New Technology for a New Year

My 11 year old son thought that it was important that, as the partner in charge of technology at my law firm, I “walk the talk” so I am now the proud owner of a sleek black iPod Nano. I tried downloading a song from iTunes last week (while on holidays) and concluded that downloading on a dial up line was not worth the effort. Any and all suggestions on what I should be downloading (now that I am back in the land of high speed access) are welcomed.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether the Nano will become an integral part of my life – but I suspect that now that I have joined the ranks of iPod owners, I will be more interested in podcasts and other “business” applications for this new technology.

In a similar vein, we are in the process of installing “enterprise-wide aggregation software”. As a person who barely understands the concept of RSS feeds, deciding to purchase this software was a way of forcing me to figure out the value of RSS feeds immediately. Rather than waiting for inspired individuals to demonstrate the value of RSS feeds on an individual basis, our firm is going to figure out which feeds should be delivered automatically (based on practice area, etc). Users will still be free to choose their own feeds but I believe that we will be able to benefit from aggregate user experience in determining the “hot feeds” on the net. There are other benefits (I seem to recall mention of “controlling bandwidth”, etc).

Although I haven’t had time to substantiate my intuition on this, I remain convinced that there is real benefit in harnessing the power of blogs and wikis. Again, any suggestions on “hidden gems” (other than SLAW of course) are welcomed.