology
I am certainly not impressed with Twitter technology and stand by the point I made the other day about listservs or other electronic forums being superior. And when I write about technology I don't mean the geek end; I mean the user end.

I first joined the online world with Prodigy back in '92 and have used one forum or another for online discussion since then. Twitter may be different than other current platforms, but is it better? The answer is clearly no.

Any good forum should have these critical components to allow for posting links and engaging in discussion:

• Multiple discussion boards so that those that want to talk baseball aren't in the same forum as those that want to talk knitting;
• The option to follow a discussion either in threaded fashion or chronologically, or simply to collapse the thread into the heading; and
  
• The option to ignore certain users because they want to talk about Mac and Cheese instead of the forum subject.

Twitter doesn't really do this well. It's a type of scattershot approach to social networking, but the discussion is strewn so far and it would be tough to follow any kind of conversation that might actually break out. And if you actually wanted to make a decent point in reply to an article or blog post, you would still be limited to 140 characters. (Though that might be a blessing in disguise for many.)

One of the best discussion forums I've seen is the one created by The Motley Fool financial site. If you look at this board for Apple, for example, you can see a neat, clean user interface. You can ignore people and threads with the click of a button. These boards have existed since the mid-90s.

A good law forum should work the same way, with the ease of dropping in links and creating bios and arguing with one another, because that's what so many like to do. If you want to get rid of the Mac and Cheese Poster or the chucklehead only concerned with self-promotion, then poof -- they're gone.

The Motley Fool boards blow the doors off anything Twitter has to offer.

Community
Great technology is useless without users. And even crappy technology is good if you have good users.

Twitter has succeeded in attracting the legal community, in lightening speed. How fast? An article by law technology guru Robert Ambrogi on August 8, 2008 in Law Technology News reviews various social networking sites for lawyers. Twitter isn't even mentioned.

And then there is an article in the January 2009 Trial Magazine (sub. only) about social networking for lawyers. It discusses Facebook and Linkedin and a couple others. But still no Twitter. Assuming the article was submitted a couple of months back, it gives you an idea as to how fast Twitter has taken off in the legal world.

So Twitter appears to be succeeding in the community development end. And that means it can be a valuable tool if you value finding articles and cases that may get swapped here and there, though they may be of limited use if (like me) you have a narrow geographic focus and practice area. I'll get far more value out of a forum with 25 local personal injury attorneys than I will out of a forum of 2,500 attorneys in different fields spread out over the nation. But I'm not everyone and your mileage may vary.

So Twitter is succeeding, and can be a decent tool for some things. I will continue to noodle with it and use it to see how it goes. Not because the technology is good, but because that is where people are congregating. Yes, I know, that is simply a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But I don't see it as a keeper. Twitter is not the future of the legal blogosphere. My next piece will be on what I think the future holds.

Labels: Blogging, Twitter

Several people have suggested I join Twitter, the microblogging service. With a 140 character "tweet" or "twit " you can send off a tiny little message to those that follow you. It's all the rage now with blogging lawyers, and there's 565 on this growing list. Heck even Barack Obama tweets (though the prior list somehow missed the First Lawyer).

But I've resisted. My brain is being swamped with information and my days seem to be getting shorter as I try to stay current:

• I have 150-200 blogs in my RSS feed;
• I have a local listserv that is, shall we say, exceptionally active in all things related to my practice;
• I've joined Facebook, which I rarely visit, and when I do, I find out what people had for breakfast;
• I've joined Linkedin, which I visit even less often.

I read hard copy magazines and newspapers. I write this blog. I've got a wife, two kids, a dog and a cat. I'm training to run another marathon, and organizing a 1/2 marathon trail race. And, oh yes, I have a law practice to run with clients to attend to.

The internet and the burgeoning social networks that it has spawned have made it possible to acquire information in ways that our parents never envisioned. Information now pours over the transom in an unprecedented deluge, being pushed and pulled in myriad ways.

But at some point I need to stem this tide. I'm not looking to retreat to a cabin in the woods, eating grubs to survive and working on an anti-technology manifesto, but I also don't feel a compelling need to open every valve of the technology river. There are only 24 hours in the day, and yes, I like to also use some of them to eat and sleep.

It is true that there are times I would like to make a very short post, but a once-a-week round-up of linkworthy items on this blog seems to be efficient enough for that purpose. And I have to think that those that would "follow" me on Twitter already follow me their RSS feed or by subscription, so little would seem to be gained by way of a growing readership.

Twitter really seems like an updated version of a listserv, which has served me quite well over the years. I've previously covered that subject (The Million Dollar Listserv), writing that "The listserv may be the single greatest tool the solo or small practice lawyer has," and if you don't belong to one in your practice area, you really should find or create one. You can read that post to see why. Twitter doesn't seem to improve on it in any meaningful way, and when you supplement the listserv with RSS feeds the ground is pretty well covered.

