“Fast-paced, fun, thought-provoking, social, local, global—Ignite is all of these and more. It’s a high-energy evening of 5-minute talks by people who have an idea—and the guts to get onstage and share it with their hometown crowd.”

Ed Adams @ IgniteLaw

IgniteLaw was actually 6-minute presentations that included 20 slides that auto-transitioned after 18 seconds.  The theme of the presentations were about the future of the practice of law.  Matt assembled 16 great speakers (I only was able to stay for 10 of them), many of whom I call friends.  Ed Adams, the Editor and Publisher of the ABA Journal (and my current boss) spoke about the future of legal journalism and the Legal Rebels project he conducted last year as a story about the future of the practice of law, or rather the Rebels that are changing the way law is practiced.

Now I think what was great about this night was that every presenter had an idea on how to make the practice of law better.  Ed covered what was already happening.  Tom Mighell covered how law schools can make lawyers better by teaching them how to run a practice, or practice management skills in law school.  And Larry Port discussed how Agile product development methodology and how it can relate to lawyers in their case work.   When you think about idea sharing and maybe even to a degree an extension of brainstorming, Ignite is a concept that could be applied to not only conferences, but how you give presentations at work or when you want to share an idea.  Short, concise, simple.

IgniteLaw was about how the legal profession can emerge from its current crisis and be better.  How can your industry change, and can you Ignite a change?

Update:

A few other aspects I forgot to point out about the new ABA Journal website:
Daily and Weekly Newsletters & RSS Feeds – Pick your poison, get news via RSS feeds for top stories and daily news, or subscribe to the daily and weekly email newsletters. Daily will recap the last day’s worth of content; weekly will cover the top ten posts of the week.
Tag Cloud – Having your topics sorted in alpha order is nice, seeing a tag cloud is better! See how many entries we have pertaining to a topic on the Topics page and on the Tag Cloud tab. Categories are alpha left to right and are weighted against the number of items in each category based on the news items and the magazine content.

Other opinions:

Read some other opinions of the new site:
Denise Howell @ Bag and Baggage
Dennis Kennedy @ DennisKennedy.blog [Note: Dennis and I are friends as well as having previously worked together at the ABA, so this one is a little "slanted" in my favor. ]
Eric Turkewitz @ New York Personal Injury Law Blog
Bill Gratsch @ Blawg.org
Ernie “the attorney” Svenson @ Ernie the Attorney
Carolyn Elefant @ MyShingle
Mark Obbie @ The Carnegie Legal Reporting Program at Newhouse Blog

This article originally was published in the May 2007 issue of LLRX.

You have worked for a large firm for many years and you have made the decision to either go solo or start a small firm. You were used to having access to all your information via an Intranet, file server, and your desktop. You could practice law and let the IT department worry about when the printer jammed or if you got a virus. Now that you are solo, you are the one that has to deal with all those problems as well as practice law.

It is no secret that one of the largest concerns for new and existing solo lawyers has to do with building an infrastructure for your new firm. Specifically, technology related concerns impact this group the most; computers, office software, security, back-up, billing software, case management, etc. The options are either to invest in all the technology yourself and spend a lot of time, money, and energy keeping all the systems running properly, troubleshooting problems, and performing regular maintenance, or outsource all of this overhead for someone else to manage on your behalf. However, you became a solo to practice law, not troubleshoot technology applications each day.

Alternatives to the two scenarios above do exist. You can invest in Web-based tools to take some of the burden off of you, and let someone else worry about the back-up, security, and maintenance. The benefits allow you to practice law and have fewer worries about issues that may come up regarding the technology itself. The downside is that if your Internet connection goes out, you cannot do much. Even worse is if the hosting company that you are using has severe problems, your data may be lost forever. I’ll cover some of the tools that are available for you to explore as well as raise concerns of relying on such Web-based services for your daily work.

Tools Available

There are many office and support tools available in Web-based formats that can lessen your office overhead.

Google’s Products

Google continues to roll-out new web-based office applications that are worth reviewing. The company started with an email client called Gmail and through acquisitions and their own development teams, have expanded their offerings to include office applications. Currently Google provides the following:

• Google Docs (word processing and spreadsheets)
• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• iGoogle (personalized page)

Google Docs and Google Calendar offer collaborative functions, allowing them to be shared others. Both services are free. Google also has a version of their office tools in a complete package that is fee based.

