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feeds
Earlier, I posted with a fairly abrasive title, suggesting that a newsletter about blawgging that is available only by email struck me as odd. The newsletter publisher, Sheryl Sisk Schelin, of blawg The Inspired Solo, posted some thoughtful responses as comments on the original.
I bring this back up largely to address the thought more completely.
The title of the post was, "How to convince me you don't get it." (emphasis added.) I completely understand her points. Chunks of my day job have been spent proselytizing on the benefits of syndication and "Web 2.0." Other chunks of my day job have been spent wedging email notifications into products where moderately flexible feed notifications exist. I understand that it's a small community that truly gets feeds.
That it's a small community that gets it is precisely why I feel that those pushing blogs (and blawgs) should be utilizing the technologies to their utmost. That readers may not all use feed readers or even understand what that means, however, doesn't diminish the importance of using feeds for publishing. It makes it more important!
There are tools, such as Feedburner Email, to allow the recalcitrant users to subscribe to feed-based publications via email. There are tools in most publishing platforms to do the same. It's certainly possible to publish by feed and allow subscriptions via email, all without the user knowing what's going on at all. But more importantly, surely part of that publication will be education, and what better way to educate a user about the feed than to give examples of the the precise content they're looking at as a feed?
Obviously, publishers may publish however they want. However, in my opinion, if one truly gets and values syndications and feeds, it only makes sense to publish everything appropriate via feed and to make allowances for others when needs arise.
ZiefBrief points out that Westlaw's TWEN (The West Education Network) got touched up in
Last Wednesday, Westlaw unveiled a new look and feel for the law school home page, as well as some aesthetic and functional improvements for TWEN. One of the biggest changes is that you can now display only active courses on your "My Courses" page or only inactive or archived courses by clicking on either the "Active Courses" or "Hidden Courses" button. This is a nice feature that helps to reduce the clutter on your TWEN home page. If you'd like a quick five-minute tutorial that displays the latest TWEN changes, you can find the tutorial here.
I saw that, though I'm unconvinced it's an improvement. The old design was plain and ugly but workable. I'm unsure what's supposed to be on the front page of lawschool.westlaw.com, because it doesn't render at all in Firefox on the Mac. I could swear I've complained about TWEN more than just this in the past, but perhaps I'm wrong. Or perhaps it's just embedded in some of the others posts that mention TWEN.
What's wrong with TWEN? Here are a few major weaknesses.
Where are the feeds? In 2007, why am I being emailed (when someone chooses to notify by email) rather than being given an option to subscribe to feeds.
Where's the aggregator? Why doesn't TWEN allow a professor to set up a reading list of topical blogs? Or subscribe to a del.icio.us or Technorati or Google Reader shared links feed of tags for the class?
Where are the tags? Wouldn't it be great if you could tag content from around Westlaw with TWEN-aware tags? See a case on topic? Tag it. In fact, why doesn't Westlaw do this natively? Topic-based Key numbers are fine, but they're someone else's categorization.
And on that bigger topic, where's the Westlaw-wide integration? Isn't this supposed to be our first taste of West's crack? Why not really get us hooked, maybe with stuff we can use in the future.
West and TWEN (and Lexis, too) could stand to get out a little more. I may not think all is right with Facebook, but that's definitely a step in the right direction. Bring people together. Encourage sharing. Encourage networking. What's more, get them deeply integrated in the tools. That will really get them hooked.
More importantly, it will make the tools more useful.
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