I know many Alabama lawyers who are just beginning to be interested in keeping up with one or more blogs, but who are so new to this type of publication that they haven’t really done much looking into how the technology works. They simply bookmark their favorite blogs in their web browser and try to remember to visit those sites every few days, if they’re not too bust with other things, to see what’s new.
I’ve so recently become convinced that there is value in some of the thousands of blogs now being published across the Internet that, until a month or so ago, that’s what I’ve been doing, too. But there’s a much better way to organize all the different blogs you might like to follow, and have new content brought directly to your desktop and organized in such a way that you can quickly review new posts to determine whether there’s anything there that interests you. These applications are called aggregators or news readers.
My counterparts Jim Calloway of the Oklahoma State Bar Management Assistance Program and Courtney Kennaday of the South Carolina Bar Practice Management Assistance Program have co-authored a great short article, See You Later, at the Aggregators!, about news aggregators, how they work, and how to choose the right one. It was published in the ABA GP/Solo Technology eReport not too long ago. If you’re interested in getting more from the blogs you follow, with less time and effort, it’s a short read and well worth the effort.