Archive for August, 2008
Pay your people! August 28th, 2008
One of the aspects of my job is managing litigation on behalf of my clients. More often than not I am responsible for co-ordinating a team of people including an advocate and one or more witnesses and expert witnesses. More often than not I am contractually responsible for the team’s fees and expenses and I invoice my client for those costs in addition to my own fees. Understandably, legal fees in a litigation matter can be pretty high and despite their best intentions, clients sometimes become alarmed at the costs of running a court case a couple months down the line and payments sometimes start to come in later and later as clients try desperately to maintain cashflow or even delay the inevitable. This isn’t to say that all clients do this, they don’t. For the most part my clients are wonderful and they pay without delay.
Many attorneys will pay their team when the attorneys themselves are paid and I understand that completely. If you have an advocate and an expert witness leading and giving evidence at a trial for a few days the cost to the attorney can comfortably head north of R20 000 to R30 000. These are costs the attorney usually has to bear until the client pays the fee and unless the attorney has a substantial practice, this represents a significant dent in the attorney’s cashflow so many attorneys simply delay payment to the rest of the team.
The downside of this is that the rest of the team may need to source income from other projects to keep going and may not dedicate as much attention to the case at hand or may simply lose interest if they are not being valued enough to be paid for their work. Unless a client is fortunate enough to have a team that can look beyond not being paid on time (or sometimes at all), the client will ultimately suffer when vital experts become unavailable or witnesses fail to attend a hearing forcing a costly postponement.
The point is that it is so important to pay legal fees, not just to keep your attorney focussed on the job at hand (regardless of my intentions I also need to pay the bills each month and being paid for my work means I am not distracted by the need to maintain cashflow and still keep the case going properly) but, perhaps more importantly, to maintain a coherent team because maintaining a coherent and motivated team could be the difference between success and failure.
Short of dire financial circumstances I believe it is vital to pay my advocates, my service providers and the rest of my team, often before I pay myself. Without them I can’t do my job as well as I would like to and can’t service my clients as well as they deserve. I’d like to think my clients feel the same way about me. Many do.
Technorati Tags:
fees, experts, legal fees, litigation, payment, service providers, expert witnesses, advocates, cashflow
Posted in Don't be stupid, Legal stuff, Mindsets | Comments (Comments)
Big changes at iCommons ahead August 28th, 2008
For those who don’t subscribe to the iCommons mailing list,Heather has just sent out the following email to the iCommons community:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the Board’s and that it would make more sense to enable the current team to be able to implement our vision independently, while iCommons develops a lighter, federated structure that enables global membership while keeping core costs low.
During the next few months, we’ll be transferring keyp projects over to The African Commons Project in South Africa and handing over to the new iCommons staff that the board will appoint. The team that has been running iCommons in Johannesburg will also soon be announcing its plans for the coming year, which includes, among other things, an iSummit in South Africa in October, 2009.
We’re very sad to be saying goodbye to the organisation that we’ve all worked so hard to build over the past two and a half years, and we hope that the new iCommons and the new African Commons Project – along with Creative Commons – will find clearer ways of collaborating with one another in the future for the greater good of the global commons.
Best wishes,
Heather.
This announcement is pretty significant because it means that the iCommons community will see quite a significant change occurring at iCommons in the coming months as the current team moves from iCommons to the African Commons Project to continue and initiate what will surely be innovative and fascinating projects.
At the same time iCommons itself will move in a different direction as a sort of community development organisation for the benefit of the broader Commons-based community.
Both shifts are pretty exciting and although my time at iCommons comes to an end at the end of this month, I am looking forward to seeing how the team continues to grow and innovate in the African Commons Project and how iCommons shifts its emphasis to make a greater contribution towards community building overall. I have been privileged to have the opportunity to work and interact with Heather, Kerryn, Daniela, Rebecca, Rosanne, Hettie, Anna, Stephanie, James and Raj on one hand and with the iCommons board, in particular Ronaldo Lemos, Lawrence Lessig, Joi Ito, Catharina Maracke, Paul Keller, Tomislav Medak and Jimmy Wales (unfortunately I didn’t have an opportunity to interact all that much with Laurence Liang and Jonathan Zittrain during my short time at iCommons) on the other hand.
