RSS feeds are a great way to keep up with news and topics related to your specific legal niche. I use my RSS feed as a way to centralize the blogs and content I want to stay up to date with, discover ideas for blog posts, follow the conversations in my industry, monitor my competitor’s activity, and more. However, many lawyers I speak with aren’t familiar with RSS or the use of an RSS reader such as Google Reader.
What Is An RSS Feed?
WhatisRss.com tells us:
RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.
RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site’s email newsletter.
Our email boxes are already flooded with too many emails and receiving blog updates this way can be cumbersome. Subscribing to RSS updates through a reader is a more advisable way to consume the blog content. Benefits include:
- Reducing the time and effort needed to check websites for updates
- They help to aggregate all your information into one space, a sort of personalized newspaper you create
- It allows you to pull information from the web rather than have information pushed to you via email
- You can easily unsubscribe from feeds
- You can keep information more organized via tagging, labeling, categorizing, sharing, liking, etc.
Google Reader
In order to subscribe to RSS updates, you will need to use an RSS Reader. My RSS reader of choice is Google Reader. Here is a short video explaining Google Reader and how to use it:
Google Reader Mobile
Google has a very good mobile version of their Google Reader as well. It offers many of the same features and benefits of the desktop version.