Friday, May 20, 2005 1:00 PM
One of the continuing themes I return to on a regular basis (mainly because I find it an intriguing challenge) is how to get the legal masses into the blawgosphere. By this I mean the 95% of the legal world which does not currently participate in the blawgosphere. Item number one is that a feed reader needs to be innately provided in the standard build of the law firm desktop. Item number two is that feeds of specific interest to non-techie lawyers need to be readily available.
For today, i'd like to look at item number two, which really is a question of content. Clearly, there is a lot of solid content being created within the blawgosphere by blawgers themselves. This will remain a key avenue for growing both readership and interest among the non-technical set in the legal vertical. However, an equally important development is the growth of RSS-enabled feeds from traditional information sources. And, from my own personal experience, it these traditional information sources that are generating new buzz among lawyers who otherwise would show little inclination to participate in the blawgosphere, even as just a reader.
What are these information sources? Examples included the Federal Government's growing RSS Library at FirstGov. At this site, you can find the start of what I hope will be an ever-expanding list of informational feeds from government agencies and legislative bodies. At present, the reference seems dominated by press releases and news headlines, but transcripts, speech logs and recall information are also included for some agencies.
One of the great things about RSS and really XML in general, is that feeds can be generated from just about any information source. Right now, the focus within the blawgosphere are the feeds generated from blawgers, but I am really excited about the possibilities related to feeds generated from databases. For example, the Security and Exchange Commission's EDGAR system already outputs XML. So, it won't be a long step to deliver personalized EDGAR data into a lawyer's inbox to assist with monitoring and compliance matters. Environmental compliance is another area that seems ripe for the picking. Imagine if all of the public data maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency was readily available via quick-subscribe feeds. Next, look at the Federal Register, and you see a resource that is crying out to be sliced-and-diced into topic-specific themes (like what the US Copyright office makes available on this page). If you added in a feature which allowed users to subscribe to pre-established searches of government databases (e.g., notify me by RSS any time a new 'hit' on my pre-selected search query appears in EDGAR), it all gets even better.
There is much more that can be done, of course. The key point is simply what I am seeing occur among non-techie lawyers. They ask for an RSS reader because the government agency they regularly monitor is now providing information via RSS. Or, they ask for an RSS reader because email as a delivery system is increasingly resulting in their daily updates and newsletters getting caught up in the web of spam filters and blockers. Who wants to spend time searching through thousands of emails in a spam cache, trying to find a newsletter?
Finally, as the private sector delivers government information in a more efficient stream than the government itself can deliver, the case for RSS will grow among the current non-blawging crowd. Just today, Robert Ambrogi's Lawsites pointed out a new patent-watching system based on RSS feeds called PatentMojo. And, this is just one of many companies moving towards RSS as a delivery platform for legal.
In sum, as has been oft-stated, content is king. For the blawgosphere, getting the masses involved will take an ever-improving stream of good content. And, moving content upon which attorneys already rely into feed-friendly streams will go a long way in accomplishing this goal.