Lawyers: Groking Web 2.0

One can’t blog enough about this subject. Lawyers, and others (and especially parents!), need to know about Web 2.0. You really, really, really do.

If you are tech-inclined, but just don’t have a lot of time, use the 23 Things method for learning about Web 2.0.

If you are not tech-inclined (and that is most of us), Robert Ambrogi has an excellent series of articles for lawyers that you can get to from his recent Web 2.0 post. Read them, follow the links, and experiment. Don’t worry about getting frustrated the first time through. It can take time for most of us to grasp (or grok, if you will 🙂 all of this.

Or, I’ll give you the best advice I was given 20 years ago when we still all sat around and asked, “what’s this cyberspace word/thing?” The advice to me was simple, “read a computer magazine every week.” You won’t understand most of it at first, but each week the language, the writers, and the content will get a little more familiar, and you’ll be much less intimidated by it all.

You, as is surely true of me, may never become a techie, but I can manage technology, because I know what tech things are, what they do, what I want them to do, and have enough basic knowledge to ask my real techies friends and co-workers the right questions. They might laugh at me, but that’s fun too. Who cares if you don’t know the right noun or verb for your question? That’s why it’s a question! (Or, pretend if you must (and we must!), that you are in Italy and trying to speak Italian. Italians will smile and even laugh at your mangled syntax, but they will love that you are trying to communicate in their tongue. And then they’ll feed you.)

And you have it MUCH easier now. We didn’t have the Web 20+ years ago and didn’t have remote access, though I’ll never regret my high school and collegiate battles of terminal contention, so to speak, with punch cards and dumb terminals, and that later moment when I “got” DOS and file structures, and directories, etc. Those battles served me well, even though I now still would rather spend my free time at the library and at Powells, in yoga class, or carousing with friends (yes, librarians do carouse, though very quietly).