Google offers a small business package (Standard Package is free, Premier Package is $50 per year per user) includes:

• A customizable Start Page
• Google Docs and Spreadsheets
• Page Creator (basic webpage with a WYSIWYG editor)
• Gmail account
• Google Talk (IM/VOIP)
• Google Calendar
• Control Panel to manage accounts and your domain
• Help and support
• Extensible APIs to integrate with other third party software

This can be a very powerful combination of tools for solos and small firms who are looking to reduce overhead and IT support for basic office functions.

ZoHo’ Products

ZoHo is a brand of AdventNet, a software company. Their free and for pay services offer a wide range of options for solos and small firms who are looking to reduce IT overhead. Like Google, their Web-hosted tools provide a lot of functionality, but not a full suite such as Microsoft Office. Currently Zoho has the following product offerings:

• Writer
• Sheet
• Show
• Calendar and Email
• Project
• CRM
• Planner
• Wiki
• Chat
• Notebook (private beta)
• Mail (private beta)

Tom Mighell recently wrote about the benefits and differences between Google and ZoHo’s products vs. Microsoft Office in the March issue of Law Practice Magazine. One of the biggest drawbacks of using these services has to do with back-up. Tom reports that neither Google nor ZoHo offer bulk back-up to another source. You must download each file individually to your local computer prior to transfer to another data back-up location.

37Signals’ Products

While being able to replicate what a Microsoft Office Suite might offer is important for solos and small firms, there are other tools that will help manage your office. 37Signals based in Chicago, offers a variety of Web-based tools that address needs such as project management (or case management if you want to think if it in that perspective) and Client Relationship Management. Known for producing simple to use tools that offer many features but are not overwhelming, 37Signals products include:

• Highrise (CRM – Customer Relationship Management)
• Basecamp (Project Management)

37Signals’ products also offer many other opportunities as each of their products have APIs (application programming interface), which allow for other software to interact with theirs. A great example is their Basecamp product. This project management tool allows you to collaborate with others on a project by setting tasks, milestones with reminders, and file management for that project. If you purchase their comprehensive package of services it will even do time tracking. One feature Basecamp does not offer is billing or invoicing. That’s where FreshBooks comes in. They use the Basecamp API to allow their web-based billing and invoice software to interact with Basecamp to allow you to create invoices for each project. Of course you would need a FreshBooks account to make this happen, but having those two applications talk to each other makes sending out bills and invoices seamless.

Concerns for Lawyers

As the new generation of Web-based services and software arrives, lawyers will always have concerns. Do you reduce your overhead costs by outsourcing these tools or do you manage all of them yourself? If you do take a serious look at using Web-based tools, then privacy, data security, and copyright of content will be issues with which you will have to deal. This is particularly important if you plan to use “free” versions. Catherine Sanders Reach, Director of the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center, recently wrote on the group’s Site-tation site about the cost of free resources. Ms. Reach stated “…attorney’s must give thought to the potential repercussions of relying on free technology for mission-critical functions.” And she is correct. If for some reason your free web-based email service is down and clients can’t contact you efficiently, that certainly impacts business.

Ultimately, you have to be comfortable with the due diligence you perform in backing up your data, understanding what you are really giving up by using free services, and evaluating how these factors impact your clients and their respective matters.

What Does the Total Package Lack?

At this time I think there are several hurdles that must be overcome before any lawyer or business professional can truly use web-based tools to manage essential office tasks.

Simple single sign-on: Of all the online tools that I use, test, and experiment with, one of the nice things about the Google products is that I don’t have to re-login to use each application. Single sign-on is important for users who use multiple web-based applications from the same vendor. Of course if you decide to pick different products from different vendors this may always be an issue. OpenID may solve this problem (a universal unique identifier many web-based companies are adopting for access).

Access to third party back-up sources: Data security is always going to be on the mind of any lawyer or small business owner. This means that if you want to ship your data off to a third party security/storage center you need to be able to have the ability to do this at any time.

Smartphone access/integration: The world is quickly becoming more mobile. The expectation to have access to all your information at any given time is also becoming more mainstream. If you worked at a larger firm, what was your required response time? I understand some firms require their lawyers’ response to clients must be within 2 hours of receipt. Web-based products need to have the ability to integrate with Smartphones (Treo, BlackBerry, Q, BlackJack, etc.) to allow lawyers access to their contacts, documents, and email directly from their mobile device.

