I gave a presentation several weeks ago on Effectively Using Family Law Blogs at the annual "Hot Tips From the Coolest Domestic Law Practitioners" seminar presented by the South Carolina Bar. In this presentation, I pointed out the many ways that legal blogs and RSS feeds can revolutionize your law practice and really the way that you view and use the internet.
If you are not familiar with RSS feeds, you need to be! They can make your web usage so much more efficient that you will literally wonder how you ever got along before them. Using RSS, you are able to monitor a large quantity of information quickly and easily. Echoing my thoughts, Alex Wollenschlaeger of The Unofficial Apple Weblog recently posted
It’s no exaggeration to say that the day I started using a feed reader, my internet life changed forever. Suddenly, instead of having to click through my regular cohort of a few dozen sites, I was able to scan hundreds of sites for the news I wanted.
The Wall Street Journal Online has an excellent article, A Guide to Using RSS, to help get you up and running. Once you realize the benefits of RSS feeds, you will need to decide how you want to read/monitor them. There are two basic ways to read and subscribe to RSS feeds: (1) newsreader software (such as NetNewsWire or NewsFire), and (2) a Web based newsreader platform (such as Bloglines, Google Reader, or NewsGator). I will take a closer looks at the differences in these in later posts.
Note: If you’re interested in viewing the written materials from Effectively Using Family Law Blogs, you can download a *.pdf version of my written materials by clicking HERE.
Source: “Hot Tips From the Coolest Domestic Law Practitioners” by Ben Stevens, published at The South Carolina Family Law Blog.