Fight RSS Overload | Knowledge Management

RSS overload continues to plague us. To combat it, I recently eliminated some of my Google Reader feeds that I just never get to (I’m down to 141 now). Still, I have thousands of unread posts in those feeds. There’s something new from AideRSS that may help focus your feed reading on the good stuff and weed out the rest.

I’ve mentioned AideRSS before (see RSS Overload is the New Black). It’s an application that filters RSS feeds and delivers only the best ones to your RSS reader. The problem is that you have to go to the AideRSS site, create an account, enter feeds that you want filtered, and then add the new filtered feed to your reader. Not horrible, but a little cumbersome.

Now, however, AideRSS has integrated with Google Reader. This means that all you need to do is install a FireFox extension and Presto! – the AideRSS PostRank filtering system is applied to all of your RSS feeds in Google Reader. This makes the service 1,000% more valuable. For a nice detailed description of this, head over to Eric Blue’s Blog.

Of course, I can’t describe it as well as the people who made it, so here’s a video about this new Google Reader integration.

Other LawyerKM posts on RSS

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

RSS Bankruptcy

After only four days without Internet access, I am considering declaring RSS Bankruptcy. There are just too many RSS feed items in my Google Reader account, and I can’t keep up.

By now, most people have heard of e-mail bankruptcy: the act of starting over by deleting most (if not all) of the e-mail messages in your in-box and requesting that people resend messages if they are really important. It’s becoming pretty popular. Maybe the next version of Microsoft Outlook should have an e-mail bankruptcy button. Here’s an article about how venture capitalist Fred Wilson declared e-mail bankruptcy last month. His message was, “I am so far behind on e-mail that I am declaring bankruptcy,” he wrote. “If you’ve sent me an e-mail (and you aren’t my wife, partner, or colleague), you might want to send it again. I am starting over.”

I sympathize with Wilson. I know that I’ll spend most of the day playing the “e-mail catch-up game” when I return to the office after vacation. It’s stressful. But I feel an almost equivalent level of stress when I see that I have several thousand unread RSS items in my Google Reader account. There are close to a thousand items in my KM folder alone. Part of me wants to at least skim the items, but the other part wants to simply pretend they never existed. This is nothing new, really. I wrote about it last year in RSS Overload is the New Black. So, I should have seen it coming.

For now, I’m not ready for RSS bankruptcy. I’m just going to allow the items to accumulate, read some at my leisure, and really do nothing. (I know, it’s all very Zen.) If I miss something, it’s OK. I’m sure someone will re-blog it and I’ll see it eventually. Or maybe I’ll see it on Twitter, or maybe in my FriendFeed wrap-up email. Or maybe I should follow Tim Ferriss’ lead and outsource my RSS reading, the way he outsources his e-mail. Or maybe… it just doesn’t matter.

How do you deal with RSS overload?

Update: One thing that will help is Google’s new Google Reader application for the iPhone, which is still in beta. Read about it on Lifehacker. The previous version was pretty good, but it was clearly a “light” version of the full web-based RSS reader. The new version more accurately resembles the full version. Very handy.

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Enterprise RSS Webinar – NewsGator

On March 18, 2008 NewsGator conducted a webinar called “Increase Employee Productivity with Enterprise RSS.” Replay here. 

More LawyerKM on RSS here.

More on RSS from other KM sites here.

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Knowledge Management for Law Firms :: In case you missed it… Mar 2 – 8, 2008

Here are some of my favorite legal knowledge management & technology blog posts and other items from the week of – March 2 – 8 , 2008:

• Is Technology Failing to Simplify Life? (Tim Ferriss)
• Legal Issues from Facebook and Related Social Media Technologies: Panel Discussion (Slaw – Connie Crosby)
• Apple Aims to Put iPhone Into the Workplace [I hope they succeed] (NY Times)
• 10 guidelines for building your blog’s credibility (Real Lawyers Have Blogs)
• Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond (Read Write Web)
• Social Networking Moves to the Cellphone (NY Times)
• Padded lampposts for distracted texters being tested in London (Engadget)
• What a feed reader can do for you (Caselines – David Hobbie)
• DLA Piper launches trainee internet portal (“…similar … to the popular social networking sites Facebook and Bebo…” Managing Partner Magazine)
• Document Management Systems (DMS) and Knowledge Management (Eric Blue’s Blog)
• Lifestream – Aggregating Youself (KM Space – Doug Cornelius)
• Federal Court to Put Information in Your Pocket (Law.com – Lynne Marek)
• If you must use PowerPoint, study Steve Jobs, Cory Doctorow, or Larry Lessig’s speeches (Scoble on Twitter)

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Twitter and Follow | Knowledge Management

Another great Common Craft video (see below). This one is about Twitter.

I like Twitter (see the link to follow LawyerKM on Twitter on the right –>>). But I’m getting a little inundated with information these days, and Twitter isn’t helping. Neither is following people like Robert Scoble, the self-proclaimed “tech geek videoblogger” and prolific twitterer (or is it tweeter?). More than 11,000 people follow Scoble on Twitter.

I like following him as a Google Reader friend because he essentially vets content for me. Well, not directly, but you get the idea: I read the stuff that he has shared because if he thinks it’s interesting enough to share, then it probably is interesting enough for me to read. (See RSS Overload is the New Black to see how Scoble rips through 600 RSS feeds in a flash with Google Reader).