Central Start Center: Finally what would be very desirable is the ability to have a central start center which you can log-in when you get to work, have a portal that gives you access to all these applications as well as the ability to pull in other information like local news, custom search, and maybe even sports scores. Applications like iGoogle (now their name-brand for their personalized page) and NetVibes help do this, but these sites still have limitations, although they are improving continuously.

Ultimately, you can become relatively efficient with current Web-based applications. For the “office” applications, you need to be diligent in using the Web-app as an application, not as a storage facility. If you are finished writing or collaborating on a document, export it out to save in some other location. This does not mean you cannot re-import it and work on it again, but you should think of these as applications only as a tool, not as a complete, final solution.

By using Web-based applications, you can reduce the overhead dedicated to operating your office. Be diligent in checking the terms of use and privacy statements of all “free” applications. Be cautious of using vendors who are still small and have the potential to fold at any given moment (namely anything in “beta”). You do not want to lose your data forever because the lights go out in Silicon Valley. Finally, use the tools you feel most comfortable using. If you are a WordPerfect or Microsoft Word pro and use special features, equivalent Web-based applications will not serve your needs. Be smart about the tools you use and you will find the benefits and efficiencies come with those decisions.

What concerns you most about web-based office solutions replacing traditional desktop applications? Let me know at fred@frederickfaulkner.com.

Two years ago I wrote about what was going to be BIG in 2005. It was a fun take off on the VH1 BIG in 2004. With technology and the Web changing at an ever-quickening pace, I thought it would be good to predict what I think is going to be BIG in 2007. So let’s get started.

Content Syndication – My News, My Way

Two years ago I predicted that RSS was going to take off. It did, but not in the way that it should have. Many factors contributed to the lack of wider adoption of RSS, but now the playing field has changed. Publishing companies are seeing the value in RSS and how content can be syndicated to other Websites, and more importantly, delivered directly to readers. The software companies have also caught-on to the power of RSS and are integrating the RSS format directly into their applications. Much of this can be attributed to the explosion in the number of blogs over the last five years. Microsoft will help expand RSS adoption with the introduction of their new operating system Vista, and with user migration to Internet Explorer 7, released several months ago. Both have integrated features to facilitate the use of RSS.

RSS will be the vehicle for syndicating content, but it won’t just be text and images anymore. The popularity of content such as video and podcasts will continue to grow this year. OPML will also start to gain some traction as well.

OPML stands for Outline Processor Markup Language. It will have many useful application as a content syndication vehicle as it continues to develop. The most common use at the moment is to bundle a number of RSS feeds into one file, which you can then in turn import into another aggregator. So if I wanted to share my Legal Blogs folder from my news aggregator with you, I would export the folder as an OPML, allowing you to import that file and use all the feeds to which I am subscribed, via your own aggregator. This saves both of us time because I monitor about 50 legal blogs, and it would cumbersome to copy and paste each feed URL into a document to email to you.

The Social Web Becomes the Regular Web

Last year was all about the "social Web." In 2007, we will see how the social Web will be absorbed into the "regular" Web. Blogs and Websites will for the most part become one and the same. We won’t differentiate them as much because blogs will continue to be integrated into mainstream Websites and their core features, such as blog comments and RSS, will become an accepted part of all Websites. This integration has already started with the re-launch of Time.com, along with use of these applications in mainstream media sites such as the WashingtonPost.com and NewYorkTimes.com sites, to name just a few. These publishing giants have taken social Web concepts and placed them directly into their respective Websites. These features include a blog aggregator which is summary content from many sources (Time.com), columnist blogs with comments enabled, podcasts, and a "save and share" feature on all their articles which allow you to bookmark or share links to articles via social communities like Sphere, Newsvine, Digg, and Del.icio.us.

The next generation of the Web will continue to prominently include online community building features. Websites like Second Life will continue to change the way we interact with each other. Companies will no longer just be on the Web, they will interact on the Web. The legal community will, to a certain degree, follow suit. Advertising rules and regulations will continue to evolve regarding how blogs and Websites are treated by the state bar associations [Link].

