Real Lawyers Have Blogs : Law Blogs, Social Media, Twitter

Speaking to legal professionals around the country I suggest if you're going to do one thing to get started down the road to social media that you get started with RSS. RSS is the oxygen giving life to content on the net.

And it's your RSS reader which allows you to receive content, whether by source (blogs and news sites) or by subject (subscribing to keywords at Google News or Google Blog Search).

The RSS reader of choice for LexBlog bloggers, and I suspect the majority of the net, is Google Reader. Here's a short video done by Seattle's Common Craft explaining how to use Google Reader.

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As blogging is all about joining a conversation, it's important to identify the top conversationalists or thought leaders in your niche.

The question is how to find the top law blogs. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb posted six ways to identify top blogs in any niche and asked readers to suggest others.

The outcome is nine ways you may wish to try in identifying the top law blogs in your niche. Note that the legal industry lags other professions, so user generated offerings, i.e. del.icio.us, do not offer as much in the law.

• Del.icio.us. ReadWriteWeb previously wrote about how to find top niche blogs using Del.icio.us. At the simplest level, go to http://del.icio.us/tag/topic+blog. Helpful features include RSS feeds, user comments, and information about the people (users) who have done the classifying.
• StumbleUpon. Though there's a huge number of users, it's more fun than business. There's no clear way to look at top sites in any category, the search results page is really random looking. Good for stopping by and doing some searches just to see if you've missed anything, but nothing you'd do as part of a structured search.
• Google Reader Recommendations. Google Reader's new recommendations are very high quality, in tech at least, because they have a large number of web savvy users. You may wish to start a dedicated Google Reader account filled just with some known feeds in a niche, so you can receive recommendations of other top sources in that same niche.
• Technorati. Technorati's blog finder, organized by user tags, and ranking by authority is not what it used to be. But it still warrant a look in hunting for top niche blogs.
• AideRSS. Though it may be slow at times, it's really useful in lots of contexts. In theory you can plug almost any RSS feed, including search feeds, into AideRSS and it will score items in that feed for popularity based on number of comments, diggs, del.icio.us saves and inbound links. You could put feeds from a blog search for niche specific language into RSS and find some niche hotness. Once you identify top niche blogs you can also run their feeds through AideRSS.
• Ask.com Blogsearch. Ask has the best blogsearch on the web, it uses Bloglines subscription numbers as a big weight in spam control. There's very little spam. You can search for niche specific language or a key niche link and sort by popularity of source. Because it gets overlooked by others, do not use it alone.
• Google Blog Search. Search for keywords and key phrases related to your niche. Subscribe to the search and RSS feeds from bloggers writing on the subject will be fed to your newsreader.
• Google. Google's basic search is the place I begin every time. Search relevant terms and add the term 'blog.' Browse you're findings. Subscribe to what look to be relevant blogs and do the same for blogs those blogs cited by the blogs you first found. In a week or so, you'll flush out who is at the top by seeing who is in the center of discussion.
• Navigating blogrolls. Not always kept current by bloggers, but as you see the same blogs repetitively listed on blogrolls, you can guess they're the top ones.

These are just tools. The bloggers you'll want to follow and reference in your posts (so as to enter the conversation) will be ones you'll identify over time. I've been blogging for over 4 years and regularly find what I consider to be top bloggers.

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Google Reader has received a new user interface and number of new features.

The additional features, per Per Google's Ben Darnell at the Official Google Reader Blog:

• Unread counts and 'mark all as read.'
• Folder-based navigation makes it easier to organize your subscriptions.
• New expanded view lets you quickly scan over several items at once.
• Sharing feeds is easier - with a single click of the 'shared' icon, you can publish an interesting item on your public sharing page for your friends to see.

I played around with my feeds on the new reader this evening. It is more user friendly and what ever the boys did on the tech side, it did speed up my experience as a user.

Speaking to groups I am recommending Google Reader highly. If you aren't using a reader, there isn't an easier one to start with.

Google Reader's help section covering how to subscribe to feeds, how to use the reader, and how to manage your feeds is outstanding. Walking through their screen shots and accompanying explanation can have you using RSS feeds in a couple hours.

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RSS/newsreader use has taken off over the last year. It's going to become as widely used as email and the web in time.

Web based newsreader, Bloglines, made RSS easy to use for those interested, but Google Reader, also a web based newsreader, is going to bring the use of RSS susbcriptions to the masses. When I asked my ILTA (Internal Legal Tech Assoc.) session audience last week which newsreader they used, Google Reader won in a land slide.

Though Bloglines still maintains an edge, Richard MacManus of Read/WriteWeb reports on the significant Google Reader gains on Bloglines.

Here's a chart from Hitwise from January, 2007 when talk of Google Reader just began.

And here's the same charting from this month.

Bloglines GM Eric Engleman told Read/WriteWeb that with Bloglines recent re-design 'it's a two-horse race [and] the race is on!'

I'm not sure I buy it. My guess is that Bloglines recent surge is more of a general surge in RSS use, as opposed to an increase in Bloglines popularity.

Technorati was ahead of Google Blogsearch but now has to feel itself being lapped, with a real risk of becoming irrelevant. The only thing different for longtime Bloglines employees is that they had they had their pay day with Bloglines acquistion by Ask.

Technorati Tags: Google Reader, Bloglines

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