Category Archives: General IT

General IT, General Legal IT

Everything is fine in social media, the sky is blue!

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I signed up to Twitter back in 2007 I think, can’t remember the exact date as my original account got wiped in some X cull or other. My current account started in 2009 and I’ve been a fairly regular user since. That is until August 17th 2023 when I made my last post on X.

My stopping didn’t have anything to do with anything other that Tweetdeck going behind the paywall, a paywall that for me was too high for a social media platform. I tried Threads but my experience with it wasn’t great, as you can read in a previous post. In the end I got fed up of waiting for that v1.1 to fix things! So that was it for a Twitter like experience….or it was until I got an invite to BlueSky!

BlueSky social media platform

What a breath of fresh air, it’s like taking a step back in time to the early days of Twitter when developers were encouraged and there was a wide variety of topics and conversation not just town crier politics. In fact in reality BlueSky is more an open protocol for a social media platform, the BlueSky app is billed as an example, the push is for others to build things using the protocol. Bit like the early days of email, there was a mail protocol but others built Outlook, Thunderbird etc

So is it just like early Twitter? Not exactly, here are some key things to understand that I think will help you get started.

The home or following feed is pretty much as you’d expect, these are posts from people you follow. In the settings you can choose whether this includes replies or not, reposts etc But key difference is that there are no algorithms pushing content, it’s simply what you follow.

The concept of feeds though is slightly different to Twitter lists. Custom feeds can be created by developers to collate content, so for example I’ve created a Legal Tech feed to look for key legal tech terms (subscribe here). I’ve not done any coding for years, so I took advantage of SkyFeed created by the developer community to help you create custom feeds, all you need to understand is a bit of regex which isn’t too hard to pick up.

But there are now lots of feeds to follow and in fact although I’ve done the usual follow/follow back to build up a community, it’s mostly through feeds that I find the most useful posts and conversations.

So what about Tweetdeck? Well thanks to an active developer community there’s a web app called Deck Blue which is absolutely fantastic, it’s pretty much tweetdeck but is getting developed all the time and is the one thing that’s kept me with BlueSky. It really is that good!

On mobile, again there is a BlueSky app but the developer community has built something better, GraySky is a fantastic mobile app and as good as any 3rd party twitter app that there used to be (before they were all killed off).

I joined BlueSky on August the 7th, have made 280+ posts and in my busiest month posted 106 times. I was user 520,272 and there are now over 2m and it’s still limited access. No I’ve not added all this up, another developer has created a great app to pull stats together – Twexit.nl

Did you ever use tweekly.fm? A bot for posting last.fm stats to twitter. Well that got killed by X’s API limits, but has now appeared over at BlueSky – lastfm.blue

I’ll finish with one final feature that hopefully will help the platform as it grows. The concept of subscribe-able mute lists. Anyone can create a mute list. So maybe you want to avoid people that post pictures of cats, you’d create one, add the users to it and subscribe. The cats pictures disappear. Others can also subscribe if they want to avoid cat pictures too. It may sound a bit harsh, but it doesn’t stop you posting cats, nor does it doesn’t stop people who like cats from seeing them, you just can choose a topic list to exclude if you want. You can find if you’re on a list (use Twexit.nl) if you really want to know.

The platform is developing all the time, so for example hashtags are just appearing, lists are evolving (from mute lists to also include lists in the twitter sense).

Anyway I’d love to build the legal IT / legal tech community over there, as well as any other topics (but please not polarising politics, leave that to X!!). I’ve a few invite codes available, so if you’re genuinely interested in moving across and adding to the BlueSky community then drop me a line and I’ll happily share a code.

Oh and then follow me @planty.bsky.social

Appendix
Here are some other resources for learning about BlueSky :-
How to Bluesky. This article explains how Bluesky works… | by Nico Mara-McKay | Medium
How I made the ‘Seattle Sport’ custom Bluesky feed | jacklorusso.com

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General IT

Threads : Is this twitters myspace moment? Together with a few thoughts on the upstart (updated).

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For those of a certain age in the UK, “Threads” probably conjures up an image of nuclear destruction (For US people think “The Day After”), it’s not a bad analogy for what may happen to Twitter, now a big player has a clone.

I’ve written in the past about Mastodon (here), lots of people joined but it never stuck if we’re honest, other than as a fringe product. But the entry of Meta with the hard job of building up initial “followers” already done through Instagram, gives it a leg up into the mainstream.

