Strategic Legal Technology 
The line between blogging and Tweeting just blurred a bit today.
Today, document assembly company Exari wrote the blog post The insidious nature of the billable hour. It discusses why the billable hour is a barrier to building document assembly tools. Central to its point is a Twitter conversation among Mary Abraham, Jeff Brandt, Doug Cornelius, and me [links are to Twitter]. This spurs some observations.
1. A Tweet I wrote is first. I can’t remember why I wrote it nor do I remember the entire dialogue at Twitter. So much for knowledge management of Twitter content. Skeptics might think there is nothing worth preserving but this suggests otherwise. So I ask my knowledge management friends… any hope of ‘doing KM to Twitter’? Personally, I periodically copy my Tweets to a spreadsheet, which is a manual and clunky process. And it saves only mine, not exchanges like Exari captured.
2. Seeing what Exari has done here, I wonder whether there are other Twitter conversations I’ve had that are blog-worthy.
3. In August I posted Divining Meaning and Intent in the Modern Era, commenting on Dan Regard’s comment that “re-assembling fragments of what once was” will create meaning as well as EDD challenges. I would have been very hard-pressed to re-assemble the dialog that Exari presents. If asked about it, I probably would have had, at best, a dim recollection. So I view the Exari post as a great illustration of “re-assembling fragments”.
4. And finally, I can see the lawyers starting to swarm on the copyright issues. I’ve not spoken to Mary, Jeff, or Doug but I suspect they, like me, are perfectly happy to have their content re-purposed with attribution and links (as Exari does). Is such reproduction fair use? Will reproducing a Twitter thread that never really existed as thread lead to legal issues? I certainly hope not but Tweets have already given rise to libel actions.
Ron,
I definitely agree with your Twitter-related KM comments. When I wrote that billable hour post, reconstructing the Twitter conversation was very tedious. (I also used a spreadsheet to capture the Tweets and order the chronology.)
That said, I think it would be quite straightforward for Twitter (or a third party developer) to provide a feature for easy ’storage’ and ‘retrieval’ of Twitter conversations. I’m envisaging something akin to Lists called, for example, ‘Conversations’. Users could create a name for a conversation they wanted to ’store’ (really a filter or view), and then add that name to each Tweet they wanted to form part of that Conversation. (The key difference between Conversations and Lists being that, with Conversations the user is selecting individual Tweets rather than Users/Streams.)
Comment by Andrew Davis 12/2/2009 @ 7:58 pm
I believe this is why archiving and analytics is so critical in making social media friendlier to business. If you can capture your social media footprint as an individual and a business - and manage it - you can identify content, search, re-post or utilize in other content mediums. The key is knowing where it came from and when (even if it is your own), where it links or points to, and then getting access to it to reuse.
This storage and retrieval exists and works!
Comment by Blane Warrene 12/4/2009 @ 5:41 am