I have started going into multi media.  There is the Landlord Law Podcasts and the Landlord Law YouTube channel.  Exciting stuff.  And I am planning to do more audios and videos, both promotional and in due course as part of the content of my membership site.

However these mulitmedia files are very big.  I was shocked when I saw how large my audio files were, and found out that they tend to be about a MB a minute.  There is the problem about loading them up to blogs and sites in the first place, and then the strain that they can place on your server.  Particuarly if lots of people  want to use them at the same.

The answer to this it seems is Amazon.  I always thought of Amazon as primarily an online bookshop, even though they have branched out into all sorts of other things, even shoes and garden furniture.  I have been a fan of Amazon for many years.

However they also provide online storage space, under the name Amazon Web Services.  It seems that it is both very cheap and very secure and reliable.   If you are not a died in the wool techie its all a bit confusing, but I now feel reasonably confident with their simple storage solution Amazon S3.

You have to sign up, although if you have an ordinary Amazon account you use the same login etc.  When in the S3 area you have to set up buckets to store things in.  Then in the buckets you can put more folders to sort things and then load up your files.  Bingo!  You can link to them easily on your blog (so long as you remember to tell Amazon that they are public files).

I did this a week or so, loading up my podcast audio files and various other things.  I felt pretty pleased with myself until I realised that there was no way I could track how many people downloaded and listened to or watched my files!

I had a rummage around on Amazon itself and found that you could activate something called logging which would record details.  Yippee! I thought, sorted, and duly activated.  However a couple of days later I found the folders full of all these logs, which I did not know what to do with or understand.  Surely there must be an answer?

There is, and its name is S3Stat.  You sign up with them, set up some keys which let them access your Amazon S3 storage area, and then they get busy and start analyzing them.  So finally I was able to learn that in the 24 hours since I signed up, six people had downloaded my podcast (its now gone up a bit)!

Its a pretty good service at a minuscule price, $5 per month (about £3).  However they also have a ‘Cheap Bastard’ plan which allows you to have the service for free if only you write about them online.

Hence of course this article!  Its a pretty good service.  You might want to check it out.

A very useful function of social media is to allow you to keep up to date easily.  How?  Well:

You can follow blogs via RSS

If you use the Google homepage method, then on your Google homepage will be blocks for each of the blogs you follow with a list of the most recent three blog posts.  You can run your eye over them every day to see if there is anything you want to click through to and read.  If you follow lots of blogs then you can have separate home pages for each which you naviagte by clicking tabs.  Its fairly straightforward, but you need to register with Google first (worth doing as there are lots of other benefits).  To follow blogs click the orange square with the white curvy lines on it.  I have found it easiest to do using Firefox.

You can sign up to get blog posts by email

Not all blogs offer this, but if they do, and if it is a blog you are particularly interested in, it is worth doing.  You will then get sent an email of all their posts, which you can read quickly and easily in your email in box.  if you decide you don’t want them any more it is generally easy to unsubscribe.  (Note, if you want to get posts of this blog by email, there is a link to do this at the top of the side bar).

You can become fans of facebook pages

You will then see their updates on your facebook wall.  If you use facebook a lot this is a good way to keep up with what they are doing.  Again it is easy to block them or stop being a fan if you get fed up with it.

You can follow people and do searches on twitter

Many lawyers think twitter is stupid solely because of the name.  This is a mistake, twitter is a serious business application now.  You can follow people and organisations you are interested in and keep tabs on what they are doing and thinking.  There is also a very useful search function where you can search on words, to find out what people are saying about them.  Try a search on your firm’s name!

You can sign up for Google alerts

This is another benefit you get from registering with Google.  You  give Google the relevant words and every day they will send you an email summarising search results.  Use this for key words in your professional work niche, and also for your own name and the name of your business to find out what people are saying about you.  I have found out loads of interesting things from Google alerts.

You can keep any eye on updates on your LinkedIn home page

The LinkedIn home page is similar to the facebook wall, and you can often pick up what people are doing and writing about by scanning this once a day.

Thats all I can think of just now.  Do you know any other good ways of keeping in touch using social media?

I don’t know about you, but I find I am using the internet all the time. I am constantly looking things up, checking facts and the law before I write something, or seeing what new blog posts have been written by others. And I want to get there quickly with no tedious looking up.

So I was delighted to find out about the Conduit free tool bar service.

My first thought was, as always ;), for my Landlord Law members. Some of them have complained that the navigation on the Landlord Law site is a bit opaque (others have complimented me on its simplicity so you can’t please them all). “Here” I thought “is a way to give them an alternative method of finding things “. So I constructed a nice toolbar with links to all the main Landlord Law pages. You can read about it here.

Naturally I downloaded and used the Landlord Law toolbar myself, and very useful if was too. But I began to get frustrated by it. Because I had designed it for landlords, whereas I am a solicitor. I wanted access to sites I use professionally such as the UK Statute Law Database and the CPR. I wanted a link to The Times law page and the housing section of the Communities and Local Government web-site. I wanted the Nearly Legal Blog and BAILLI. And after a while I decided that I was jolly well going to have them.

A quick email to the nice Conduit people reassured me that I could have more than one toolbar.  So I did the Housing Lawyers toolbar. You can read about it here.

It is *really* useful. I work on two computers (the office PC and the Macbook) and use two different internet browsers on each. The toolbar means that my links are in the same place on all of them, which makes life a lot easier.  Plus, if I find a new site I want, I add it to the toolbar and, bingo!  It is on all my web-browsers without me having to do anything.

If you are a housing lawyer you are welcome to use it too. You can download the toolbar from here. My Conduit stats say that there are six active users, so presumably someone other than me is using it – I hope they are finding it useful.

But if you are not a housing lawyer (and lets face it, not many people are) – why not get your own? The Conduit people promote it as a way of getting money, as you can earn if lots of people use your toolbar, but frankly all I am interested in is having an easy life. Anyone can sign up and get a nice toolbar for all their regular web sites. You can fit an awful lot on it, as you can do drop down lists, which means that different types of site can be grouped together. I have a drop down list, for example, for all the housing blogs I follow,  and another for all the sites where I can read case law.

Why not give it a go?  Let me know how you get on!