I’ve not seen any law firm marketing teams jumping on yet, but given the number of organisations already on the platform I’m sure many are underway in creating their accounts.

Early impressions are it’s very much a very polished v1. But I thought I’d post few of my first thoughts on what’s missing or what I don’t understand yet and then keep this post updated as it develops.

Timeline – I don’t get this yet. It seems to be algorithm based and is giving me a load of posts from either popular accounts or accounts it thinks I may like from Instagram. This is OK for day one or two but after this it will get annoying, I want to see those I’m following in chronological order, OK the latter isn’t really Meta’s way but at least let me have majority the former.

Follows – this feels a little clunky at the moment, I seem to have to dual approve Instagram accounts. Now this may be just that as people join they’re setting up as private and so my initial “join to Instagram” needs to be approved by them for Threads, so a thread follow only would work in the same way as Twitter?

Lists – But thing missing if the platform wants the power users, I wat to group people by subject.

Web app – I primarily used Twitter through Tweetdeck, these platforms need to have multiple interfaces, not just one app. This isn’t Instagram. Marketing teams will definitely want to use HootSuite, Tweetdeck or one of the other power platforms but normal users need at least a basic web app asap.

API and third parties – they may not be perfect but typically Meta have been fairly good at opening up their products for use by 3rd parties. Sure in the past they have shut some functions down in both Instagram and Facebook, but generally they are fairly open. This is what grew Twitter in the early days and what we’re seeing with Reddit and Twitter now shows a closed shop is a bad idea.

Meta has talked about using the open messaging platform so that a link to Mastodon can happen, this also is the direction of Bluesky (the new product from the original Twitter team) which could really open up a fantastic platform for the future. And it’s really this that led me to the title of this post, this really could be the start of the end for Twitter in the same way Facebook was the end of Myspace, kind of ironic really!

Update 12th July: so after a week I’ve drifted off the platform, the lack of timeline for those I follow only creates too much noise from things I’m not interested and removes ability to start a “thread”. This though seems to be priority for next upgrade so let’s see. Also lack of hashtags makes things a bit clunky, in the early days things like (follow friday) was a great way of following people interested in similar things. I will be back but only once v1.1 lands!

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General IT, Technical, Tips & Tricks

It’s been a while……and we still haven’t cracked hybrid meetings!

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Well it’s been two years since my last post, I gone through lots of should I shouldn’t I continue hosting this blog? But I’ve come to realise it has helped me horizon scan the legal business and it’s technology use, something I’ve missed doing for a couple of years. So how best to restart?

Well why not start where I left off and continue on from the last post on remote working tools.

I have to say the post was pretty spot on, Teams really has become much more standard in business, we all quickly transitioned more or less back to normal routines, but it’s clear now that the pandemic is behind us that hybrid working is now fully embedded in the working day. No more 5 days a week in the office.

But has anyone else cracked those hybrid meetings, the ones where half the participants are in the office, half online? No me neither! It starts with the tech problems, everyone at home is on ready (we’ve all cracked the when to mute, when to camera etc) , but the meeting room goes through the obligatory ten minutes of struggling to connect the tech, echoing mics and squealing speakers, “can you hear me” etc. And then the room proceeds to dominate the meeting, have side chats and pretty much forget there are others on the call.

I’m not sure what the answer is yet, maybe you can add in the comments any tips you’ve got on improving the experience. But I did come across this BBC article from 2021 on various ideas companies have for this space and improving remote meetings. It will be interesting to see how the tech unfolds in this area.

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General IT, Office365

The battle of the video communication platforms – Is lock-down over yet?

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I was going to write this post during the lock-down, when Zoom lived up to its name and took off in a big way. I had the idea of looking at Zoom vs Teams and why the former got such traction early on. But things changed week by week and much like the government guidance or the medias latest stick to bash them with, as soon as you think you have understood it things change again!

But during these past months I do seem to have used pretty much all the platforms rather than sticking to one specific one. Zoom, Teams, Skype for Business and Skype. And I can understand why Zoom became the to go to platform, it’s simplicity is its key. It’s stripped away all the complexity and focussed on the communications aspects, the video is done right – who’d have thought we wanted most to see everyone in the meeting not a constant slipping in and out of a big image of the speaker (or more likely see the person who is unmuted and crashing about) with a random 3 or 4 others in a small box or circle. Then add simple, but useful extra features like the ability to break out into small groups and top it off with an experience that most of the time just works and you’ve a winning formula.

