Electronic Caffeine

Curious about how our community was adopting these tools, I queried members of my LawMarketing Listserv, www.lawmarketing.biz, and my 300 LinkedIn connections. To no surprise, the clear favorite is Google Alerts — by a wide margin. Some people have 20 alerts running. What’s a Google Alert? It’s a simple process where you sign up, and indicate keywords (names, cases, etc.) you want to watch. Google searches the internet for relevant hits, and sends you a summary of headlines in an e-mail. And the price is right: it’s free.

It couldn’t be easier to start a Google Alert. Simply visit www.google.com/alerts and complete the online form:

1. Indicate your search terms.
2. Select whether you want searches from news,blogs, the web, video, groups, or all of the above — a comprehensive search.
3. Select whether you want an e-mail summary sent as it happens, once daily, or once a week.
4. Enter your e-mail address.
5. Click “Create Alert.”

Google Alerts are not perfect. They will report the same item more than once, and sometimes pull up a link that was posted years ago. But by and large, they are very good and extremely useful.

RSS and News Aggregators
Another free method is RSS feeds and news aggregators. These are like creating your own personal newspaper. You simply enter the web address or RSS feed of the site or blog you want to follow, and paste it into “add feeds” section of your favorite news aggregator. (To get the RSS feed, simply click on the familiar orange RSS Button.)

You read your “newspaper” on the web with one of the many news aggregator websites, most of which are free. A longtime favorite of mine is Newsgator at www.newsgator.com, which shows me the headline (or headline plus summary) of new items published on the blogs and sites I follow.

My Yahoo and Google Reader are popular news aggregators, along with Bloglines, My AOL, Netvibes, My MSN, Windows Live and Pluck.

The downside is that you actually have to devote the energy to visit the news aggregator site instead of having the news e-mailed to you, but it does keep your inbox clear of e-mail alerts. You choose your poison.

E-mail subscriptions
Always thinking of user friendliness, some websites realize that RSS requires a small quantity of thought, so they also offer simple e-mail subscriptions. This way whenever there is a new item, a summary is sent to your inbox.

Among popular subscriptions:

• The Wall Street Journal Law Blog at http://setup1.wsj.com/pznsetup/pub/email/setup.html.
• The delicious legal tabloid Above the Law, at www.abovethelaw.com.
• Real Lawyers Have Blogs at http://kevin.lexblog.com.
• The ABA Journal Newsletter (in daily or weekly frequencies) at http://www.abajournal.com/subscribe.
• The Law.Com Newswire at http://store.law.com/registration/register.asp?subscribeto=nw.
• My own LawMarketing Blog at http://blog.larrybodine.com/subscribe.html.