Legal Search Marketing Blog

RSS Feeds From U.S. Government & White House

Firstgov.gov is the US Government's official web portal and they have a list of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds which are browsable by topics that include health, business and economics, and science.

WHAT IS RSS?

RSS has several meanings: Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, and RDF Site Summary. In any case, it's a method of summarizing the latest news and information from a website, that can be easily read by many news readers or news aggregators. ALL Lawyers should be aware of RSS feeds and they really are easy to use and a great way to follow a lot of different news stories in one location.

US GOVERNMENT PODCASTS

They also have a listing of Podcasts from the US Government and then also a link to the White House RSS feeds and podcasts.

New Blog Search Engine Submission Site

I ran across a new free blog submission service at Feedshot, which submits your RSS feed to currently 17 different blog search engines. It doesnt cover the new Google blog search engine but it says it will be soon. It also sends you a report with the submission results and its free.

MSN Crawling RSS Feeds for Breaking News

MSN announced on its blog that they are crawling certain feeds in order to index breaking news as quickly as possible.

One of the key elements of having a great index is having fresh content.  If someone searches for Vista on the day that we announced the name for the next version of Windows then they should be able to see relevant results. 

This means that we need to have the content in our index within minutes of these types of events happening. In order to do this we built a simple crawler to get News and Blogs that break this type of news.

Canadian law firm updates clients via RSS

Ron Friedmann reports that Clark Wilson of Vancouver is offering RSS feeds for its publications. Friedmann exhorts more firms to jump on the blogging bandwagon:

"Law firms have many options to 'touch' clients digitally: blogs, RSS feeds, Webinars, streaming video, and podcasts. It surprises me that more firms are not opting to experiment with these. Given that firms already generate a lot of content, the marginal cost to distribute in channels other than print and e-mail that might be more appealing to many readers (including clients and prospects) is relatively low ..."

SOURCE: LAW.com Blog

Washingtonpost.com RSS Feeds Carry Ads

Article from Marketing Vox about how the Washingtonpost.com is integrating ads into its RSS feeds. All lawyers should start to know what RSS is now. 

Washingtonpost.com is the first major news site to begin integrating advertising into its RSS feeds, in what is a sign of more direct competition between mainstream news organizations and search engines (and blogs) for new media dollars, AdAge reports (via MediaBuyerPlanner). MSNBC TV's The Situation with Tucker Carlson is the Post's first RSS advertiser.

RSS advertisements began as text ads and to a large extent remain so, but HTML ads are now also being used. Yahoo and Google offer ad-supported RSS feeds, and Pheedo has created RSS advertising networks that companies such as American Express, Continental Airlines and Verizon use.

Google Launches AdSense for RSS Feeds

From the Google Blog, Google has launched Adsense for RSS Feeds, which enables publishers distributing content through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or Atom feeds to include relevant text ads in their feeds and receive a share of the revenue generated by ad clicks.

Enter AdSense for feeds, launching today in beta. The idea is simple: advertisers have their ads placed in the most appropriate feed articles; publishers are paid for their original content; readers see relevant advertising - and in the long run, more quality feeds to choose from.

Given the great flexibility that feeds can offer, it’s essential to get the model right, especially so that readers are satisfied. Towards this end we have outlined what we believe are some best practices for advertising in feeds.

Publishers who want to participate in the public beta can apply here.

Tutorial on Using RSS Feeds

LexBlog has a good post about how to use RSS feeds and a link to a good tutorial. All lawyers should know about RSS (real simple syndication) because they are an excellent resource and the way of the future. 

For those wanting to learn how to use RSS (real simple syndication), Bloglines.com provides an excellent means to do so. Bloglines is web based so there's no software to download. And it's free.

There is also an excellent tutorial in a post at betterdays published by Preetam Rai.

Track Your Firms Key Information Via RSS Feeds

Great Post from Kevin O'Keefe at LexBlog about BlogPulse offering RSS search feeds and how you can use these to track information about your firms name, top partners, etc.

---> RSS search feeds allow lawyers and legal marketing professionals to track key words and phrases. Firms should be tracking, among other things:

• Their lawyers' names and firm name to see what people are saying about them
  
• Names of competitors
  
• Nature of work they are looking to grow
  
• Subjects relevant to litigation and transactional work

I was surprised at the LMA national conference this last week that no one but me, was talking about, or for that matter even heard of, the ability to do this.

I'm with you Kevin. I'm also amazed that more lawyers and law firms aren't taking advantage of things like this.  Blogs and RSS Feeds are the future.

RSS headlines delivered to your phone for free

New service from FeedBeep that notifies users of new RSS headlines (based on keywords) via SMS (text message). Its now open to anyone who can access text messages on their phone or mobile device. Registration is free and very simple.

Hundreds of thousands of data feeds are available in RSS format, and now you can receive alerts about events worldwide — as they happen — right on your SMS-capable phone. Alerts can be set to go to your mobile device or our web messaging system based on your keywords or any time new information is posted to a feed.

Visit FeedBeep today to open your free account.

RSS Defined

What is RSS - The Acronymn Means More than Most Realize

Rich Site Summary
Really Simple Syndication
RDF Site Summary

RSS files are formed as XML files and are designed to provide content summaries of news, blogs, forums or website content.  While the majority of RSS feeds currently contain news headlines or breaking information the long term uses of RSS are broad.