According to AFP, court documents filed today show that seven plaintiffs will get no more than $2,500 each, lawyers that filed the case get 30% of the settlement money to cover their fees, and the remainder will be put in a fund for organizations that are focused on Internet privacy issues and education. The settlement also “requires that Google undertake wider public education about the privacy aspects of Buzz,” according to Reuters.

The case represents several similar lawsuits that were consolidated earlier this summer. The plaintiffs, in general, contended that Google violated their privacy when it launched Buzz in February and created a social network out of Gmail users’ personal contacts.

Public backlash was almost immediate: Google apologized, while government agencies reviewed Buzz and an FTC commissioner said the Buzz launch was a case of “irresponsible conduct” by Google.

The proposed settlement still needs to be approved by a federal judge in San Francisco.

source

MOBILE SITES FOR LAWYERS

If you don’t have a mobile version of your site, that means that someone on a mobile device will see your site just like they would on a desktop. For some sites, its not that big of a deal because they have a basic text rich site. Yet for bigger sites that have flash animation, they can pose problems in that first most mobile devices, including the Iphone can’t read flash, so you basically have a big blank spot where the flash animation normally would be. Then also normal sites that look good on the desktop, sometimes don’t look as good and are usually harder to navigate. So some users who found the site might just give up and go find another site that is more mobile friendly!

CREATING A MOBILE SITE FOR YOUR LAW FIRM

Creating a mobile version of your site can be done in a number of different ways.  It depends on how your site is currently setup.  If your site is setup in Wordpress, you have  a lot of different options on ways to get your site setup for mobile.  If you have a html regular site, then there are other ways to get a mobile version of your site.  Ive used a service called Mofuse and basically you setup a site using tools and you can add different elements to the mobile site. Then you would setup a custom domain name like M.lawdomain.com and then you would have some kind of script setup so that it would detect if someone was on a mobile device and direct them to the mobile version.

WORDPRESS MOBILE SOLUTIONS FOR ATTORNEYS

Ive found that using wordpress plugins for the mobile site is the best solution.  Another reason to upgrade your current legal site to Wordpress, it just has more flexibility and makes certain tasks easier.  There are a number of different plugins you can use to mobilize your attorney site. Most of them are setup so you dont use a custom domain name and instead your URL stays the same.  You can have your posts come up on your mobile site, or you can instead redirect it to any other page in your site, including your contact page or a special page you create for mobile users.    You have a lot of options but the goal is to make it easy for the user to view the pages and posts in your site, and to also make it easy for them to contact you, including the ability to click on your phone # and instantly call you on the mobile devise they are using.

If you look at this site on a mobile device, you can see an example of how the site would look.

We have helped a number of lawyers create mobile versions of their sites, contact us today to see how we can help your law firm create a mobile site.

Its pretty easy to upgrade Wordpress by just downloading the software and then following the basic instructions, but it’s even easier with this auto upgrade plugin!

WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.

WordPress automatic upgrade upgrades your wordpress installation by doing the following steps.

1. Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
2. Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
3. Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.
4. Puts the site in maintenance mode.
5. De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
6. Upgrades wordpress files.
7. Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
8. Re-activates the plugins.

The plugin can also can be run in a automated mode where in you do not have to click on any links to go to the next step.

Go here to download this plugin now

Yahoo! organic search transition to begin
Later this week, we will begin the work of transitioning the back-end technology for Yahoo! Search over to the Bing platform. This is an important step toward our goal of improving the overall relevance of Yahoo! organic search results and attracting a larger audience to Yahoo! Search, to ultimately put your ads in front of more potential customers.

You’ll want to make sure that you’re prepared for this change, so be sure to check out these tips and stay tuned to the Yahoo! Search blog for confirmation of when the organic search transition is complete.

Testing of paid search account transitions has begun
Soon, you’ll be able to access a transition portal from within your Yahoo! Search Marketing account. This portal will walk you through the simple step-by-step process of creating a Microsoft Advertising adCenter account and importing your campaigns, or linking an existing adCenter account that you may already have.

Before we make this transition portal broadly available to all advertisers in the weeks ahead, we are currently testing it with a limited number of accounts. You will be notified via email once the transition portal is available.

Commitment to a quality transition continues
As we’ve stated all along, our primary goal is to provide you with a quality transition experience in 2010, while protecting the holiday season. We continue to make great strides toward this goal, and we evaluate our progress every day. However, please remember that if we conclude that it would improve the overall experience, we may defer the transition to 2011.

Read more at the Yahoo Blog

Is the Yahoo-Bing change relevant to your legal website?

YES because the bottom line is that both Yahoo and Bing produce a good amount of traffic and according to the latest comScore data, Yahoo and Microsoft sites had a combined search market share of 31.6% in June 2010. Yahoo sites had 3.2 billion search queries and Microsoft sites had 2.2 billion search queries in June 2010. That’s a total of 5.4 billion search queries in one month.

So if you can get your site listed highly in the Bing organic listings, then that will carry over to Yahoo and it should produce a good amount of traffic to your site.

HOW TO OPTIMIZE FOR BING

Optimizing your web site for Bing.com is not that much different from optimizing your web pages for Google. Just like Google, Bing requires optimized web pages, good content and high quality inbound links from other sites if you want to see your website in the top 1o results for keywords related to your legal practice.

The difference will be the weight that Bing puts in the different ranking factors. Things that work well with Google might not have the same effect on Bing and vice-versa.  In some cases you might be ranked well at both Google and Bing but not for all keywords.  So its going to take some expermenting to see what works the best and here are some quick tips.

• Optimize some pages of your website for Google and other pages of your site for Bing.
• If possible, optimize each page of your website for a dedicated search engine/keyword combination. The more targeted the optimization, the more likely it is that the web page will be listed in the top results.
• Use the webmaster tools at Bing and register your site and also a sitemap. They also have a bunch of good Search engine optimization tips for your site.

Its time to recognize that Google is not the only search engine out there and that BING is for real and it makes sense to try and get your site ranked well at Bing in addition to Google.

If your law firm needs assistance with their SEO marketing campaigns or if you want us to help you get good Bing SEO organic rankings for your legal site, contact us today.

Just two years ago, Yahoo spent $79 million to rebuff a hostile takeover from Microsoft and preserve its independence. Now, a big part of Yahoo’s future prosperity depends on how well it can join arms with Microsoft on a high-risk, high-reward technical project.

Yahoo and Microsoft are racing to meet a fall deadline for launching their joint venture to collaborate on Internet search, an effort by the former rivals to try to narrow the gap with their much stronger, common foe: Google.

The effort — including the retraining of hundreds of Yahoo salespeople to sell ads for both companies, and a conga line of about 400 engineers who are relocating from Yahoo to Microsoft offices in Silicon Valley; Bangalore, India; Burbank; and Redmond, Wash. — needs to be complete by mid-October if the two companies hope to have the show up and running before the start of the holiday season, the critical make-or-break period for advertisers and publishers.

At stake in the joint venture, Yahoo executives say, is the company’s ability to become an innovative force in search again — something Yahoo acknowledges it can no longer afford without its partnership with Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The 10-year partnership has Bing providing the underlying results of Yahoo searches, with Yahoo retaining control of how those results are displayed.

But outside observers say more than just Yahoo’s reputation in search is at stake. Considering the revenue and traffic represented by Yahoo’s 3.1 billion U.S. monthly search queries, the search partnership represents a critical gamble by new CEO Carol Bartz to grab a bigger piece of the search revenue pie. During the first half of 2010 compared with last year, Yahoo’s search ad revenue declined by 11 percent, or $84 million, to $674 million, even as the economy improved. Both Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer have made the search transition a top priority for both companies, executives say.

“Really, there is a tremendous amount at stake here for both players,” said Laxmi Poruri, an analyst with Primary Global Research. “There are search engine advertisers out there who are eager for this. They want to spend more money on Yahoo and Bing. The problem is these guys (individually) aren’t getting enough traffic for them.”

If the companies miss the mid-October deadline, they say they will be forced to delay the switch in the United States and Canada until 2011, sacrificing the lucrative holiday advertising season. But Poruri said Yahoo also is under pressure in the long run to continue to generate search traffic for Bing. “If the technology is a disappointment or the traffic acquisition is a disappointment, then Microsoft will go somewhere else to get that traffic,” Poruri said.

Both Microsoft and Yahoo executives say the switch-over is going as well as could be expected, and Yahoo says that all of its search traffic, apart from paid search, could be powered by Bing as soon as the end of August. Still, Mark Morrissey, the Yahoo senior vice president in charge of the company’s transition team, said engineers are sometimes pulling 48- to 72-hour stints to hit key milestones.

“I can tell you, far and away, this is the most complex logistical and technical thing I have ever been a part of,” said Morrissey, who also handled Yahoo’s switch to new systems for its paid search ads and display ads.

“All our day jobs are really that at this point,” said Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Online Services Division.

The Yahoo-Microsoft alliance represents an unprecedented effort by two former competitors to join forces, but it has become increasingly necessary because of Google’s dominance. Google now provides about two-thirds of U.S. Internet searches, and an even higher share in many other countries.

Under the collaboration, Yahoo receives 88 percent of the revenue from searches done on Yahoo sites in the first five years, while saving the heavy costs of the computer infrastructure needed to crawl, index and rank the Internet. Microsoft receives the still-significant search traffic flowing through Yahoo. That is valuable because the more queries a search engine processes, the more relevant its answers, and the more extensive variety of keywords it can sell to advertisers.

