Andy Havens' Talking Blog
You gotta hear Andy Haven's talking blog. He's got a caricature of himself with a moving mouth (kind of like to spoofs they do on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, where only the mouth moves on a picture) and automatic audio! He calls it his Blogbot.
When you mouse over the caricature, the eyes of the cartoon follow the mouse. Spooky stuff. Andy is learning waaaay too much technology.
The talking head talks about the failure of KM in in-house law departments and "the tolling of the bell of knowledge management in the legal industry." The reason is that KM boosts efficiency, and law practice is based on the billable hour (which is antithetical to efficiency). Andy thinks KM could work in plaintiff personal injury and mass tort cases.
I had a sitepal on some of my firm's sites for a while last summer. Got bad feedback from the clients and visitors. They hated the self starting aspect of the sitepal. I have been on his blog and always press pause. Sure, its neat, but after one shot, it doesn't add anything to the content. In fact, its just him reading the content. Now, if it was an audio clip not of the content, I would probably listen, but I read faster than he reads, so I don't want to have him talking at me.
This kind of stuff gives bloggers a bad name. What's the value added? There is none -- it's just animation of a guy reading stuff he's posted to his site. Plus, it's exceedingly annoying to have him speechifying about the exact same thing every time I visit. As a result, I wound up removing my bookmark to Havens' site (which I assume wasn't part of his plan). Just because we have the technology to do this kind of thing doesn't mean that we should.