The bottom line for anyone involved in the broader community or interested in the community’s work is simple: watch the space!
Technorati Tags:
icommons, african commons project, heather ford, changes, strategy, announcement
Posted in Companies, Good guys, News, People, Sharing | Comments (Comments)
Bend over for the mobile networks August 26th, 2008
I was reading an article on MyBroadband this morning about how the three main mobile networks in South Africa are exploiting the vagaries of their mobile data products and how those products are billed at the expense of their customers. I have complained about Telkom’s profiteering in the past and the mobile networks are no better.
Here is the scenario: As a mobile data user you probably have a data bundle which specifies a certain amount of data you can use for a reduced price per MB. You may even be using an HSDPA doohickey or even a newer HSUPA device (are these available yet?) having bought into the fast mobile data transfer race MTN and Vodacom seem to be engaged in. So you are out there on the road/in a coffee shop surfing the Web, downloading stuff or doing other things as speeds that make Telkom’s ADSL seem like dial-up, life is good.
One problem though: do you know how much data you are using? The networks don’t provide a service in terms of which you can monitor your data usage in realtime (Vodacom apparently sms’s you to let you know how close you’re getting). To make matters worse, unlike ADSL, your connectivity does not end when you reach the limit of your data package. Your rate per MB just increases to around R2.00 or whatever your out of bundle rate is and on you go, cruising at light speed on the Web until you get your bill at the end of the month and experience a minor coronary. Sorry for you! The networks just don’t seem to have the capacity to tell you how much data you are using although you can be pretty sure the MDs of each network have a casino style counter showing them how much money the network is making in realtime on their office walls!
The next problem is the cost of mobile data. It is hideous. I used to think that this is really Telkom’s fault because their pricing is off the charts and to an extent that is true. It isn’t the whole picture though. Virgin Mobile charges its customers 50c per MB for data. Neotel charges its customers 8c per MB for out of bundle data. While this may well not be a simple case of comparing apples with apples, there must be a fair amount of wiggle room in there to cut prices for mobile data, both in bundle and out of bundle.
The networks do say that they can charge less for data but then users need to “commit to higher volumes of bandwidth” … right! So the main thing is to use higher volumes to compensate for the lower prices and to ensure that the networks keep making the massive amounts of money they are making and you pay pretty much the same anyway (use less for more per MB = use more for less per MB = works out pretty much the same?).
Here is an marketing idea from me, for free: sell a small jar of vaseline with every data package, just to ease the pain a little. You could even see about labelling the jar with your own stickers.
Technorati Tags:
mobile broadband, mtn, neotel, telkom, vodacom, high prices, cost per MB, cost of mobile data, mobile data, cell c, virgin mobile
Posted in Don't be evil, Making money, Mobile Tech, Mobile workplace | Comments (Comments)
Don’t write blogging off just yet August 25th, 2008
While blogging is not the be all, end all that it once was in the social Web experience, it would be a mistake to write blogging off as outmoded and no longer relevant (even if it is for those sufficiently ahead of the adoption curve that blogging is old hat already). The one big advantage that blogging has over other media we increasingly use on a day to day basis is its capacity to communicate ideas and messages in longer format posts. Sure Twitter is great for putting stuff out there and (arguably) having interesting real-time conversations, but Twitter is constrained to 140 text characters at a time. Anyone who thinks that Twitter is an appropriate medium to communicate a thought process, possibly with multimedia, is deluding himself.
