Looking around the landscape of law blogs it’s clear that many lawyers who start blogging just run out of steam after awhile. They write a few posts, get the basis, then trail off into the ether never to be heard from again. As a long-time legal blogger I can tell you it’s a tough thing to keep content flowing.
Enter the mighty and unsung hero of legal bloggers, the RSS feed.
You’ve seen the RSS icon on lots of websites. That (typically) orange button is like a beacon to those of us who blog about the law and hope to find new ideas and topics about which the write.
RSS (most commonly translated as “Really Simple Syndication” but sometimes “Rich Site Summary”) is a standardized format that lets someone publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized way.
A reader who wants to automatically get updates from certain websites can “subscribe” to the feed (just like subscribing to a newspaper) and read the updates using software called a an RSS reader.
So let’s say your a blogging lawyer who wants to get some ideas for your collection law blog. You want to know stuff about FDCPA and some decisions that you can riff on. You also want to know what the other consumer law bloggers are doing.
No worries, friend. Just hop online and get Google Reader, a free web-based RSS feed reader. Then run a Google blog search for your preferred term. Bring up the site and click the orange button you probably see. It will automatically bring the feed into your Google Reader account.
From there, just check your Google Reader on a regular basis for some ideas to help fill your legal blog with new content and ideas.
By the way, lots of “real” websites also have RSS feeds on them. See, for example, our friends at the New Yotk Times:
See that blue button next to the star? That’s an RSS feed icon. Just click it and you’ll bring it into your Google Reader, too. You can do this for any custom search on Google, or on any search with that icon in the address bar.
What do YOU do to overcome writer’s block?
Image courtesy of mark78_xp.
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