The Mobile Web

For the Web design and development community, the mobile Web has been talked about for years. Ever since the first cellular phone could access sports scores we’ve been thinking about how it will evolve into something more robust. Now with newer cell phone technology the rest of the world it is starting to see it become reality.

With access to the Internet beyond just dial-up and broadband, mobile phone companies and Wi-Fi hotspots have enabled us to use devices other than a laptop to access the Web. Smartphones were the first step into this arena. Business leaders and the legal community grabbed on to these devices for the ability to do more than make a phone call. Soon Webmasters started to see odd browsers visiting our sites, like the BlackBerry engine. With the recent introduction of other mobile devices such as the iPhone, and ultraportable PCs like the Oragami, accessing the Internet will no longer be as difficult as it was before. If someone wants to find a lawyer, or locate an office of your firm, the barriers to that task will be quite small. Internet connectivity will continue to be readily available, which means that you, and your firm’s Website, will always be on (as well as the expectation that you will respond to your clients in a much faster fashion). In 2007 you may want to consider having a mobile version of your Website available for visitors to use.

Convergence of Web Applications with Desktop Client Applications

First there was the desktop client application, and everyone was happy that they could write and edit documents faster than using a typewriter. This was fine for many years, but as business and the legal community continued to grow and computers were widely adopted, the limitations to this environment became more apparent. Collaboration between multiple people or multiple offices was difficult. What version of an application was Tom using, vs. Paul? Incorporating multiple changes from multiple platforms was a full time job. The Web transformed that with the introduction of Web-based applications like 30 Boxes, Writely and Google Spreadsheet (both now officially called Google Docs), and Gmail. We quickly embraced the ability to collaborate on documents instead of coordinating fifteen emailed versions of the same document among three people. And the price has been right, and help is free.

Being able to access documents and information stored on the Web is great, but what if you wanted to sync those documents with a laptop so that you can continue to work on a plane trip? You would have to coordinate with your colleagues that you were doing this and not to adjust the document while you were gone or you had to merge the changes back into the document when you landed. Now we have begun to see the limitation to having fully hosted documents. What was once a great solution has become constraining again because even if the Internet is much more readily available, doesn’t mean that we are always on the Internet to access our documents. So now a new challenge has to be surmounted.

Sometime in 2007 we will see the ability to sync those online documents with an offline version. I believe the need for this feature will be the next logical step for many of these online software providers, and one that the users will value. While many are free services, new features will be added that will require a fee and I’m sure some, if not many, will pay the price to have this convenience.

Other Continued Trends

The three aforementioned items above will not be the only technology changes in 2007. Other trends will continue to gain momentum, and could find the tipping point of wide adoptions this year as well. Examples include:

• Podcasting and online videos
• Online communities and social networks
• Web access to basic legal services

This year looks to be another exciting one for technology, and how the legal profession will leverage applications to improve and diversify services. The Web is offering users around the world the ability to connect, share, and do business with one other in real-time — all the time. If you think I’ve missed something, or have a BIG trend you see forming in 2007, let me know so we can track it together. I’ll write a follow-up article to this at the end of the year to see where we landed.

The end of the year is closing in fast and you will undoubtedly ready many "year in review" articles this month. Rather than writing a column referring to what we covered this past year, I want to get you thinking about next year, so you can start the year off right – with a strategic plan for your website that is integrated into other firm goals for 2007.

Reviewing Your Current Website

Hindsight is always 20/20, so – what didn’t you accomplish with your website last year? Do those unaccomplished goals still hold value within the scope of your overall marketing strategy? If so, do you want to make sure these goals figure prominently in your plans for next year?

In following with what website plans were not implemented, did you perhaps add a new feature or features that failed to generate the response you anticipated or simply did not work? To what can you attribute this lack of success?

Looking at what you have done and how your website has contributed to your overall goals and marketing efforts will help you to focus your plans for improvements and enhancements for 2007. Review all aspects of your website, from design to content to traffic statistics to clients who engaged your services through the site. Having a complete picture of what happened over the course of the last twelve months will provide you with valuable data. 

The next step in this evaluation process is to draw up a short list of ideas and changes that you want to make to your website in the next year and put it aside. Then take a look at the competitive landscape that surrounds you.