There were some security concerns at the start, some valid and some I suspect stoked by competitors. But a number of updates seems to have addressed most of these (though I know some companies are still stopping use for reasons that have been patched weeks ago).

That was the original angle for the post, but Teams is now catching back up, by end of April they were talking about 3×3 video which was a welcome addition. By May breakout rooms were on the cards. Proving the benefit of the 365 platform, turning feature around quickly. So by the time we all get back to the offices there won’t be much feature wise to split Zoom and Teams for most firms.

I think though Zoom is here to stay and though. Teams will be a fixture for many, but I do think Microsoft missed a trick early on that could have removed the need for firms to also have Zoom. And it highlights that it really does need to sort out it’s mess of technologies and give a clear view of it’s platforms, let firms and consumers have a totally SaaS version of Teams without the need to configure a tenancy, that maybe is a stripped back version (but not separate!) to just communicate and have basic desktop sharing. Then bin Skype, both versions (look they ruined the consumer version, they had a killer cross platform solution, it was what Zoom was years ago but got ruined integrating in the Microsoft ID and all the other bloatware).

Simplicity of the Zoom offering will keep it in play, especially as it has got such a hold across the consumer space now (we’ve mentioned the Skype shambles, but Google and Facebook were late to this too and didn’t have their platforms ready to go). Personally during the lockdown Zoom has been the go to platform for pretty much every outside work situation my family has been in.

It’s hard to argue that home working has been a huge success, something that is now embedded and won’t shift backwards to the previous “normal”. But there are a couple of challenges left  that need further work:

First the big challenge we will face going back to our offices, online conference calls have worked very well because everyone is remote. They still leave a lot to be desired though when the majority of attendees are in a physical meeting room. The remote workers start to get side-lined in this scenario.

As I mentioned in a talk just before the lockdown at the BLTF 2020, this is the area we need to start to develop and get right. The technology used to share video, presentations and whiteboards will need to be in every office collaboration area or spaces will need to be designated for hybrid meeting use and in person only meetings. There are so many scenarios we will all be familiar with of being unable to connect visitors, having the wrong video connection etc We will need to solve these quickly as we are not going to get rid of home working now!

Second challenge is another I raised at that presentation. Voice quality. Thankfully in work situations we have developed the etiquette of using good quality microphones (usually headsets or quiet rooms and a good PC/Mac mic), muting yourself when not speaking and the host managing the meeting to keep the background noise down. Even with all the childcare challenges people have had this discipline has meant meetings have run extremely well. I can’t say the same for the outside meetings though, the difference is noticeable (“unmutees”, “camera fiddlers” and “upnosers”) and this will unfortunately be the same when we’re having the hybrid office & remote meetings.

One ray of hope though is work companies like nVidia have been doing to utilise spare capacity in their graphics cards to run AI technology to eliminate background noise. Could this be the audio equivalent of the background blur in video?? Watch the video on the BBC site, the results are pretty amazing! And it’s early days too so to see that companies are starting to see the challenge and doing work to develop this area is great news.

It’s clear that after this situation we are in is over things will be different. I hate the term “new normal” as I don’t things will be revolutionary different, we’ll quickly slip back to a recognisable normal (it’s already underway) but we will embrace remote working as it works (as a lot of us who were doing it previously knew anyway). So it’ll be more an acceleration of what was already happening. What we will need is the same acceleration in the tech at the office end when we start to go back in.

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General IT, General Legal IT

Dangers of email – is this what’s to come?

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We’re in a world where what you say on social media can suddenly have a big impact on your career. Maybe not so much for the average worker, but certainly for anyone in the public eye.

But a recent story on the BBC News site surrounding the Boeing 737 Max debacle could be bringing that level of scrutiny to work email, the release of emails from Boeing has thrown up an email from an employee indicating the plane was “designed by clowns”.

Now this on it’s own probably nothing for you to worry about, but then throw in this story by The Guardian about the development of AI bots being used to detect harassment in emails, to help in flagging bullying and sexual harassment in the workplace and all of a sudden you could be in danger of being the firm equivalent of Alistair Stewart.

