Wednesday, April 05, 2006 11:47 AM
As I continue to champion feeds, blawgs and new models for information-sharing and collaboration, I often encounter individuals who suggest we are years away from the masses participating in this medium. Candidly, these naysayers often have good points and there remain some significant hurdles to getting the average attorney with limited technical skills on board.
But, I am finding that these same naysayers are often too caught up in blawgs as the sole representative of this new information-sharing medium. In fact, I believe blawgs will ultimately just be one piece of a much larger puzzle. Indeed, I am finding that when I introduce the concept of feeds and news readers to skeptical attorneys, blawgs are not always the best source to showcase initially. Instead, blawgs tend to be a (albeit valuable) add-on source after the attorney gets comfortable with the initial feeds they start consuming.
Why? In part, because there is something about an established brand delivering commonly understood content that hits home. What do I mean by this? Let me show you by way of example.
The Washington Post has made freely available a U.S. Congress Votes Database. It is a great resource that has been made even better by the inclusion of RSS Feeds that allow an attorney to track every vote of every member of Congress. Randomly selecting one example, here is Senator Trent Lott"s voting record page. Via the RSS feed provided on this page, you can subscribe to a feed that will alert you every time Senator Lott votes. Imagine for a moment that you are a Government Practice attorney or lobbyist who needs to keep apprised (or keep clients apprised) of Senator Lott"s votes. Using RSS to accomplish this is both inexpensive and efficient; probably more efficient than any other method in fact.
The Washington Post"s RSS feeds allow me to introduce a skeptical attorney to the technology via a concrete example of a well-known brand (i.e. Wash Post) delivering commonly understood content (votes) right to his/her desktop. Then, after some time has passed and they are comfortable in receiving information via these feeds, I can go back and expand their options by introducing the rest of the blawgosphere.
The legal vertical is a place where being practical makes a lot of sense. Anyone who has tried to "sell" technology to lawyers probably can tell you lots of stories of glazed-over eyes and general indifference when they tried to introduce too much, too fast. With this in mind, I don"t introduce the entire blawgosphere to an attorney right away; mainly, because I have found that is often counterproductive.
In sum, I can only say that, if you are tasked with educating lawyers and gaining converts to feeds, newsreaders and blawgs, I recommend finding those concrete examples that add value to the lawyers" work processes today, even if that is simply an RSS feed generated from a database. If your goal is to gain converts and really showcase the value of these technologies, think like a marathoner, not a sprinter. If you do, I think you will ultimately be much happier with the end results.