Competitive Analysis

Knowing what you have worked on over the last twelve months is a good starting point, but information about what your competitors have accomplished is an essential component of your future planning process.  Has your competition taken specific business away from you? Is another firm or practice providing a service that is within your field of expertise? Do other firms have value-added services that you offer but have not properly communicated or marketed, or that you can enhance to extend the range of your services to clients? Remember, you do not have to be the first to offer a online service or implement a technology application (such as a blog, wiki or an extranet).  The objective is to determine how to implement one or more of these applications in a manner which keeps you competitive and expands your services.

Ideas that you will want to consider include the following?

• coordinated offline and online branding
• e-mail updates on topical subject matters
• client portals
• web-based client intake forms

After taking a quick look at your competitors within the context of the "marketplace" (location, industry, etc.), you can add more context and content to your wish list of ideas to implement over the next year.

Brainstorm Your Website Wish List

Once you have conducted an comprehensive and efficient evaluation of your work over the last year, and identified the same for your competitors, sit down with your staff and start brainstorming about ideas for your website. Ask them to contribute ideas that they find are useful on the web in general, not just what they believe are useful on other law firm websites. Remember to bring those initial ideas from reviewing your own website to the discussion. Putting all options and ideas on the table will give you an extensive list and allow you to chose the "best of breed" to implement. Don’t restrict your thoughts to financial requirements or additional resources, as you might be surprised on what you can implement through a project plan that includes implementation over a one year period.

Once you have that list, eliminate the extremes that you feel are either out of your financial reach, won’t provide a satisfactory ROI, and do not fit any other firm requirements. Take the remaining ideas and review the business, technical, and resource requirements required to implement them successfully within your established time frame.

Develop Requirements for New Features to Integrate

Now that you have a list of features you have determined are worth implementing, create a requirements list to go with each feature. This requirements list will include not only technology requirements, but business requirements, an outline of staff resources, and information related to whether a consultant or third party is required to expedite completion of the project. Documenting these requirements prior to beginning the project will assist in fulfilling the objectives as it is put into motion. This information also provides responsible committee members all the information they need to review and approve the project. At the end of the article, I have included a link to a basic form (in PDF) that you may follow to gather requirements for website enhancements.

What is Your ROI?

With any new enhancement or project you want to be able to measure if the change was successful or not. Determining a Return on Investment (ROI) to help put a dollar amount to your project is always a motivating factor for selecting a project that can be successful. You want all of the proposed technology related enhancements to be strategic, measurable, attainable, realistic, and tangible, or S.M.A.R.T.  Choosing an enhancement for which you can’t measure the impact on your business may not be not a smart investment. To assess the ROI for an enhancement, you should to weigh all costs to implement the work to the return that the enhancement will bring. For example, if you want to add a client intake form to your website, you need to calculate the programming costs, staff time for reviewing the form and testing, and finally implementation. Next, you need to determine how much staff time will be reduced or increased by the use of this form. Finally, how many new clients will it take to make this improvement a profitable enhancement. Of course the last part will vary because cases can cost and bring in different levels of revenue, so choose evaluation criteria that most closely match your firm business practices.

Build Your Website into Other Marketing Efforts

If you haven’t already done so, your website should be integrated into all of your marketing efforts. All your print collateral and business cards should have your web address on it. If you have a special area of law that you cover, you need to make sure you have some informational resource related to that topic on your website for current and prospective clients. Build a client intake form into your website to streamline your phone process.

Plan for at Least One New Enhancement

Every year you should plan for at least one website enhancement. To some this may seem like a big investment, while others may want to implement several enhancements at a time. How many you implement on an annual basis is up to you, and is dependant on how your website fits into your other marketing and business efforts and goals. The web is a powerful tool that breaks down barriers of entry into markets and can reduce costs, all at the same time. Many firms have realized this and have successfully leveraged the marketing value of their respective websites. As the number of web users steadily increases, for locating professional services as well as a range of consumer related activities, having a website that can work for you instead of against you is vital.

Conclusion

The web will continue to become part of our everyday lives. Proactively improving your website with enhancements that work in tandem with your overall firm goals and marketing strategy ensures greater success. Creating S.M.A.R.T. enhancements and mapping your timeline now will save you frustration and dollars at the end of the project. Good luck planning your strategy for 2007, and feel free to contact me about the enhancements you plan on making and if they are successful after implementation. [Note: Follow this Link to an example of a form for planning your website enhancement - PDF]

It is probably the most taken for granted webpage you visit every day—the infamous homepage that appears each time you open your Web browser. Many see it as just another page that they immediately click away from once their browser is open. Others actually change it to something more meaningful or interesting. Traditionally, the homepage, is usually set by someone else at first, but with the expansion of the Web 2.0 era and the greater adoption of RSS you can actually do more with your homepage than ever before.