It is easy to get caught up in the new Web bling and declare old media obsolete. To an extent we have seen that with the “newspapers are dead” debate (I believe that paper based newspapers are on their way out but the professional newspaper will still be around for a while longer if publishers can make successful transitions to digital options - preferrably RSS, even if this is a paid subscription option). The real shift from blog centric communities a year or so ago to where we are (or where we are heading) is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to establish new communal centres focussed on our blogs as the background noise increases. Instead the answer is to consider shifting to a distributed community model and send your content in its various forms out into the social Web using a variety of distribution channels, whether those be lifestreaming services, social platforms or individual services at a time. This is at least the model I have adopted because my friends (real-life and online contacts) are all over the place. Some of them use FriendFeed, some prefer Jaiku. Others use Flickr as their primary photo service and many use Facebook for their social interactions. The point is that it makes more sense for me to send my stuff out to my friends rather than trying to persuade them to subscribe to and follow yet another service or content stream. This is about finite attention and how not to divide your friends’ attention even further unnecessarily.
Coming back to my thoughts about blogs, the format of a blog may vary, as may its platform but there is a place for longer format content pieces and that is something blogs are great tools for. I sometimes forget this in my rush to try out the new stuff and then I remember the value of a blog when I read some of the better written posts in my NetNewsWire subscriptions.
Technorati Tags:
blog, blogging, distributed social networking, lifestream, lifestreaming, social media, social networking, community
Posted in Blogs and blogging, Lifestreaming, Social Web | Comments (Comments)
Blogging is, like, so 2007 August 21st, 2008
I’ve been thinking about blogging in the context of all the other ways we can express ourselves on the Web today quite a bit lately. For the most part I have been thinking about a distinction between a more centralised blog-type publishing platform and a distributed approach to publishing as an extension of my thoughts about lifestreaming as a primary means of connecting/reaching out/publishing.
A blog has been a focal point of discussion for a while now in the fringe of the SA Web community. It isn’t anything new and the novelty has pretty much worn off and those people who continue to blog regularly do so because they are more committed to the platform as a medium for their messages than because blogging is the new Big Thing. Of course this is not indicative of the state of the SA Web generally because the mainstream is only really becoming aware of this “blogging thing” in addition to arguably the better known “Facebook thing”. For the mainstream blogging still represents potential for online interaction although somewhat shrouded in mystery. This, at least, is my sense of things at the moment.
Turning back to those of us who have been blogging for a while now (I will have been blogging for 4 years in December), some of us may be re-examining the value of a blog in the context of the broader social Web. Most of us use Twitter/Identi.ca/FriendFeed/Plurk/insert-name-of-new-thing-here daily, often far more often than we actually post longer form blogs. I have a strong leaning towards a more distributed approach to social media through lifestreaming and I have my various content streams feeding into Jaiku, Pulse, FriendFeed and, recently, Facebook in more stripped down format (mainly because I don’t seem to have much luck getting the Facebook apps I use to present my stuff the way I want it presented).
A blog’s success depends on persuading readers to either visit the blog regularly or subscribe to its feed. In that sense it can be somewhat limited in its reach and, ultimately, its influence. You may have the best written posts on your blog but if no-one reads them, do they exist in any meaningful way on the Web? Anyone who has watched a presentation given by any of the social media gurus doing the rounds knows that the appeal of a blog is its ability to reach out to potentially huge audiences. That potential is still there but with the growing number of blogs, it is that much harder to stand out. That being said the usual ways of building blog traffic still apply. If you post regularly on your blog, engage with your readers, establish a regular and persistent presence on other blogs through commenting or trackbacks (and so on), you may well find your readership growing.
Short of achieving a sizable readership another way to expand your reach is to cultivate networks of contacts either across a number of properties or by focussing your efforts on more pervasive platforms. We do talk about social networking after all. These properties include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FriendFeed and any number of more obscure or focussed networks. A more distributed approach means you have a better chance of reaching more people although the further afield you go the more difficult it is to maintain a cohesive network. Maintaining meaningful relationships takes time and there is only so much of that available so it becomes important to limit your scope to the networks that will best support your intentions. This is a big reason why people tend to stick with the likes of Twitter despite it having a sad history of poor reliability. The fact is people who have been using Twitter have a sizable network on Twitter and that is an incentive to keep using the service. People may try out a range of new services but ultimately return to their bigger networks.
