A news aggregator enables you to follow relevant sources (blogs and mainstream media) as well as keywords and keyphrases relevant to your work. It brings the news to you vs. having to go out to individual outlets to get it.
Why should you use one?
News aggregators make your life easier and compile the information you want to see in one place, without having to sift and sort through other irrelevant information.
- Allow you to network
- Engage in conversation
- Follow relevant news
- Easy to share information from
They make it simpler to interact directly with your target audience of clients, prospective clients, and the influencers of these two—bloggers, association leaders, reporters, and publishers. They are also an essential blogging tool, in that you will be able to engage in the the existing “conversation” that is being reported and blogged upon.
By sharing items from your news aggregator on social networks you’ll pick up a following from all three of these groups in your target audience. Engagement will ensue with prospective clients and influencers by virtue of what you share.
Which one should you use?
Feedly is the most popular news aggregator. It’s an application for various non-mobile web browsers as well as mobile devices running on iOS and Android. Feedly compiles news feeds from a variety of online sources for you to customize and share with others. It also allows you to monitor key words and key phrases from Google News.
Listening to subjects (key words and phrases), including names of organizations, terms of art in your area of law, case names, and legislation can be as, if not more, important than following sources.
Flipboard is a social network and news aggregator providing stories in an eloquent magazine-style format that users “flip through” on mobile devices, including the iPhone and iPad. Flipboard has proven popular among lawyers because of its intuitive interface that reads like a magazine with heavy imagery.
In addition to aggregating items from sources and subjects you have chosen, Flipboard pulls news and information that has been shared by those you are following on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
Flipboard recently added a feature where you may select topics and Flipboard will gather the best content from the most influential sources. The more you use this feature, the “smarter” Flipboard gets in delivering you the news and information you’d like to see. Think “Pandora for content.”