Publisher's Notebook

You might read this item, recall your own misspent undergraduate days and be glad you applied to law school in the pre-Facebook era.

A whole lot of law school admissions officials have been going online to review their applicants’ digital trail to determine whether to say thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

Kaplan Test Prep just conducted a survey of law schools and some 41 percent of admissions officers admitted that they had Googled the names of applicants.

Thirty-seven percent said they had been on Facebook, seeking information.

The survey was conducted by phone this past summer. A total of 200 ABA-accredited law schools were contacted, with responses recorded from 128 of them.

The bad news for a student with something sketchy circulating in the ether is that this stuff matters. Almost a third – 32 percent – of the admissions officers said that information learned online had hurt an applicant’s chances of admission.

What are the admissions people looking for when they Google or Facebook? Many bar licensing groups – including the Virginia Board of Bar Examiners – impose character and fitness tests as part of their vetting process. So, in two words, they are looking for good judgment.

Jeff Thomas, director of Kaplan’s pre-law programs, said in a release, “Clearly, an applicant’s digital trail can be an indicator of whether or not he or she possesses this quality.”

Forewarned is forearmed.

Random tweets from Twitter, collected during the past week:

Notes on domestic relations, from @qwertying:
I just read last year 4,153,237 ppl got married. I don’t want to start any trouble, but shouldn’t that be an even number?

Deep thoughts, provided by @rolldiggity:
It’s sad how Wile E. Coyote is remembered for his violence, and not for his brilliantly realistic paintings of tunnels.

Helpful hints, not from @heloise, but from @ablanchard519:
Dropped ipod in the sink last night, so i dried it off and thought it was toast. Put it in a bag of rice overnight and the thing works fine!

Technology updates, courtesy of @rfelty:
Leaf blower finally gave out. Picking up a new model. Think they’ve improved in 5 yrs. This one is also a WiFi hotspot.

And a fair-warning tweet to pull out on a no-good, very bad day, from @PubChick:
Today’s bad mood was brought to you by the letters F & U.

Facebook, the social media giant, has sprung a number of new changes on its millions of users this week, and the early reviews are not good.

Among the changes:

• The old News Feed now shows up on the right side of the screen in a constantly moving crawl as your friends provide new updates on their activities or comment on each other’s cute cat pictures.

• The center of the page provides a list of “Top Stories” which apparently provides updates from some of your friends, but not all. There is no explanation of why an item is a “top story.”

• In what seems to be a feature taken directly from new competitor Google+, you can set up “lists” based on, well, whatever you want. You can set up a school list, or a work list, or a list based on some common interest. It’s up to you, if you want to invest the time.

• You can decide which of your Facebook friends are your “close friends.” As if Facebook hasn’t already presented you the dilemma of whether to accept the “friend” request of someone who really is only an acquaintance….

If this seems like a lot of work to fix something that wasn’t really broken, you’re right.

I have yet to see anyone who really likes it (one friend claimed to like the changes, just to be an iconoclast). I saw more than a few friends last night who reposted a photo with a banner that said “Hate the New Facebook.” Mysteriously, those posts had disappeared by this morning.

One friend out in the Seattle area had reposted a Dr. Seuss-style poem: FB Poem #2: I do not like green eggs and ham, I do not like Facebook spam. I do not like the new Facebook change, I do not like my friends rearranged. I do not like them in a row, down below or coming up and appearing slow. I do not like them by family, friend, city or state. I do not like the page to hesitate. I do not like the Facebook change, I do not like my friends rearranged! I do not like this new Facebook crap. Kill it, smash it, make it scrap (author unknown).

Brad Panovich, a meteorologist in Charlotte, is a Facebook maven and he has posted a couple of videos on the new Facebook. In particular, he has a video with advice on how to jigger the list function to the list function to get your News Feed pretty much in its previous format. It’s worth a look.

And if you are really, really unhappy with the new Facebook changes, I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg will give you your money back.