On the other hand you can have a longer reach using single services that have a more integrated approach to and which may even require a redefinition of all your social media activities. The very concept of a blog has to change and Nic posted a pretty good take on this distinction a little while ago in his post titled ‘Facebook’s “Note Bloggers” must outnumber us “Real Bloggers”‘ where he talked about how Facebook users who publish their thoughts using Facebook Notes may well outnumber so called “real bloggers” who publish on the more traditional platforms like WordPress, TypePad and Movable Type. At the time I commented that the distinction Nic drew was a false distinction:
I didn’t really think about Facebook notes as “blog” posts but you do have a point. I probably do have a fair number of my friends seeing my notes and other entries so from a visibility perspective that is pretty potent.
Another factor is that most of my friends have a stronger connection to me and interest in what I am doing than many of the visitors to my blog which makes the views more meaningful.
I also think the distinction you draw between Note Bloggers and Real Bloggers is probably the wrong distinction to draw. Real bloggers are bloggers who, among other things, share a strong personal connection to their readers. If Note Bloggers can achieve that on Facebook and we struggle to achieve that on our islands in the blogosphere, who are the *real* Real Bloggers?
I do think he made a good point about not underestimating Facebook Notes users. If you divorce the concept of a blog from the specific platform the content is published on and rather focus on the activity of publishing your thoughts on the Web in a way that enables and facilitates feedback from readers (my Mac’s dictionary defines a blog as “a Web site on which an individual or group of users produces an ongoing narrative”) then blogging extends to Facebook and pretty much any other platform that allows for this sort of publishing. The point is that when you consider “blogging” in this light the so-called “regular blogs” Nic spoke about become less significant in the context of the broader local blogosphere. When you add a variety of lifestreaming services and online contact points to a person’s profile you can imagine the reach an average person can have just by updating her status or publishing a photo.
In a sense my Facebook example isn’t the best example. Facebook is a pretty self-contained ecosystem from a user perspective. Facebook may import a variety of content from various sources using Facebook Apps but Facebook’s outputs are pretty limited. The idea with Facebook is to concentrate activity in Facebook. I read a while ago about how Facebook is the biggest photo sharing website, as an example. You could probably do all your social networking in Facebook alone and never step outside into the broader Web.
That form of interaction we spoke about in the context of blogging last year and the year before that is available on a bigger scale in services like Facebook (which has continued to see tremendous growth recently) and FriendFeed. Between these sorts of services the relevance of a blog in the conventional sense, as opposed to the broader definition I suggested above, requires some thought. Dave Duarte wrote about a perspective of blogs as amateur publishing tools on his blog last month. Nic commented on this idea and wrote a bit about how his blogs have proven to be valuable networking tools in their own right.
I am not sure I agree with Dave’s portrayal of blogs as amateurish because I think this devalues blogging as an activity in the broader sense. I do wonder about the absolute value of a blog in the broader sense though and while there are many blogs (in the narrower sense) that are tremendously successful both in South Africa and elsewhere, when it comes to the social Web, blogs are not the only or even most effective way of engaging effectively with people in our social networks.
Taking it all a step further I am beginning to wonder if it is possible to establish and maintain an effective and coherent presence on the Web using a more distributed approach in a business context. I have been mulling over a variety of options for my business presence on the Web which has primarily been focussed on a WordPress blog. Could that change to a more decentralised model where I maintain a presence on a variety of sites ranging from the high density Facebook to lower density spaces out there, whatever they may be? Is a single content-based focal point necessary for a modern business or could something like this serve as a focal point for an effective and pervasive Web presence?
Photo: River-Porter waterfall post-floods 2 by Earthwatcher licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives 2.0 license
Technorati Tags:
blog, blogging, blogosphere, facebook, friendfeed, lifestream, lifestreaming, pulse, distributed social networking
Posted in Blogs/Sites, Lifestreaming, Web 2.0 | Comments (Comments)