I have a an old PST file from many many years ago and as they were not related to my current role or firm I thought I’d share what a simple search for “idiots” brought up, it was an email from a colleague that I’ve deliberately taken one line out of full context for effect.

“if only the people in charge of this firm had a clue as to how much time (and thus money) they’re wasting being bloody stubborn idiots”

I would hope there are laws in place to protect employees from the level of snooping (any technology lawyer like to clarify?) but if not it’s a worrying trend or maybe looking at it another way, the trigger to releasing us all from being slaves to email as we go back to non-electronic communication!

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General IT, General Legal IT, Legal

Should we stop chasing blockchain?

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At the back end of last year I saw an excellent presentation on blockchain, a technology I have tried to keep an open mind on. But this talk kind of confirmed all my fears. Let me take you through the key parts of the talk and then I’ll leave the comments open to see whether you all come to the same conclusion or can point out what I’m missing.

Blockchain is  a distributed ledger technology.

A ledger is a essentially a list of transactions.

A hash is created for each transaction, a value that is unfeasible to reverse. So it verifies the transaction hasn’t been changed. If you then hash a “block” of these transactions with a hash record together you get a block hash. Then if you add each block hash to the next you get a ….. chain.


Then distribute these ensuring the chain is agreed between them all, the more copies the harder it is to change or fake the ledger.

That’s blockchain and so far seems pretty useful as a way of protecting data?

But if the ledger cannot change and isn’t regulated then errors cannot change either right?

But it’s good for smart contracts right? The blockchain tech makes the contract unalterable. But a bug in the code and, well back to the point that the block chain makes the contract virtually unalterable ie impossible to unpick! (something that has happened)

All technology has issues, so I get this is not a reason to dismiss the concept. But unless you have zero trust in other parties and require unalterable data and where regulation or law doesn’t help, I can’t help think a standard secure database can do the job you’re after?!

Pretty much what the Australian Government said, this is a quote from Peter Alexander, Chief Digital Officer at Australia’s Digital Transformation Agency :Oh and one more reason blockchain technology like bitcoin may not be worth pursuing : “Bitcoin Mining Now Consuming More Electricity Than 159 Countries Including Ireland & Most Countries In Africa” source

To me the key question then is simply why do you need a distributed ledger, especially laws firms as it kind of removes the need for them in the transaction. If both parties agree a contract on a distributed ledger, you’re pretty much saying it doesn’t matter if we don’t trust the other we’ve an unalterable contract without the need for a middle man. Maybe it just shifts everything from transaction law to litigation? And if you actually still need the lawyer to create the contract then why not just put it in a secure database of the law firm?

Thoughts?

Oh and a big credit to Paul D Johnston who’s original presentation on what is blockchain was the jump off point of pretty much all of the above!

 

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General IT, General Legal IT

Not more feature creep

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It’s good to be reminded every so often how poor twitter can be at conveying ideas. Yes it can be great conversation for conversation, well when you’re dealing with people you genuinely interact with rather than shouting into the ether! But it did remind me how much better blogs are for this. More blogs and less twitter, maybe that should be my resolution for the new year!

This was the post I put out here today.

I can’t say exactly who the product was, but that doesn’t really matter as the issue certainly isn’t just unique to them. The problem isn’t that the extra feature isn’t useful or that it won’t actually add something a fair few people will use. But the issue is the “feature” itself being something stock or boiler plate, something that is not specific to the actual problem this product is solving and easily used elsewhere.

This example today was ‘chat’ or threaded conversation around a topic, something that appears in so many platforms. Whether it’s the document management system (thanks to a good friend for reminding me of that one!), an intranet platform, a Microsoft product (you can substitute any other big IT vendor here) with Yammer/Teams etc they get everywhere. BUT and here is my issue, they’re all proprietary. So chat about the document in one system but don’t expect to see that in your topics in Teams for example.

From the vendors case I get it (new feature, extra sales etc). But I don’t know of any firm that decides to buy everything from one supplier, in fact we’re all in a brexit type compromise (sorry!). An unsatisfactory compromise between not wanting the best of breed in everything & the lack of interoperability on one hand and the compromise in some services & risk that everything from one supplier brings.

The answer? Maybe vendors could look at the building blocks out there and if someone has done it well already then look to add the feature through integration and cooperation? Want a chat facility? Maybe integrate with Teams? If you’re a legal specific vendor and want to store a document, integrate with iManage or netdocuments? It’s not much to ask for 2019 right?