The problem with homepages is that you only get to choose one page. If you are lucky enough to be able to switch this page (some companies lock down their computers so this feature is disabled) you are forced to make the difficult choice of picking a page that suits your needs. Many choose a search engine, a news site, or another favorite website. With personalized pages becoming more common place, it only makes sense to maximize that experience to get the best of both worlds. At the end of this article I’ll take you step-by-step on setting up a personalized homepage with one of the services I mention below. So let’s see what is available for you to use and how you can get the content you want all in one spot.

Typical Homepages

Common homepages include a company’s homepage, your Intranet, major news sources like CNN.com or NYTimes.com, major search engines like Google or Yahoo!, or an ISP or computer manufacturer branded homepage like Comcast.net or Dell’s homepage. While all of these pages are fine and you can get great content from them, there is still something lacking, and that is the ability to make them really personal to you. If you are like me, you have a plethora of bookmarks from sites you visit regularly, why not have all their content in one organized place? Why not be able to open your browser and not only see information those sources, but also have a To Do list, a sticky note pad, or a preview of your Web e-mail account? Now you can and it is not hard to set up. So where do we start?

Websites You Can Personalize

Companies like Google and Microsoft are providing the ability to create personalized homepages instead of your default browser homepage. Other established portals like MSN and Yahoo! are enhancing their “my” space features to give you more options to add content and add pages to them. Finally, there are Web 2.0 companies building spaces specifically for customized homepages that are tapping into the far reaches of the Web to give you your one custom homepage.

To give you a more personalized portal, each of the examples below provide a standard set of modules that you can customize, as well as access other pre-defined modules to add to your homepage. They also allow you to define content to be filtered into your homepage from other sources such as your favorite blog or website that provides a RSS feed. Each page is has multiple columns so you can keep the modules organized. Modules can be dragged and dropped into different columns, additional pages, or deleted all together.

The first three, Google, Netvibes and Windows Live, are very similar in how they work. Each offer multiple columns and tabbed pages approach. MyYahoo! and MyMSN are more traditional content portals and are laid out differently than the other three. They provide two columns and access to their other services very easily. Depending on your personal taste, one may or may not be better suited for your needs. Personally, I use Google’s personalized page because I use many of Google’s products which integrate nicely into my homepage, but each of these below are top rated in their offerings.

• Google
• Netvibes
• Windows Live
• MyYahoo!
• MyMSN

Adding Content to Your Personalized Homepage

With the ability to add content from almost any source that publishes an RSS feed personalized homepages can be powerful sources of information. Adding the content is very simple. Google, Netvibes, and Windows Live all provide pre-defined "widgets" and "gadgets" to add to your pages. Usually by clicking the "Add Content" link you will be presented with categories for different types of information you can add. Then it is as easy as finding one you want and clicking “Add to page”. If there is a source not available in their listings you can add that source via their RSS feed (if available). Google makes it easy by adding a link by their search box called "Add a source". Netvibes and Windows Live provide similar features as well. Coming up I’ll take you step-by-step on how to create a personalized page with Netvibes and how to add pre-defined as well as custom content to those pages.

How Legal Professionals Can Take Advantage

For many legal professionals, staying abreast of developments in certain industries is critical to cases and overall daily work. The ability to have current awareness tools and other personal interest information available in one source is both powerful and efficient. If you are not using a news aggregator yet to monitor industries or topics, a personalized homepage may be one way to ease yourself into the concept. It can, however, be very cumbersome if you have a lot of modules of feeds on one or two pages. With that in mind, personalized pages are a better choice when you are looking for quick snap shots of information. A news aggregator is the better technology alternative to track and monitor many sources, such as an entire industry.

For example, I monitor the Web, legal, and marketing industries on a regular basis. While I could set up three separate tabs in my Google homepage for each industry, I have at least 20-60 feeds in each category. Taken together, those pages would be difficult to manage and track, so I still use a news aggregator for the majority of my news feeds.

