I’m officially a big fan of ÜberConference. Their blog sums up the service, “A free audio conferencing service with a visual interface, ÜberConference solves the most common problems faced in teleconferencing including making a conference easy to join, knowing who is participating, knowing who is speaking, and making advanced features easy to use.”

I had to request an invitation, but got one fairly quickly.  Once I had an account set up, I was assigned a conference number, an organizer pin, and an open pin. I can set up a conference call using that number and send the open pin to anyone I want to conference with.  With the organizer pin, I can log in from any phone. I need no pin if I am calling in from my phone.

There is also a web component which works pretty slickly. I added contacts for my committee to the system and set up a test call with one of them. She and I both received an email to let us know the call was set up and to remind us 5 minutes before.  We called in using the phone number, then also clicked on the ‘See Conference’  button in the email.  With that, we were able to see who was in the call and determine exactly who was talking. High on my list are 2 functions – chat and recording. I recorded our call and chatted enough to see that it worked.

After the call was over, I saw a statistics screen which told me who was there, who talked the most (me, big surprise) and gave me options for downloading the chat transcript and the recording. I didn’t need to, though, because ÜberConference followed my call with an email that had those items included.

Important to note – I still have to pay for the cost of the call. A different service, Meeting.io, works great as well (better in the videoconferencing department) but limits me to 5 participants and doesn’t have recording yet.  With ÜberConference, I essentially sold my privacy on LinkedIn to get space for 2 more people. I hope my committee recognizes the sacrifices I am making for them.

I would recommend this tool particularly to my journalism students and friends. It would be great for distance interviewing and recording.

AALL 2012 is upon us. I don’t know about you, but my travels here were gloriously smooth. No delays. No lost paper work.  The worst thing that happened was that I had to stand in the TSA Booth of Shame with my arms above my head.  Will I have to pay the piper on my way home?
I always like the day before the conference. For me, there is a real feeling anticipation of everything I am going to learn and see.  Plus, there are usually some really fun events planned so I get to hang with people I don’t see very often. For me, that was the “Alphabet Soup” reception last night, then Karaoke with Ken, in which I did not actually carry through with my promise to sing “Roller Derby Queen” in honor of my friend, Katie Brown. This was a wise decision on my part.  Others, however, showed me that karaoke is an art form. We have some talented members, people!

I know many of you were already hard at work yesterday between CONELL, leadership training, PLL Summit and more.  I also saw some of you heading to other fun events, like a ball game.  That is the beauty of this conference – we work and we play hard.  I hope you enjoy every minute of it. I plan to.  See you at the keynote!

You can read Google’s press release from yesterday at: Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings | Official Google Blog.

One big difference? Google is free.

Photo by Yutaka Tsutano via Flickr

I just recieved a notification that anyone can sign up to receive the RSS feed from www.mobileappsforlaw.com. So, if a new app has been added, you can find out about it. *Note, Mobile Apps for Law is a subscription database.  You cannot access the database without paying for it.

And yet, I wonder if Dan Brown is wondering what the Vatican may not be offering for digitization.

Camera Lens

I was just reading this post from the Legal Productivity blog (one of my favorites) about great (and free) image editing tools to be found online. I am a novice Photoshop user and I don’t have Photoshop at home so I will be checking out the tools they suggest. It reminds me though that I find myself telling friends, family, and students I work with about 3 sites for finding images online that are freely available to use.

First, some information that I am sure you know already.  Just because an image is online doesn’t mean that anyone can copy and paste it and use it at will. I am sure you know about a leetle thing called copyright. However, anyone who creates an image can use Creative Commons to give their images a variety of licensing attributes that allow others to re-use them in a variety of ways, with some caveats.

The first site I usually check is Microsoft Office. It doesn’t require me to know anything about Creative Commons or licensing AND it doesn’t have just cheesy Clip Art. They just let others use the images there freely (thank you for this!). Personally, I use this almost exclusively for photos. I put my search term in and click on the photo box to limit to photos.  Each image has a set of keywords applied to it, so you can find other terms to search.

The second site I check is Google Images.The link here is to the Advanced Search where you can limit by usage rights. I don’t use images commercially, so I usually just change the limit to ‘free to use or share.’

And lastly, I sometimes find good images in Flickr. Again, I use the Advanced Search and I limit to Creative Commons licensed content.

Have fun making your future projects more visually appealing!

Zotero is a Firefox add-on and it runs within the browser on your computer. It provides a place to organize links to resources and even upload documents. It then lets you output bibliographies in a variety of citation formats (including Blue Book). You can sync it another computer or online.  Pretty nifty.