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General IT, General Legal IT

“Outlook keeps crashing/is so slow” – Sound familiar?

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It feels a really long time ago since I took time to look at new software that wasn’t in the Windows 10/Office 365/Work 10 stack I’ve been immersed in since last summer. But last week I spent the day with Riverbed (and yes I know what you’re thinking “Software? But Riverbed they’re the WAN people right?”) to do just that.

But before I talk about the software, let me put out a statement. The biggest challenge in law firms in my experience is getting the basics right and if you want to distill that down to a specific challenge, get Outlook, Word and the DMS (Document Management System) working fast and without crashing. I am convinced that this is not just our firm, in fact I know it isn’t based on the feedback from two firms at the same event (both large multinational law firms that you’ll know if I said their names) as well as others I speak to in other firms.

I also know there are other products in this space, but the one I saw today was Riverbed’s SteelCentral Aternity product. It’s a monitoring product that focuses on performance and status of applications across your firm. And the reason for the post if because from a law firm point of view you would immediately see how it could help with the above challenge as there was a dashboard that showed Outlook with various actions monitored for performance (check calendar, create email, view email etc), this gave an overall performance metric for Outlook on every PC in the firm. So straight away you could check what your performance baseline is, whether a particular office was seeing worse performance or more crashes etc etc

It sounds really simple, but that’s the beauty. How many times do you get anecdotal “Outlook always crashes” or “the DMS is always slow” from lawyers but don’t have the hard evidence to see if this is truly a problem, a one of event or a perception thing? This product could show whether those teams or offices are truly experiencing issues or not and even better allow you to be proactive about it. This isn’t just about the desktop as it integrates nicely to show an full picture (network, servers etc), so you can drill down and get more certainty as to where the problem lies.

I know products like these have been around for a while but with an IT shift from onprem to cloud and from windows 7/8 to 10 and Office to 365, having something that can help that transition would be really useful. A real evidence based answer to those “it’s been slow ever since…”

I’m definitely going to look a bit further at this area!

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General IT

01/01/2000 to 29/05/2018 – are you ready this time?

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Remember the Y2K bug? The months of news stories, the panic that no one was prepared, the number of consultants and companies offering help/services and the number of conferences on the subject.

Fast forward 18 years and we’re facing another acronym that companies are now realising is pretty close, GDPR.

I hope a reminder of what GDPR is comes as little surprise to anyone.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will take effect in the UK from 25 May 2018. It replaces the existing law on data protection (the Data Protection Act 1998) and gives individuals more rights and protection in how their personal data is used by organisations.

I can’t say I am personally an expert in the law, but I’ve found myself involved to varying degrees in a number of organisations from work in a law firm to being on a school governing body. It’s something that will affect pretty much every organisation. There are plenty of guides out there on the web, some that are specifically targeted to certain areas (for example schools, churches etc) and simply the more data you have and process the more complex things will become.

But though a reminder is worthwhile my worry with GDPR is not that we won’t all be ready, but that we don’t understand it enough. I can see GDPR becoming the new “Health and Safety”, we understand it enough to be worried but not enough to argue why something can/can’t be done in it’s name. We’ve already seen stories recently on records being deleted in the name of “data protection” in the windrush scandal in the UK, with GDPR in place how many organisations are going to err on the side of caution and erase data? There was an article written in this weeks The Spectator on this very subject, so it’s not just me! I mean if you don’t legally need to keep the info won’t it be easier to respond in the time limit for data requests by being able to say “we have nothing” or worry about breaches by having nothing to breach?

I’m not necessarily suggesting the law is over the top. I think what it aims to address is valid, especially give some companies lack of care of other peoples data. But equally we all need to ensure we understand the law enough to not be over zealous. Some recommendations I’ve seen suggested have been totally over the top, suggesting dedicated email services for volunteers, totally moving data to private emails into controlled cloud storage or mandated email encryption (this is regardless of the content).

So if we all take a bit of time to understand it a bit more, explain it to our friends and family then maybe we can just arm everyone with enough information to avoid “health and safety regulations gone mad” stories becoming “Data protection gone mad” (though I’m going to predict the Daily Mail with such a story by the end of the year!!)

UPDATE

I saw this letter posted today (14th May 2018) and thought it was worth adding to this post. There’s going to be a whole lot of “misunderstanding” soon!

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