Tourists visiting Colonial Williamsburg got an unexpected treat on Tuesday.

After a historical reenactment from revolutionary days, an apparent tourist at the back of the audience broke out in song. Then another tourist joined him. Then another.

Before you knew it, there was an entire choir singing a patriotic ditty.

Actually it was an entire choir…the Mormon Tabernacle Choir staged the performance, flash-mob style.

They are on an East Coast swing and including a stop in the Colonial Capitol.

The crowd was asked to join in and sing “Yankee Doodle,” unaware they were singing with the world-famour choir.

Colonial Williamsburg filmed it all and posted the performance on YouTube. The choir gets going at about 3:30 during the clip.

The Daily Press also has a report.

Trend Alert: Here’s one you may not have seen yet, but odds are, it will make its way into your life soon.

There is a movement, mostly spurred by social media such as Twitter, to start referring to the Metropolitan DC area as “the DMV” (as in District/Maryland/Virginia).

What’s wrong with “Nation’s Capital” or “Metro DC,” you ask? When you’re limited to 140 characters a post, those titles take up much-needed room.

The Washington Post first flagged the development with an article back in July. The Post writer’s take was generally positive, likening the need for a cool regional nickname along the lines of “H-town” for Houston, or “the 612″ for Minneapolis (taken from the area code) or “the ‘nati” for Cincinnati. OK, Cincy needs to work on this.

TBD, the TV station/news website covering the Metro DC area (I’m not succumbing yet), notes that “the DMV” has been pretty controversial. TBD has solicited comment from Twitter users with alternate hashtags, #dmv and #nodmv.

The “no” votes are winning. Reasons for the thumbs-down:

One guy tweeted, “@TBD #nodmv, mostly because I live in #NoVA and want nothing to do with Maryland. #EffMD”

Another woman said, “@TBD No DMV. Don’t associate my favorite city with the most god-awful place on earth: the Department of Motor Vehicles.”

That sounds pretty reasonable.

[UPDATED JULY 6]

In honor of Independence Day, Slate ran a contest asking Twitter users to tweet the Declaration of Independence.

Imagine trying to reduce Thomas Jefferson’s 1,300-word magnum opus to 140 characters. Actually, it was using 124 characters; contestants had to include the hashtag #tinydeclaration.

Hundreds of people entered, and Slate noted that the entries fell into two camps – the literalists, who sought to recreate the Declaration’s political flavor, and the humorists, who sought to be funny.

My favorite came from NEHgov (the office of the National Endowment for the Humanities), in the form of a purported message to King George: “Dear George, it’s not you. It’s U.S.”

Slate posted the winners over the weekend.

The third runner-up, “for straddling the delicate balance between the literal and humorous,” came from @Boston1775: “We seek independence based on noble and universal ideas combined with petty and one-sided grievances.”

The second runner-up, hailed “for his direct and confrontational tweet,” was from @TJMonticello (Mr. Jefferson’s own Monticello): “All peeps are equal. Sick and tired of your tyrannical BS. Seeking independence. Your permission requested, not required.”

For “both historical accuracy and a Twitter-worthy modernization of communication,” @badanes took first runner-up: “Our Rights from Creator (h/t @JLocke). Life, Liberty, PoH FTW! Your transgressions = FAIL. GTFO, @GeorgeIII. -HANCOCK et al.”

The winner? A guy called @ApocalyseHow, who was a writer for Conan O’Brien and for “The Daily Show,” according to his Twitter bio. Slate complimented his entry for “reminding us that brevity is the soul of wit”: “Bye George, we’ve got it.”

Every year for the past few years, some delegate or senator has introduced a bill in the General Assembly to outlaw texting while driving. In 2010, one of the measures was House Bill 212, which, once the Assembly convened, was promptly referred to the Committee on Militia, Police and Public Safety (i.e., legislative Siberia), where the bill languished. It ultimately was “laid on the table” (a nice euphemism for “killed”) before the session ended.

