Where do I find the time? A common question for many lawyers… for just about ever subject, actually. Not billable? Sorry, no time.

Keeping perspective on personal productivity is an important issue. True, but what about down time? While the typical lawyer has less ’social surplus’ (see video below) than the average person out there, most still have *some* time dictated by personal choice. If you’re not working, doing a family activity, sport, club/assoc. meeting, grocery shopping or laundry - what are you doing then? where do you escape?

Clay Shirky’s video from the Web 2.0 Expo (below) is thought provoking. Every hour can’t be accounted for under the category of “work productivity”. There’s a lot more optional time than any of us believe.

So for every law blogger, twitter user (yup that’s me), or social network participant out there who has to answer: ‘where do you find the time?’ … Tell them you’re being very productive, with your social surplus. And that many parts of the social web are both productive for business, and enjoyable.

Do lawyers watch TV? I suspect a few do.

[hat tip: Connie Crosby]

There have been a couple of recent additions to the Florida Lawyers Blog Watch, the blog commentary tracking site I’ve been working on with Stem client and Florida criminal attorney Ron Chapman. These two bring the total to 38:

• DIY Divorce in Florida
• Palm Beach County Family Law Blog

Also note worthy, I can see from the statistics that the RSS Feed for this site is being re-published by a number of law firms inside the firewall. Very smart… allowing lawyers in-house to scan the ongoing stream of blog posts without leaving the firm Intranet. That’s fantastic & creative usage from my perspective. What RSS can and should be used for! Well done.

What if you took all of the lawyer blogs within a given region, say Florida, and mixed them into a single location online? Well, ta-da! :) Let me introduce you to my latest RSS feed mixing effort - the Florida Lawyers Blog Watch.

I’ve wanted to create a website like this for a while. Something that tracks the latest lawyer blog commentary, but on a regional basis. Want to know what’s on the minds of Florida lawyers? This site will show you about three days worth of current topics, and more importantly, offers a quick 2-minute scan of the day’s headlines.

For me, publishing & mixing are the untold value of RSS. As I mentioned in a recent post, RSS needs to expand its boundries from the personal feed reader and create new context by placing sources together. I’m also a big believer in Author credit, so you’ll notice the blogroll on the right side of the website offers direct links to each of the Florida lawyer blogs the site tracks.

I want to thank Stem client and Florida lawyer Ron Chapman. Ron will serve as my regional lookout for any new lawyer blogs coming online, and also as a co-contact point for those wanting to be added to the site.

And finally, I’d like to point out that the full-text RSS feed for those blogs combined is available here. If you need to listen to what’s happening in Florida law and have an RSS reader, it’s an easy subscription choice. If you really wanted to get fancy, try monitoring specific topics or keywords by filtering the feed with a product like Feedrinse. Wonderful tool, IMO.

Hope everyone enjoys this website. A mobile version is in the works!

One of the biggest areas of unexplored territory in legal web marketing these days is the power of RSS, or real simple syndication.

I’ve written in the past on the use of RSS in law firms (see here and here), and how those in the legal industry can be better consumers of information using this technology. However, for those of us on the marketing side of things, the best opportunities for RSS right now are in publishing, not consuming.

A great example, Infolaw’s Nick Holmes over in the UK has mixed together the content of 13 different family law blogs into a single feed using Yahoo Pipes. Now, Nick has followed up in a comment saying this was ‘no big deal’, but I’ll tell you what is a big deal: the opportunity this type of feed mixing offers to law firms and their web presence.

Many law firms are slowly adopting and getting onto the RSS bandwagon. And that’s great! For firms that don’t currently offer it, I hope there’s a plan in place to syndicate soon. I guarantee you’ll be hearing a lot more about RSS in 2008.

Now that said, once you do have your content RSS enabled, the next obvious question is — what are you going to do with it?

Your firm website will offer those feeds, probably running through a tracking service like Feedburner to get a subscriber count. But then what?

This is where the mixing that Nick has done comes in. For another example, check out Stem’s feed mix of Canadian legal publications; it was created using Yahoo pipes too. The power comes from taking these feeds and combining (or mixing) them. Content can take a completely different flavour, and be directed at a completely different audience when using this technique.

And most important, be automated to extend the firm’s content reach with no further effort by lawyers or staff!

Law firms frequently put together cross-disciplinary service groups, either for a target industry, or a specific client. Imagine being able to take the various online commentary from your contributing internal groups, and combine it to create a new dedicated product. Or, imagine being able to filter everything the firm publishes for the keyword “environment” and publish it to a new online location, and then directing those clients interested in environmental issues.

For me, that’s why law firms should take notice. RSS is easy, it’s cheap, and is probably the most flexible new technology the web currently has to offer.