Family law pipes?
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Nick Holmes, a publishing consultant specializing in the UK legal sector, has created a FamilyLawPipe aggregating UK family law feeds with Yahoo Pipes. From Nick:
...Yahoo Pipes is a service from Yahoo which enables you to take inputs from RSS feeds and other XML etc files, manipulate them (eg sort, filter, truncate etc) and then output the result as an RSS feed or other format - all using a neat drag and drop interface.
So, in this case, the FamilyLawPipe takes 13 family law blog feeds, sorts their entries by date and outputs the latest 50 to a single feed.
After early fanfare, YahooPipes hasn't taken off like folks thought it would. But what Nick's done is a nice idea and something lawyers here in the States ought to pick up on. Being a mini ticker-tape on a niche subject via feeds is not only a nice resource for others, but lets others know of your expertise and commitment by virtue of you following the subject.
Other blog posts on this story
- Yahoo Pipes and RSS mixing from Steve Matthews
- Feed Pipe from John Bolch
The big problem with "other people's content" is a change in terms & conditions. Wired mag has a good article on scraping: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-01/ff_scraping
I'm in the process of creating one of these "aggregated feeds" on a niche area of law. I didn't go with Pipes because I wanted more control over the feed. But it is a great concept. And I agree, Kevin, that it's a great way to show off expertise. It's also a great way to stay current on your niche and build a personal content/knowledge management system.
One issue related to Jonathan's comment. In my niche, there is a major player/authority that delivers updates about 10 times per day. But they refuse to serve their content via RSS because they think it will hurt their daily page views. I think they've got it backwards.
But I've stopped trying to convince them. Instead, I'm considering scraping their site and creating my own RSS feed of their content. I know there are a lot of attorneys in my niche that would find this RSS feed extremely useful. My only concern is the "other people's content" issue. But so long as the feed only has titles and excerpts with links to the original content, I should be safe. Any thoughts?