And for me, “following” is the killer app of Twitter. Socially, it may be interesting to learn that a friend is shopping for a new sweater or is exhausted from a six-mile run, but in a law firm – we can take the “following” concept to a business level. Whether it’s blogs, micro-blogs, instant messages, or tagged / favorite documents, if my boss thinks it’s important, I should too. If certain information flows to (or from) smart, important people (like the senior partners in my law firm), I want to catch that flow, too.

Give young attorneys a way (other than email blasts) to capture information flows and follow senior attorneys so that they can benefit from what these smart, important people are consuming (or generating).

And by the way – if you, too, feel inundated, check out one way to get a lot of content in one space: the LawyerKM Netvibes Universe.

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Knowledge Management for Law Firms :: In case you missed it… Feb 17-23, 2008

Here are some of my favorite legal knowledge management & technology blog posts and other items from the week of February 17 – 23, 2008:

• Best practices in law firm blogging (Real Lawyers Have Blogs – Kevin O’Keefe)
• Will Social Bookmarking Pay Dividends with Search Result Augmentation? (Read Write Web)
• Decent Search v. Good Librarian; Social Search and Iterative Questioning (Caselines – David Hobbie)
• Embed PDFs YouTube-Style with Scribd iPaper (LifeHacker)
• Digg Gets More Mainstream; But Are Their News Sources Too Narrow Now? (Read Write Web)
• LifeHacker Overload (LawLibTech – Cindy Chick)
• Law Library of Congress Adds RSS (Slaw – Steven Matthews)

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Knowledge Management for Law Firms :: In case you missed it… Feb 10-16, 2008

Here are some of my favorite legal knowledge management blog posts and other items from the week of February 10 – 16, 2008:

• 2/15 – Launch of Enterprise 2.0 Task Force – David Hobbie of caselines gives us a look at what they’re doing (and their approach) over at Goodwin Procter with wikis, blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, RSS, SharePoint, etc.
• 2/15 – Knowledge Management Snapshot for 2008 – Ron Friedmann of Strategic Legal Technology summarized a nice list of what participants of a recent KM function noted as their top KM priorities for 2008.
• 2/13 – Putting the Social into Social Media – Doug Cornelius of KM Space reflected on real-life connections brought about by online activity.
• 2/15 – Do Wikis belong in Law Firms? – (also posted here) – Connie Crosby shared a really nice slideshare presentation on Wikis in law firms.
• 2/12 – Wikis in Law Firms – An Alternative View – Ted Tjaden sparked a hot discussion in the comments about how (or if) wikis belong in law firms.
• 2/12 – iConnect at Deloitte – Jack Vinson of Knowledge Jolt with Jack wrote about Deloitte’s new expertise location application that monitors email traffic and extracts key words and phrases from communications.
• 2/10 – GoogleDocs – Collect Spreadsheet Data via Email – Cindy Chick of LawLibTech tells us how to use Google Docs to create a form and collect the data from email recipients. More info from the Google Docs Blog.
• On a wiki-related note, but from last week, before I started “In case you missed it…,” Doug Cornelius of KM Space, is looking for law firm wiki stories and speakers for a panel on the use of wikis in law firms to be presented at the ILTA conference in August. Details here.

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Too Much E-Mail Leaves Workers Disoriented, Inefficient | Knowledge Management

Update: the Wired link below is apparently dead.  Here is another link to the same study on ABC News and another on MSNBC.

Great article [dead link] on Wired. Best take-away: “Resist the urge to immediately follow up an e-mail with an instant message or phone call. Make sure the subject line clearly reflects the topic and urgency of an e-mail. And use ‘reply all’ sparingly.”

We in KM have a special hatred of email. Let’s hope that 2008 brings RSS, internal blogs, and wikis to reduce the amount of unnecessary email we have to battle. We’ll deal with RSS overload at another time.

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Too Much E-Mail Leaves Workers Disoriented, Inefficient | Knowledge Management

Great article on Wired.  Best take-away: “Resist the urge to immediately follow up an e-mail with an instant message or phone call. Make sure the subject line clearly reflects the topic and urgency of an e-mail. And use ‘reply all’ sparingly.”

We in KM have a special hatred of email.  Let’s hope that 2008 brings RSS, internal blogs, and wikis to reduce the amount of unnecessary email we have to battle.  We’ll deal with RSS overload at another time. 

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management for Lawyers and Law Firms

Google Reader, Meet Google Search | Knowledge Management

Although LawyerKM likes the idea of enterprise RSS, we know that many firms are not ready to go there. Will the lawyers use it? Is it worth the investment? Don’t get us started. Most of us here have resorted to Google Reader, which we love. We often wish that Google would make an enterprise version of it; but, we’re not holding our collective breath.

We’re such big fans of GReader, that we were shocked to see that Google added a search box – the lack of which we always found strange. [PC World agrees] How could Google — the search giant that it is — fail to have a search function in its RSS reader?

Even more shocking is that we didn’t notice that the search function has been there for a couple of weeks now. It has something to do with the fact that we’ve been really busy and also because we all have the Reader on our iGoogle pages – so we don’t really open GReader (proper) very often.

Well, we’re happy to see it. A belated welcome and thank you.

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management for Lawyers and Law Firms