Reading Time: 5 minutes
I have been blogging for awhile, decades at this point. This blog has the word “exploration” in its title but, really, it may be more about experimenting. One thing about experiments is that you may not see them bear fruit for a long time, if ever. Or you may get results you don’t anticipate. That was
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David Whelan
Website:
https://ofaolain.com/about/
Like A Good Neighbor
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 7 minutes
I had the lawn mower out over the weekend. We had a brief respite from the heat and the rain and the new sod we’d put down needed a trim. As I was finishing up, my neighbor came out with his mower and a similar mindset and we got to chatting. We’ve lived here for over…
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Do Web Analytics Measure Anything Any Longer?
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 6 minutes
The age of bots is here. While we have always been awash with automated crawlers and scrapers, it has now become overwhelming. For a long time, the reporting of website statistics in annual reports or as a service benchmark for law libraries was questionable. Now it is downright pointless.
There was always a weakness in using…
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The Point of Training
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 7 minutes
I am a recent transplant to Chicago. This past spring, I learned that Chicago Public Schools have an administrative governance board at each school. The Local School Council operates as an advisory group for each principal, and is pulled from the school’s community of parents, teachers, and neighbors. The news reported that the system was short…
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Slow News Day
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I was a newspaper carrier as a kid. That has started to inform some of my thinking about how to consume the news these days. We are seeing that information ingesting is increasingly designed to be disruptive or outright damaging. It is a mixture of many things: small, portable devices, 24-hour news cycles, data harvesting information…
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Put Aside the Why
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 4 minutes
I’m a satisficer, an embracer of the good-enough-for-now. I do not know when that started but it’s certainly a perspective I feel that I’ve had for most of my career. It may stem from being someone who works with technology which often breaks without an obvious cause. You can spend time trying to understand the…
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Embed the Librarian Intelligence
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 7 minutes
I am a little bit fascinated by the Anthropic-initiated Skills concept. In my mind’s eye, it fixes two of the significant problems with professional use of agentic AI (and generative AI): lack of expertise and lack of re-usability. The gap that I am unsure how to cross is moving from theory to application.
One of the…
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A Herd of One
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I have been using Mastodon for over three years now and have no regrets. I’m aware of confirmation bias in this matter but it still feels right. I was ready to take the next step, which was to try to run my own Mastodon instance. It’s still early days but I am pretty sure this is…
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Where Does The Time Go?
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 8 minutes
Most people I know are paid for time. It’s an artificial contract. Notionally, I am paid for 40 hours of work a week. There is some expectation that those 40 hours will occur within a specific schedule, like 9am to 5pm. Employers pay me for my time because they have neither the ability nor interest to…
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The Light Touch of Leadership
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I was talking with some colleagues recently about leadership and management. Both had new managers. In one case, the person had joined a new team with a seasoned manager. In the other, an existing team had received a person new to management. They were having very different experiences. None of it was surprising.
It wasn’t surprising…
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For Every Searcher, Their Search Engine
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Wither the web search. You may have started putting in a date delimiter of ChatGPT’s arrival as a cutoff for reliable results on the internet. You may have hacked your default browser search to cut out slop. One thing is for sure: web search is not what it was. Thirsty AEO and GEO marketing is trying…
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It’s Alive! New Law Practice Technology Book
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 7 minutes
“Hey, publisher, I have an idea for a book. It’s called ‘Law Practice Technology.’” Not my most creative pitch, I will confess. It took more than that but I will admit to a certain amount of uncertainty when I decided to see if I could find a publisher for a new book. I had written an…
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Purpose Before Product
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 8 minutes
I am a policy skeptic. Which I think is a bit funny because I am (mostly) a rule follower. This can lead to unintended consequences when rules lead me to playing silly buggers but if you want a different outcome, think before you start rule-making. After working at the ABA and then a lawyer regulator, I…
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The Two Speeds of Law Practice Technology
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 9 minutes
It is funny how you can be aware of something but, until you explain it to someone else, it doesn’t really take form. So far this semester, we have been looking at law practice technology from the perspectives of efficiencies: doing things more quickly and more accurately. Now that we’ve hit some security topics, the focus…
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A Smile And A Handshake
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 6 minutes
We are getting some work done, a bit of gardening. It’s landscaping, which is mostly a word that I use when it’s “more gardening than I want to do myself” because, while I love gardening, I’m an incrementalist. A new plant here, a repotted one over there. We are going to plant out our front yard…
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