The teenagers who text must have hired the same guy who lobbies for the tennis moms in SUVS and salesguys in cheap suits and cheap cars, both of whom yack on the cell phone while driving. Bills to stop same routinely go down each year as well.

A Facebook friend of mine in Utah re-posted this picture, which is now making the viral rounds. The featured church is in Alabama. Feel free to refer to it if and when you are lobbying against texting-while-driving bills next January:

U.S. News & World Report published a handy list last week: “5 Do’s and Don’ts for College Students Using Social Media.”

While aimed at college kids, this quick and basic primer on tools such as Facebook and Twitter is useful to (A) parents with a kid in college who may not get it yet, (B) law students or new graduates who may not get it yet or (C) younger associates at law firms who somehow got that far without getting it yet.

If you fall into category (A), feel free to send the link to this post to your kid. If you fall into category (B) or (C), you better keep reading.

The U.S. News piece said as many as 79 percent of recruiters look to the Internet for info on applicants. They want a sense of who a job applicant is…what’s she like beyond the strong resume she filed. Job applicants all too often are unaware that they’re being watched by potential employers. That young woman with the stellar resume may have posted Facebook pictures of herself chugging beer at a frat house. Given the generally crummy hiring scene (for new law graduates, it’s as bad as it’s been in a generation), it’s a buyer’s market.

You can look at the full U.S. News article here. But this is the quick version of their list:
1. Do create positive content
2. Don’t post questionable photos of yourself anywhere on the Internet
3. Do Google yourself
4. Don’t post negative status updates or tweets
5. Don’t make your online presence all about you

Most of all, be careful how you present yourself. A tip of the cap to our colleague Dave Rhea, the multimedia editor at Oklahoma City’s Journal Record, for first flagging and blogging about the U.S. News item. Rhea notes in his post that employers are all over the Internet, looking for scoop on prospects.

Drunken snaps from that debauched Spring Break trip to Florida may become, sadly, what he calls an FIL (a Future Income Limiter). So are neck and hand tattoos, Rhea says, but those are topics for another day.

So you have a Blackberry and a Twitter account and you keep the world updated on your personal activities…constantly. If you’re a trial lawyer and you want to tweet live from the courtroom, think twice. At least if it’s in federal court.

And you might see if your judge thinks like a U.S. District Judge in the Middle District of Georgia, who last week ruled you can’t tweet from his courtroom. Judge Clay D. Land of Columbus said that twittering from court violates Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 53. That rule says, “[T]he court must not permit the taking of photographs in the courtroom during judicial proceedings or the broadcasting of judicial proceedings from the courtroom.”

The word “broadcasting” is the rub. In U.S. v. Shelnutt, Land ruled, “The Court finds that the term ‘broadcasting’ in Rule 53 includes sending electronic messages from a courtroom that contemporaneously describe the trial proceedings and are instantaneously available for public viewing.” And the drafters of Rule 53 were looking past TV and radio broadcasting, he said.

So check the Blackberry at the door. In Columbus, anyway.

Larry Bodine, a well-known and well-respected law firm consultant, doesn’t like Twitter. He recently kicked up a storm on the Internet, essentially arguing that the social media outlet has little value for law firms.

He was in Richmond earlier this week, talking to the Virginias Legal Marketing Association. I didn’t go, but all my sales staff did and I got a report: Larry remains unconvinced about the service.

Twitter, Bodine said, is like the Macarena (the arm-folding, bouncing dance craze of 1996, for those who somehow have forgotten). Here today, popular today, likely to pass.

I must admit I tweet (@paulfletcher, if you want to follow me), but not all too often.

I logged on today and there was a comment defending Twitter: “Twittering is like hugging. Just because it’s hard to measure the return on investment doesn’t mean there isn’t value there.”

Hmm. Okay, so Larry won that round.