Everyone loves a Top Ten list. After posting about the Top Ten Flicker Hacks a few days ago, I decided I’d spend some time looking for some more Top Ten lists. It has been several weeks since I had time for any semi-pointless Web surfing and it turned out to be fun. There are countless “Top” lists on the WWW, so I decided to limit my collection to lists of either recent vintage or great usefulness (or strangeness.)

Warning: The following links carry lots of useful information, but also the potential for the wasting of a significant number of billable hours. I also have not carefully reviewed all of the linked sites and some may feature content objectionable to some readers. I found so much material that I haven’t had time to read it all myself.

So let’s start with the Top Ten Essential Travel Gadgets. This is great reading for the road warriors. I don’t own most of these, but I do carry a multi-tool in my shave kit and I use it frequently. This is followed by 10 Top Ten Gadget lists, ranging from the ten strangest clocks to the ten strangest keyboards.

Top Ten Largest Databases in the World is from BusinessIntelligenceLowdown.com. I’d never heard of this site before. But they had another interesting feature, How to Be a Manager that Your Employees Respect: 73 Surefire Tips. This is great material for anyone with employees. (I will definitely visit this site again or subscribe to its RSS, but I have to note that a website offering tips to the business community probably shouldn’t have Google ads. It makes it look amateurish.)

PC World has many top ten features, like The Top 10 Tech Stories of 2006. I also must note The 15 Best Places to Waste Time on the Web. (OK, maybe you are better off not knowing of these.) Here are many more PC World Top Ten lists generated by searching the site.

Even though you may have all of the degrees you want, you may still appreciate the Top Web Tools for College Students. If you want to spend way too much time contemplating how to improve the Google ranking for your web site, here are Ten Top Ten Search Engine Optimization lists.

As a dedicated Gmail user, I can’t skip Top 10 Gmail Tips and Hacks. Some of these are at the expert level, but some are for everyone, like “A recent and quietly introduced Gmail feature is Mail Fetcher, which can check up to five other e-mail accounts and download all that mail into your Gmail. To help keep things organized, Mail Fetcher can automatically label and archive all this incoming mail.”

Ten Effective Workplace Habits is maybe a bit mislabeled. It is more about career planning and development than actually getting work done.

OK, I’ve got to stop now. But I’ve accumulated more material. So I will do a follow up next week. I’ve got top 50 and top 25 lists, along with more top 10 lists. But feel free to e-mail more list suggestions to me (except for lawyer jokes.)

Well, at some level I never thought I’d link to a YouTube video from this blog, and at some level I knew, of course, that I’d someday link to video from this blog. But this video from Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cutural Anthropology, Kansas State University, about the evolution of the World Wide Web is currently one of the most-viewed videos on the Web. This is a actually a pretty big deal because the video is intended to make you think, where most highly popular Web videos are posted to entertain. So if you can spare 4.5 minutes of your time, maybe at lunch, or maybe when you get home tonight, you should watch this. But do it when you have time to reflect, not when your next appointment is due in six minutes. If you are a visual learner, you may enjoy this visual representation of how the Web is changing. (Note to those with slow connections or new to YouTube, if the video keeps stopping, hit pause and let the red line showing it is loading expand out to about halfway. Then hit play.)

I am sure most all of you are aware of Flickr, the photo sharing website. One of the most interesting aspects of Web 2.0 is how many creative people and organizations build on the work of others. One creates an interesting Web application and then another builds something even more interesting related to that. So, even though the following list may not be directly useful in your law practice, I really wanted to pass along Thomas Hawk’s Top 10 Hacks on Flickr. Readers have then added to his list with their suggestions for additions in the comments.

I like bargains and Giveaway of the Day certainly offers bargains ─ free software packages. It reminds one of the early days of the Internet, when downloading freeware and shareware from various sources was a staple of online activity.  Now one risks spyware infection from indiscriminate downloading. So it is nice to know of a site that screens their downloads. Since its December launch, Giveaway of the Day has offered many free downloads. There is a catch, however. You can only download the featured application for free on that one day. When you visit the site you may see an interesting product from a prior day, but that is now only available for a modest fee. If you are really interested in such downloads, you may want to sign up for the daily e-mail notices from this week’s Website of the Week.

OK, I’m back. I survived the holidays and the Great Ice Storm of 2007. We never lost power but our hearts go out to our friends in places like Muskogee and McAlester, who have been without power for days and have more days ahead.

A brief bit of background about this great tip is required here. I’ve posted before about the benefits of using TinyURL to shorten links for pasting into e-mails. in our state, OSCN provides docket sheets for pending cases in many of our counties. Here’s an e-mail from Noble, Oklahoma attorney Cheryl Clayton who learned about TinyUrl at one of my "30 Tips" programs.

“After learning about tinyurl from you, I put it to use. To keep an eye on the court dockets in my cases, I wanted a quick link that would instantly pull up the case without having to click my way through OSCN. In TimeMatters, I used or created a web field. I then went to OSCN, found my case, and used tinyurl to create a short link that would fit within the size of the Timematters field. Now I can check my case within seconds with one simple click. I did the same for Cindee Pichot in the program she uses
– Time and Chaos. I don’t use Amicus but I am sure the same thing can be used done in it. For lawyers, a nifty and practical application of tinyurl.”

Effective immediately, Oklahoma Bar Association members have access to a free legal research tool. We are very excited about providing free legal research to our members as a member benefit. Our provider is FastCase.com. OBA Members need to log in through www.okbar.org using their Bar ID number and PIN Number (just like you use for my okbar.org.) We are officially launching after the first of the year. But it is up and running now, so those who read my blog can get a few days early start.

Read more here and FastCase FAQ’s are here.

Congratulations are in order for the OBA Board of Governors and the OBA Member Services Committee for making this happen! It continues a tradition of providing the best in bar member services.

And I think You richly deserve it!

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html

This is really an inspired choice. The democratization of the WWW through so many new Web 2.0 applications is really quite a change in the way we get our information. We still rely on the mainstream media sources for news, we also look to You: blogs from You, Wikipedia entries for You, recommended bookmarks from You, online bargains from You and reviews of entertainment from You. So stand up and take a bow. You deserve it.

I try to stick closely to law-related items in my posts. But what the heck. It is the holiday season. I can give a gift to many of my readers with this post and provide some people much-needed stress relief during this busy time. (Ever notice how good we lawyers are at rationalizing a course of conduct once we decide to embark upon it?)

This week’s Website of the Week features free recordings of classic live rock concerts from Wolgang’s Vault. Click on the link above, register and soon you, too, can be hogging the office bandwidth listening to complete concerts from Jimi Hendrix, Fleetwood Mac, The Who, CSN&Y and Led Zeppelin. The Top 100 Rated of the collection is quite impressive (if you enjoy this type of music.) I saw the story of Wolgang’s Vault on TV and it is certainly interesting. Someone is making a lot of money from selling the classic rock memorabilia. But they are giving us lots of free music, so it’s cool, man.

Happy holidays, everyone.

Hat tip to Norman G. Fernadez, Esq. of Chatsworth, CA, who posted the link to the Solosez list.