There are some that think Twitter's great for breaking new stories, but that's really nonsense. For example, some "credit" Janis Krums with using Twitter to "scoop" mainstream media with a first photo of the US Airways splash landing in the Hudson. Krums was on the first ferry to reach the plane. The WSJ wrote, "Notch another win for citizen journalism," and the Daily News called his 15 seconds of fame "well-deserved."

Why, on godsgreenearth anyone would think this is a "well-deserved" "win" of any kind and relevant to any serious issue of news reporting is beyond me. Why would it matter that someone twittered about a loaded airplane going down in full view of thousands of people on the edge of the biggest city in the country -- other than to the guy who took the picture and spent his time twittering it to friends? Did Twittering save lives? Of course not. Rescue was already in progress.

While Krums was being lauded as a celebrity, I wanted to know why the hell he was spending time on his iPhone instead of asking the crew what he could do to help, getting life vests ready to toss overboard, looking for survivors in the frigid waters, and looking around to see where, if at all, there might be lifeboats that he might need to assist with. Obsessiveness to technology can also mean the difference between life and death.

And then there is LexTweet -- a project of Kevin O'Keeffe's Lexblog business that builds sites for lawyers -- where the twittering is all about law. Or at least that may have been his thought when starting it. According to O'Keefe, "The community has already grown to over 1,500 members. But when I checked it out I found these pearls of twittering show up on his service:

• Is about ready to make some creamy broccoli cheese soup...yummy! (Melby_AZ)
  
• Have a serious craving for macaroni & cheese... might have to go to Garden of Eden. (Chickpea)
• OK, finally made it to library, rocking out to "Lavalounge" via live365.com, and reading Crim Law. Woot for law school (Littlefrogling)
  
• Our four year old has just admitted that she is being bullied at school. ipod is switched off... Kids are so cruel. (Accidentclaim)
  

Who wants to sort through this crap looking for substance? Thanks, but I have enough to do. Even if I knew these people I wouldn't want to read this dreck.

Now I don't blame O'Keefe for putting that content up, or even encouraging it. He's the platform builder, not the content creator. But it doesn't help to claim 1,500 twittering lawyers if these are among the ranks.

I'm not saying I will never Twitter. It certainly has its place as yet another method of information sharing. It's just that I don't see the need, given that I already can't read all the information that comes in. And it doesn't seem to be any improvement over a simple listserv or bulletin board with threaded subjects. And that type of technology was in wide use in the mid-90s.

Will Twitter help me acquire yet more information that I can't get to, or assist me in sharing information that I might have? I don't see how.

For more on twittering lawyers:

• Twitter users going to LegalTech New York : Here's a list (Kevin O'Keefe @ Lexblog),

  Here's a list of Twitter users [53 and counting] I know who are attending. If you're not on the list, leave a comment, or drop me a tweet at @kevinokeefe so we can get you on the list.

• they're all atwitter (we're not) (David Giacalone @ f/k/a)

  Everywhere you look, well-known members of the blawgisphere (lawyers who have weblogs) are all atwitter, chirping excitedly about Twitter ...At risk of being called a twit (or a throwback), the f/k/a Gang is pre-emptively opting out.

• Blawg Review #186: The Twitter Wars (at the Res Ipsa Blog)

  Twitter, a cross between "social networking, blogging, and texting," took center stage this week as legal bloggers debated the usefulness of the new networking platform. For a run down and the new technology and reasons why some attorneys are not embracing it [read the rest of the post with the links]

• Twitter for Lawyers (David Harlow @ HealthBlawg)

  I've been twittering for a couple of months now, and the consensus seems to be that I'm just one of those bleeding-edge geeks with too much free time. I bet I would've gotten the same reactions from fellow lawyers if I had installed a telephone in my office back in the 1870s.

• First Impression of The Lextweet Reflection (Greenfield @ Simple Justice)

  Kevin O'Keefe is always on the hunt for the next big thing, and what to do about it. His latest creation is Lextweet, billed as means to "follow legal community members who use Twitter to discuss the law and much more." ... But the biggest issue has nothing to do with Lextweet at all. The vast majority of twits are, how do I say this nicely, worthless to the general lawyer audience. Nothing personal, but intimate details of your personal hygiene don't interest me. I don't know your family (I don't even know you) so it's really of little concern what they're having for breakfast. But this is what people twit about, and what shows up on Lextweet whether it matters or not.

  
  
• How I Use Twitter -- Let me count the ways (Grant Griffiths @ Blog for Profit)

  Since I spend some of my time visiting with real-world friends and business contacts and individuals online about twitter, I thought it might be time to provide a post on "how I use twitter."

• Sixteen Reasons to Tweet on Twitter (Robert Abrogi @ Law Marketing Portal)

  1. Expand your network. With blogging, writing, speaking and various bar committees, I consider myself pretty well networked. So I was surprised upon joining Twitter at how many new contacts I made, how quickly I made them, and their potential value to me as a professional.

• Attorneys Flocking to Twitter for Marketing (Larry Bodine @ Law Marketing Blog)

  From where I'm sitting, 2009 will be the year Twitter becomes the major business development trend. Why?

Labels: Blogging, Twitter