Seeing him reminded me to write about an intriguing trend. Look at this photograph to the left and tell me what you see that is strange.

If you see that everyone in it is looking at some kind of digital device, you're correct.

In today's environment, savvy coffeehouse owners are offering wireless Internet service to accommodate technophile customers like these, who wouldn't be caught dead without their digital appendages (OK, maybe that's a bit of an overstatement, but you get my drift).

And most of these technophiles insist that wireless access be free.

The photo was taken by Valdis on a recent tour of coffeehouses in Cleveland that offer free wireless Internet (wi-fi) service.

Valdis and intrepid bloggers/wi-fi enthusiasts/coffee-lovers George Nemeth and Steve Goldberg spearheaded the tour, which was last week. It turned into an all-day event. Our intrepid bloggers were met along the way by other local bloggers who stopped and joined in for a cup. The whole event was blogged and podcasted and captured in digital photos posted to Flickr. And captured in print by journalist Chris Seper (himself a blogger although on hiatus), in a Plain Dealer piece:

"They strapped on their notebook PCs, iPods, digital cameras and mobile phones (complete with wireless earpieces) and blazed through a dozen cafes on the coffeehouse circuit...."

"Quality-management programs can't give you the kind of empathetic connection to consumers that increasingly is the key to opening up new business opportunities. All the B-school-educated managers you hire won't automatically get you the outside-the-box thinking you need to build new brands -- or create new experiences for old brands. The truth is we're moving from a knowledge economy that was dominated by technology into an experience economy controlled by consumers and the corporations who empathize with them."

Editor's note: Welcome to the fifty-eighth in our weekly PowerBlog Reviews of business weblogs.


George's Employment Blog covers employment law and human resources. The blog is written by George Lenard, an attorney from St. Louis, Missouri, and Michael Harris, a Human Resources professor and consultant, also from St. Louis.

Michael has written an account of how the two met over coffee, got to know one another and then started to blog together. It's also a good article about the benefits of blogging.

This blog manages to stay focused on a niche, yet covers a wide range of employment-related issues that appeal to both lawyers and non-lawyers alike. George is experienced in writing for non-lawyers, as he also writes a column for the Hiring Center on Monster.com.

I love the way this blog lets the personalities of the writers shine through. The tone is conversational. It often has humor interspersed.

The blog is not above the occasional civilized rant, either, as in this post where George takes on a very legal institution -- class action lawsuits -- and undresses them down to their skivvies:

"OK, this blawg is my place to speak my piece (and Michael his), so once in a while I can rant a bit about things I hate.

I'm not opposed to the very idea of class actions, and will even concede they theoretically can serve a socially useful function.

But how they work in practice stinks for a number of reasons. One of which we'll cover today." (You'll need to read the blog to understand what George hates about class action lawsuits.)

"Come on Anita, isn't it obvious? We are just so much smarter and more interesting. Seriously, many of us like to write and enjoy the freedom of writing whatever we want instead of what has to be written for our clients. Also, I wonder if many of us aren't more concerned with the need to develop independent professional identities. I suspect most of the blogging lawyers do not work for large firms, but are in situations where they are very conscious of the need to market themselves."

"Analysts at Wall Street brokerage firms who once tracked small companies in hopes of attracting investment banking business cannot do that anymore for fear of raising conflict of interest questions. Companies in turn cannot favor selected analysts in releasing corporate information. The end result is that smaller companies are having a harder time gaining analysts' attention.

All this has heightened the importance of IR professionals to companies that are seeking to be heard by investors over the crowd of other such companies also clamoring to be heard."

"...the Internet has benefited the entire industry, and retailing as a whole. It's just created an entirely new revenue stream and it's going to continue to grow.

We've found the transition into cyberspace pretty easy, because we've been doing a lot of remote selling, without any brick and mortar, for over 20 years. And I think that customers in general are getting used to buying things sight unseen. And we are working on improving the experience, the feel and texture of the product, through the use of images to help them even more."