Feeds

Some time ago I set up a Friendfeed account and plugged in a couple of my feeds. I did not pay it any further attention until recently I noticed a number of my band of followers were subscribing to my Friendfeed.

So I checked out why. Via the Twitterverse I was pointed to this great post on Friendfeed for Lawyers on Advocate’s Studio by Martha Sperry, an attorney in the Boston. It tells you all you need to know.

I’ve mentioned Feedity before – a natty feed generator which will scrape a web page and deliver a feed based on the linked list(s) it finds there. It usually returns some unwanted links too, but you can then tweek the feed to deliver just the main items.

Since last I wrote, Feedity has moved to a paid model for anything over and above use in a personal feed reader.

I’ve just used Feedity to generate a feed from Times Law Reports since they don’t produce one themselves. I checked their T&C’s when doing this. They refer to using Times “content” and as these are just headlines linked to their site, I feel OK about it, though expect a take down notice soon! I’ve also piped the feed into my lawtweets Twitter account. Having done that I’d better pay Feedity $39.

Another feed you may find useful is the Justis Alert for Latest cases from WLR. You need to be a Justis WLR subscriber to access the reports themselves. However, in addition to the linked case name, the feed does deliver the keywords and WLR cite in the description.

These and more feeds are aggregated in my Lawfeeder.

When I said at the turn of the last year that RSS would explode in 2007, I don’t think I was being particularly prescient.

The RSS standard was then sufficiently well established that it was only a matter of time (and in internet time, that means months rather than years) before it took hold. Blogs were already pumping out RSS as standard and most news sites were latching onto it; Firefox had added support for Live Bookmarks and I saw the release of IE7 as being the catalyst for wider awareness.

Although there are many desktop RSS readers around, most people are finding it more convenient to do their computing in “the cloud” and anecdotal evidence suggests that Google Reader is perhaps now the RSS reader of choice.

But the potential for RSS lies not simply in the benefits it provides for individuals to consume and manage breaking news/current awareness feeds for themselves, it lies in the literally endless opportunities it offers for us to repurpose that information to our own ends. There are numerous applications now that enable you to publish RSS feeds on your web pages; to aggregate and filter feeds and generate custom feeds from that; and to feed these feeds into services that themselves produce feeds.

The only problem I have with all this cool stuff is the nightmare vision that we are creating endless loops which sooner or later will bring the global network down!

In the UK legal field, there are plenty of useful blog and news feeds to be getting on with; but it is to their shame that, outside these spheres, established publishers have so far failed to come up with the goods:

• the Statute Law Database – finally released after more than 14 years development – has not seen fit (despite my entreaties) to implement feeds of latest legislation (and if you do so, by year and number, both descending please!)
• the law publishers may be doing things with their current awareness content behind the paywall, but the unarguable benefits of their publishing feeds of their latest publications have thus far escaped them (the only current exception being Wiley Law)
• even BAILII – at the vanguard of the free legal web – does not yet (publicly) publish feeds of latest cases (they do produce an unannounced beta – from which a few pipes)

Get on with it!

RSS Cruiser is a legal info buff who currently spends some time on the web looking for law-related RSS feeds, encountering instead (blogs apart) classic Web 1.0 pages that are little use to man or beast in this gimme-what-I-want-now age. These Web 1.0 pages are known as “false documents” in that they look pretty and give him the information he wants but are of little value in the grand Web 2.0 scheme of things. He still awaits rescue with his like-minded castaways.

What RC is after on these pages (since you ask) is little orange icons that look like this.

Turning specifically to law publishers’ new publication feeds (a particular bugbear of his – and he’s not alone) , sadly in a recent trawl he had 100% no shows. (But do note that a number of publishers provide feeds for their journals.)

So, to lighten up his day, he went where he knew he’d find thousands of the little gems – he did a search on Google images for RSS icon. Here’s some of the more interesting variations he found: