Rob Curley delivered the second keynote at the CALI 2007 conference yesterday. He is a vice president at the Washington Post, but his irreverent style, self-admitted red-bull addiction and child-like demeanor would never peg him for the role normally reserved for stuffed shirts in neckties. While I kind of wished his talk tied back to legal education a bit more–overall, it was a funny, witty and a completely fresh look at how to conceptualize not only how to go about integrating all these new technologies that keep emerging, but also how to manage your own career. Unfortunately, there is not a video yet of his talk, but as soon as it becomes available I will post it here for you all. He highlighted a few of his projects that he explains under the terminology of being “hyperlocal”, or using all of these great technologies to magnify local events to an level never seen before. He says hyperlocal is so local you can’t print it because if you did there would be too many pages. He credits his success in part to his extensive use of the “technology” Internology. This is the practice of getting a whole lot of interns to do a lot of work for very little to no money. He also credits his success with getting a bunch of “MENSA Nerds”, surrounding yourself with them and then getting out of the way. Rob also loves databases and applications that are driven on databases. When you can’t find the information or people won’t give you the information, get creative. He tried to get stats of players from one of the local universities and they wouldn’t release the information. Therefore, he simply called the players mothers who were happy to supply them with everything they would ever need to know and more on each player every Wednesday.
Here is a list of some of his team’s accomplishments. Here are a couple of my favorites:
- Daily video podcast in Naples
- onBeing at the Washington Post
- Examination of Teen Shopping
If you want to know more about Rob right now, read this great interview from Frontline or watch this video of a keynote he gave in April 2006 by clicking on the picture below:
Filed under: General
Grey Tales 
Thanks for pulling together these links — that was a great talk, and while it was tangential to legal education, I think it really helps to stretch our brains a little.