Monday, July 03, 2006

The new blog next door

Here I am, entering the blogosphere! I have to admit that I had one of the best mentor to jump in this crazy adventure: Patrick Cormier.

When I first met him, I had no clue we shared so many interests: wines, information management, ski, etc. At the time, we were both articling to become lawyers in Montreal, Quebec. He was at Greenspoon Perreault and I was at Borden Ladner Gervais. One case united us and then... nothing! It is only this year that, while reading about knowledge management, I stumbled on articles he had written and especially, on his blog. I instantly realised that he was Web 2.0 fluant!

Then, I started to follow what he was writting and started to realised that he was sharing with the rest the world what I had been keeping for myself. Being the socialist that I am, quiet rapidly, I was hooked on blogging! Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I noticed a posting on Slaw for a speaker that would make a presentation about Practice and Case Management 101. Since this is one of my hobbies and what I have beign doing at work over the past years, I decided to contact Patrick who accepted my offer right away. Now I realise he had other plans for me...

He contacted me a few days later to see if I was interested in giving another presentation about Web 2.0. Ok, I had a good knowledge of the web trends and technologies, but having no spare time, I had no blog, ClaimID and the likes... In fact, I was using collaborative blogs to comment and wikis to share knowledge. It all changed today!

Last week, Patrick thanked me in the most original way by posting on Slaw “The Paperless Lawyer-Speaker: Dominic Jaar”. As you will note at the end of his posting, Patrick tickled the litigation lawyer in me by writing:

"Now all that you need Dominic, so people can find you easily (especially if they google you); is your very own claimid page. ;-)"

Not only that, while replying to library-boy-on-french-law-bloggers, I noted that "As a Quebec lawyer, even if I blog a lot, I do not blawgue" underlying the fat that I used other people blogs to discuss various matters to the exclusion of law. Well, my dear Patrick pinched me by commenting: "Salut Dominic - il est où, ton blogue?! :-)" Guess what? Here I am!!!!

2 comments:

Patrick Cormier said...

Wow, great taste in layout choice Dominic - I did not know about this template: looks very pro and inviting. Like the title of the blog too - will give you flexibility to blog about wines and information management. ;-) I'm your first subscriber!

patrick

Patrick Cormier said...

I forgot - when you have a chance, make sure you add to the sidebar of your template a subscription chiclet or (better) a RSS icon with the following URL so people can subscribe to your blog (not everybody knows that adding the suffix "/atom.xml" to blogger blogs yields the correct URL for subscriptions and auto-discovery does not always work):

http://dominicjaar.blogspot.com/atom.xml