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Friday, July 16, 2004
Chip implanted in Mexico judicial workers From Associated Press, via Tampa Bay Online: Thankfully, I'm in Massachusetts, where lawyers just carry bar cards. Special issue marks Law Practice Magazine's 30th year Now available online is the 30th anniversary issue of Law Practice, the magazine of the Law Practice Management Section of the American Bar Association. It includes an outstanding assortment of writers and articles, including a compelling feature by editor Merrilyn Astin Tarlton, "Lawyer Dreams," profiling seven lawyers who have made their dream careers into reality. I am proud to have contributed to the issue, along with co-authors Jim Calloway and Jeff Flax, in the article, "30 Sites for Our 30th Year," a review of 30 great sites for legal professionals. Thursday, July 15, 2004
Fight spam and win The headline for this post, "Fight spam and win," is the motto of InBoxer, a spam filter for Outlook. After using it for five months, I'm a believer. InBoxer is amazingly accurate in blocking spam while not interfering with legitimate e-mail. Unlike some spam filters that block specific domains or addresses, InBoxer is a so-called Bayesian filter that couples statistical mathematics with language technology to analyze the words contained in a message and decide whether it should be blocked. It does not depend on any pre-defined rules. Rather, it learns as it goes, starting upon installation with an initial analysis of the messages in your inbox and then continuing to learn based on decisions you make about the messages you receive. Significantly, InBoxer never deletes a message. If it is confident a message is spam, it moves it to an Outlook folder it creates titled "InBoxer-blocked." If it is uncertain, it moves the message to a folder titled "InBoxer-review." Besides these two folders, InBoxer adds two buttons to the Outlook toolbar -- block and keep. If you find a message in your inbox that InBoxer should have detected as spam, click the block button, and InBoxer "learns" from that action. Likewise, in the InBoxer-review folder, you can review the messages and tell InBoxer which to review and which to keep. If you are unsure about InBoxer's accuracy, you can also review the InBoxer-blocked folder, but in five months I've never seen InBoxer block a message it shouldn't have. To the contrary, as promised, the more I've used it, the more accurate it gets. As an added measure of confidence, you can tell InBoxer to trust specified senders and domains, or have it learn to recognize every address in your contacts list. InBoxer has made e-mail usable again for me. Its accuracy rate is enormously high. As I said, I've never found a message in the blocked folder that shouldn't have been there. I have found messages in the review folder that I wanted to save, but in almost every case these were commercial messages that I had opted to receive -- such as airline special offers -- but that closely resembled spam. If you use Outlook and are having difficulty managing spam, I highly recommend this product. You can download it and try it free for three weeks. If you decide to buy it, it is $27.95. Monday, July 12, 2004
Intriguing alternatives to the lawyer headshot On the listserv of the Legal Marketing Association, someone posted this query: "I'm wondering if anyone can provide me with examples of websites that contain interesting and/or unique attorney headshots."The replies offer an intriguing survey of the diverse and unique ways law firms present their attorneys' images on their Web sites. Among the firms identified by members of the list as having unique headshots:
Sunday, July 11, 2004
Sales of Internet book surpass all records This is a fact: Sales of the second edition of my book, The Essential Guide to the Best (and Worst) Legal Sites on the Web, have surpassed all previous records for sales of the second edition of my book. Better get one before they run out. FCC chair launches blog Speaking of Sabrina, she reports that FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell has launched a blog hosted by the AlwaysOn Network. AALL program on blogging If time were my friend -- which it is not -- it would allow me to get over Tuesday to hear Sabrina Pacifici and Glenn Reynolds preach the gospel of blogging at the AALL annual meeting. |
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