I use my homepage to monitor the ABA’s reputation online via a few custom search feeds and our own internal RSS feeds which we publish. I also have a few tabs set up for personal items and general news. The main tab is set up with some widgets that help me get things done like a To Do list, a notepad for larger notes and thoughts, access to my Gmail account and my Google Calendar. This allows me to open up my browser, see what is on the agenda for the day, and organize my tasks by priority. I can also quickly see who has been talking about the ABA overnight and what we are publishing out to the world via RSS feeds. For me, it takes less than five minutes in the morning to get up to speed and then start my day.

Making a Personalized Homepage

To help you get started with a personalized homepage, I’ve documented the steps you need to go through using Netvibes. I chose Netvibes for this example because it requires no additional account set-up besides an existing e-mail address. You don’t need to have an account with Google or Microsoft as you would for Microsoft Live or the Google Personalized page. In this example, we’ll set up the account, add content to the main page, and create a new tab and add content. So let’s get started!

Note: If you don’t have access to adjust the homepage of your browser you can still create a personalized page – you will just need to bookmark it and go there every time you start your browser.

Step 1. Starting out. To get started with a personalized page, visit Netvibes, www.netvibes.com. Once there you will need to create an account so you can personalize this page.

Step 2. Sign In / Create a New Account. Click the Sign In link in the upper right corner. A Web 2.0 looking window will overlay the screen with Existing User and New User choices. Select Sign Up Now!. Provide an e-mail address and password. This will be how you identify your personalized page from everyone else’s. Once your account is created you will be able to modify the modules, add tabs, and they will be retained for your own account.

Step 3. Title your Page. You will want to add a page title for your personalized page. The text at the top of the page that says "Type your page title here" is editable by clicking on it. You can name it anything you want. I called mine Fred’s LLRX Start Page.

Step 4. Adding Content via Pre-defined Gadgets. Before we add content to your page, take a look at the pre-loaded items. If you don’t have a Gmail account or don’t care to see the colorful looking pictures via Flickr you can delete the module by clicking the “X” in the module header when you hover over it. Once you have deleted the modules you don’t want to retain click the “Add Content” in the upper left hand corner. A taskbar will appear on the left side of the screen. In that taskbar a series of categories and types of modules will appear. You can hover over any of the links to see more about that particular module. If you click the link an example module will appear. If you want to add it to your page, click “Add to my page.” Fill in as many modules and gadgets as you desire. If you want to see more modules you can check out the Netvibes Ecosystem for more custom modules created by other users.

Step 5. Adding Tabs. You may find that your main personalized page is getting pretty full from the modules you are adding. To help organize your modules Netvibes, just like Google and Microsoft Live, has tabs you can add. To add a new tab click the “New Tab” link next to your General tab. You can then label the tab anything you want. For example if you want to put all your search modules on a second page, you can call the tab “Search.” Once a tab is created you can drag and drop any module on any tab and it will move the module to that tab. To add new content to that tab you would use the same process as Step 4.

Step 6. Adding Content via RSS Feeds. If the modules and gadgets provided by Netvibes and the Netvibes Ecosystem do not provide specific modules of content you desire, you can add your own RSS feeds to your Netvibes page. Say for instance you want to add the LLRX RSS feed to your personalized page to see when the next issue is published. To do this, surf to LLRX.com and click on the orange XML icon at the bottom of the left sidebar. Copy the URL and then go back over to your Netvibes account. Click “Add Content” and select “Add my feed” link at the top. There you will paste the URL for the LLRX News Feed into the top box and click “Add.” A module showing the last five entries in the RSS feed will be displayed in a module on your personalized page. You can edite that module to show up to 9 entries by hovering over the top of the module and clicking the “Edit” link. You can do this for any RSS feed from any Web site. So if you prefer CNN news to MSNBC or WashingtonPost.com you can add any CNN feed to your personalized page.

Conclusion

Personalized homepages give you the ability to create quick snapshots of information that you may visit on a frequent basis. Making a personalized homepage your start page for your Web browser ensures that you can access that information quickly at any time. Adding new content to a personalized page is easy, and you can even drag and drop them to any column you want with the click of a mouse. Now that you know how to create a personalized page, take advantage of your homepage and maximize it to provide all the information you need in one central location. If you are using a personalized homepage, let me know what you like about it and ways in which you find it useful.