Thursday, June 26, 2003 12:14 PM
One of the roadblocks to the widespread use of blawgs within the legal community is ease of use. Beyond the need for simplicity, blawgs must find a way into the average legal professional's daily routine. And, as part of that routine, my experience has been that the average attorney has only two applications open every day--a word processor and an email client (some would add web browsers to this list, but I am not yet convinced of that). The software companies that service the legal vertical have realized this, and continue to integrate their products into these two application types. It stands to reason that companies interested in tackling the "ease of use" roadblocks to blawgs would explore the same model.
With this in mind, I recently tried out a third party weblog add-on for Outlook called News Gator. News Gator, which has a 14-free trial and costs $29 to license, is a weblog reader that mimics the standard Outlook inbox functionality. Moreover, News Gator offers a weblog publishing feature (via another plug-in available on its website) that allows an Outlook user to publish to his/her blawg directly from Outlook.
News Gator installed quickly and appears as a new toolbar within Outlook. You can then subscribe to the rss/xml feeds from your favorite blawgs, choosing to have all feeds display in a single folder (similar to an aggregator) or to have each feed show up separately in its own folder. The feeds are displayed in the standard Outlook menu bar, showing up as another folder right below your Inbox folder. You can also control how often the feeds are updated, whether on demand or a pre-determined intervals (e.g., every hour).
One of the really nice features of News Gator is that you can interact with the each headline from a given feed in the same way as email. A headline can be forwarded, saved or deleted. More importantly, News Gator "remembers" actions you have taken, so that each time you refresh your headline feeds, you don't get all of the original headlines dumped back into your folder. Therefore, only new headlines for a given feed will appear each time the feed is refreshed.
The publishing feature of News Gator comes in the form of plug-ins that work with a number of leading weblog editor products, including Blogger, Radio Userland, and Blogx. I set mine to work with Blogger and had a few hiccups along the way, mainly trying to point to the Blogger API (hint: you have to use this URL: http://64.41.146.215/api/RPC2).
Once I got it configured, however, the publishing feature worked pretty well. I especially liked the fact that I could publish to my weblog without exiting Outlook. That being said, the publishing portion of News Gator is not as feature rich as the Blogger editor itself. Most notably, when I made a mistake with one test posting, I couldn't find a way to edit the posting from News Gator -- I had to use my Blogger editor.
Still, on the whole, I give News Gator a solid rating. And, given that version 1.0 of News Gator was only released last February, I think it safe to assume that we will see expanded features and functions in the coming months. Ultimately, for legal professionals who live in the Outlook, News Gator is worth a try.
Note: Blogger is in the midst of some server changes. Here is another API address to keep handy: http://api.blogger.com/api