With Google’s reintroduction of RSS on the Google Chrome browser, this week, law firms are going to be taking another look at RSS for their web publishing.
I’ll share a little history on how RSS (Real Simple Syndication) was first introduced to a lot of law firms, eighteen years ago, by me.
When you’re an entrepreneur (me) selling a new product (LexBlog), you learn the trigger points for selling. Paying off the credit cards and the second mortgage used to fund your business depends on it.
Introducing blogs to law firms, something they’d never heard of, one of the trigger points was RSS – or lack thereof in the case of most law firm websites.
RSS, I explained, was like a radio signal for a radio station. People and major news publishers had radios – in this case, RSS readers – but you have to have that radio tower sending out a radio signal to get your stuff to those radios so that it may be read.
Most law firms didn’t have RSS enabled websites. But websites weren’t built for publishing, so who cared twenty years ago.
In 2003, digital publishing came along en mass – including for law firms who began publishing their lawyers’ insight and commentary. Blogs were jumped on because they had it all over websites for publishing, not the least of which being the inclusion of RSS on blogs.
Now, RSS mattered. You needed RSS enabled sites to keep up with the competition as well as to get your content to your audience.
The days of Camelot for RSS have passed in many people’s minds – including in the minds or a lot of law website development companies and law firms.
We see a good number of firms – some the largest in the world – who are surprised that they don’t have a working RSS feed needed to syndicate their content across LexBlog’s network or to reach RSS readers being used by their audience. Sadly, they didn’t know any better.
With Google now shining a light on RSS and incorporating it into Chrome so users can save sites so as to automatically see updates, RSS is likely to be of concern again.
Hello, law firms, “There’s this thing called RSS, it’s like having a radio signal coming off the tower if you’re a radio station.”