Tuesday, February 10, 2004 1:55 PM
As I have mentioned before, I personally use
NewsGator and have found that I greatly prefer receiving my news headlines via feeds into Outlook than yet another newsletter in my inbox. I have also been finding that more and more newsletters are getting caught up in the ever-changing firm spam filters. And, I will admit that I rarely take the time to go pull a newsletter out of the spam cache.
Yet, I also realize that I am still in the minority of people in the legal vertical who have ever heard the word "feed," let alone subscribed to one. In my estimation, the current "blawg" community is largely made up tech-savvy lawyers, librarians, paralegals and technologists. Bringing in the rest of field will be a significant challenge. To address that challenge, the tools of the trade have to be at the ready and so easy to use that even a novice can figure it out without a lot of training.
Which brings me to Outlook... Given the dominant market share held by Outlook, if Microsoft added a feed reader into the standard version of Outlook, wouldn't the audience potential for RSS-type feeds immediately skyrocket? In addition, wouldn't this action give the concept of reading news and information via feeds in Outlook a whole new level of legitimacy?
To me, the answer to both questions is simply, yes. At the end of the day, I would like to see blawgs, blawg content and feeds become standard mainstream fare and turn into marketable opportunities for legal professionals to sell, share and collaborate. So, whether Microsoft partners with an existing third party reader, or builds it own, I would like offer up this open call for an Outlook Reader...