I then went to stay with an old school friend whose husband ran a computer company. I told him about my problems. We decided that what I needed was a book. So we went to Waterstones and I can remember sitting on the floor surrounded by computer books while Kelvin worked out which would be the best one for me.

I read it from cover to cover on the way home on the train (it was quite a long journey), the scales fell from my eyes, and since then I have not had a huge problem. There are and always will be many things I will never be able to understand or do, as I am a solicitor and not a trained computer/software engineer, but somehow I have always managed, eventually, to sort something out.

I think the important thing is to want to do it, and then not to give up. Also remember that the designers of (most) software are writing it (on the whole) for ordinary people to use, not computer genius’s. This means people like us ought to be able to understand it. Once you get in to the way of understanding how things are done in software (there are a lot of conventions and standard ways of doing thing), you can generally sort of find your way through it.

Often once you understand something, you find out that it is not actually as difficult as you thought, and indeed you may wonder what it was you ever found difficult!

NB The book I bought is well out of date by now, but if you are a complete beginner, probably something like Computing For Beginners: The Basics Explained in Plain English would be a good one to start with. It has quite good reviews on Amazon.

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I suppose the main thing it is used for is to keep tabs on your contacts.  Once you are ‘connected’ to someone else on Linkedin, you get kept informed of their activity, such as whether they join a new group, update their profile, or post a status report.

I like this.  For example if I learn that X has a new job I can write (or rather email or send a message via the Linkedin system) and congratulate him, and perhaps wonder if I might want to use his firm sometime.  If Y has joined a new Linkedin group I will take a look at it and see if it is a group I might want to join too.  And the status reports are interesting as they let me know what people are up to.

Likewise my contacts can keep tabs on me, and keep up with what I am doing with my business or otherwise (at least insofar as it is recorded on Linkedin).

I have also through Linkedin, found and re-connected with several people I had lost touch with, which is always nice.

Another interesting aspect is the groups.  This is where you can join in discussions and perhaps through this get to know potential clients and colleagues.  I have not found any clients yet but I suspect that this is only a matter of time.  However I have enjoyed some of the discussions,  particularly those on the Law Society Gazette Group.

If you are a lawyer, have you used Linkedin?  What has been your experience?

NB My Linkedin profile is at http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tessashepperson

The two are not entirely unconnected.  I started this blog thinking that I might perhaps use it to support a consultancy service (should there be any demand for such a thing) to assist any solicitors who wished to develop their online service.

With this in mind (and also the development of my own services) I started doing a lot more reading about using the internet and social media.  As a result I discovered that I didn’t know as much as I thought I did, and I am still reading up and researching.

Partly as a result of all this, I decided that I needed to develop my professional Landlord Law Blog (which supports my online Landlord Law service), and change it over to being a self hosted Wordpress blog.  This has now been done and the new blog www.landlordlawblog.co.uk went live at the end of November.

The new blog uses the Headway theme (affiliate link) which allowed us much more freedom in its design.  My Headway license provided for me to use the theme for two blogs, so I decided to use it for this blog also (it formerly being a Typepad blog).  Not being a proper web designer like Gill Bishop (who set up and designed my Landlord Law Blog) I have not done as good a job as her.  However, Headway has allowed me to produce a reasonable (albeit perhaps somewhat boring) blog design.   I will be working on this and tweaking it over time as I learn more.

Which I need to do.  Despite having spent much of my spare time this year reading up on the internet and social media, I feel as if I am just at the start of a very long journey.

So this blog is changing direction a bit, and I will now be using it to talk about my research about and work with the internet and social media.  It looks to be an interesting journey.  I hope you will come with me.

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