ABA TECHSHOW 2008 is now over. I did a nice little live blog post during the TECHSHOW grande finale' 60 Sites in 60 Minutes. Unfortunately near the end of the program, my browser froze and Typepad has no recovery options other than the ability to save a post or partial post as a draft before the lockup. But it appears that airport bordom and the browser history will allow me to recreate the post. The 60 Sites Stars this year were ABA TECHSHOW Chair Tom Mighell, Reid Trautz and Craig Ball.
Travel was on the minds of our panelists to start the program. They discussed finding the least problematic flight routes on FlightStats.com, the best seats on the plane with SeatGuru.com and then how to forward all of your confirmation e-mails for travel and lodging to TripIt.com where an itinerary will be prepared for you at no cost. They also noted my current favorite site to search for airline bookings, Kayak.com. I love the way you mark the Favorites on Kayak and then go back to sort through them.
An important site for online shoppers is RetailMeNot.com. Often when shopping online one will place an order and see a space to enter a coupon or discount code, if you have it. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has taken that as an invitation to open a new browser window and do a few quick Google searches to see if I can find a valid coupon code online. (And, boy, is that a sweet $5.38 savings if you do score!) So now this site is going to try and collect that information.
The Chargepod from Callpod makes my list of "things I'm going to try and convice my wife we need post-TECHSHOW."
When i need to send someone a large digital file, I typically use YouSendIt instead of sending a too-large e-mail attachment. But Tom Mighell makes a pretty good case that drop.io is a better way to share or transmit files. Lifehacker likes this one, too. Check it out.
Crossloop is a free utility site to allow you to connect to another person's computer over the Internet (with permission, of course.) If a friend or relative needs help with their PC, sometimes it is easier to use something like this to take control over their machine and fix it yourself remotely instead of trying to talk them through instructions.
60 Sites in 60 Minutes is an ABA TECHSHOW tradition. After two and a half days of a torrent of information about technology in the law office, the key with 60 Sites is to blend in a lot of humor with a fair amount of interesting online material. Each year the TECHSHOW planning board will receive two completed evaluations from attendees earnestly pleading that the program should focus entirely on useful material and forgo the humor. While I no longer have any decision-making authority about TECHSHOW, I predict you will be outvoted on this by everyone to two. The program was quite entertaining and drew a lot of laughs. And, there were lots of useful sites, as you can see above. The entire collection of sites will be posted soon to the ABA TECHSHOW website.
LexBlog conducted several Live from TECHSHOW interviews. You can read the transcript of the interview with me here. You can also read the transcript of the interview with my good friend, Laura Calloway, who is my counterpart at the Alabama State Bar, here. Congratulations to Laura Calloway on being named Chair of ABA TECHSHOW 2009!!!!