Microsoft’s costs for Bing have been huge. Its online services division, which includes Bing and MSN, reported a $2.36 billion loss in fiscal 2010. Meanwhile, Bing gained 4.7 percentage points in market share in its first year, to 12.7 percent of U.S. searches, according to comScore.

Yahoo says its long-term ability to build innovative search products hinges on the collaboration.

“It’s not about the transition,” Morrissey said. “It’s about the future of search, and where we want to go.”

With Yahoo’s share of U.S. searches dipping below 20 percent in recent years, few see Yahoo as a search leader anymore. But Shashi Seth, Yahoo’s new chief of search, says that is about to change. Seth says the collaboration with Microsoft will give Yahoo the resources to develop new kinds of search products that could mimic the serendipity of browsing a newspaper, a sense of surprise and discovery rarely found in the blue hyperlinks of a conventional search query.

One example, Seth says, are Yahoo’s plans to begin offering the “Trending Now” box on its home page to other websites, probably in the next two or three months. Yahoo updates the Trending Now box every few hours based on an analysis of its search traffic, but the featured topics are tailored to users based on geographic location and Web history, so different users see different trending topics.

“The goal is to get users to discover things that they never would have thought about,” said Seth, a former Google executive who arrived at Yahoo in February. “It’s a completely new kind of search experience, one where the user didn’t ask for anything.”

Others are also racing to offer new ways for people to search. Facebook and Ask.com recently introduced new “social search” features that allow users to ask questions of actual people, rather than just query a computer algorithm.

“We think as the social web continues to explode, this is only going to get bigger and bigger,” said Scott Garell, president of Oakland-based Ask Networks.

Some at Yahoo have been frustrated with the more centralized and hierarchical management structure at Microsoft. But despite their history as hostile competitors — Yahoo disclosed that it spent $79 million in 2008 on lawyers and “outside advisers” to respond to Microsoft’s unsolicited takeover bid — executives say the main challenge is the technical difficulty of the project.

“We’re mutually codependent,” Morrissey said, “on each other’s success.”

Source

We created this legal “mini-site” a few years back and it was a basic one page site that focused on the law firms Taxation practice.  We have recently upgraded the Tax Lawyers site design and also created it using Wordpress, so its now setup so that the lawyer can easily update the existing pages and add new pages. We also expanded the site to include additional pages of content and have added a blog component so that we can add new recurring content.

If your law firm needs assistance with Attorney web site design or Internet marketing for lawyers, contact Lawyers Court today for a free web site evaluation.

Its key your law firm site also has a mobile presence, so that when a user lands on your site while using an Iphone, its easy to navigate the site and contact you.

FROM THE GOOGLE MOBILE BLOG:

It’s well known that the mobile internet is huge and growing fast; what’s surprising is exactly how fast. According to a recent report, within 5 years more users will connect to the internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs. YouTube consumption on mobile devices has also grown considerably — playbacks were up 160% in 2009 over the previous year. And we’re excited to announce that YouTube Mobile now receives more than 100 million video playbacks a day. This is roughly the number of daily playbacks that YouTube.com was streaming when we joined forces with Google in 2006.

We launched YouTube on mobile devices in 2007 with about 1,000 videos available on the mobile site (m.youtube.com). While this suddenly opened up the possibility to access videos on the go, our site, mobile browsers and the hardware had limitations that prevented the mobile experience from keeping up with YouTube on the desktop. Today, more than ever, we know that you want to be able to find and access your favorite videos wherever you are. That’s why we’ve been working hard to roll out an updated version of the mobile site.

Here’s what’s new about the new mobile site:

• It’s really fast.
• The new user interface incorporates larger, more touch friendly elements, making it easier to access videos on the go.
• It incorporates the features and functionality you’ve come to expect from the .com site, like search query suggestions, the options to create playlists,the ability to designate “favorite,” “like,” or “unlike” videos directly from your device.
• As we make improvements to Youtube.com, you’ll see them quickly follow on our mobile site, unlike native apps which are not updated as frequently.

Visit Google Mobile Blog

It’s better to get a basic site up right away and start adding content and blogging and then later on you can always upgrade like we have done here. We created a new theme including a new color scheme, updated logo and different images that rotate on the home page for the Lynnwood Personal Injury Lawyers.

The Lynnwood, Washington Personal Injury Law Firm of Robert Kornfeld handles clients with major personal injury, medical malpractice, wrongful death, car-pedestrian-bus collisions and accidents with trucks, construction and maritime injuries, serious injury claims involving the knee, hip, and spine and those catastrophic injuries, such as burns, chemical exposure, paralysis and quadriplegia, and nursing home or elder abuse cases.  Contact Lynnwood Personal Injury Lawyer Robert Kornfeld for a free consultation. No Recovery, No Fee.

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Contact Lawyers Court for assistance with legal blog design and wordpress sites for lawyers.