Today we will provide information and reviews about The end of GoogleReader: A sign of the decline of blogging and lessons for lawyers
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As you may have heard, yesterday Google announced that it will retire Google Reader, a free service for integrating and reading RSS feeds, on July 1, 2013. Launched in 2005, Google Reader has a loyal following but with Declining user rates, Reader, along with many other products, will now fall victim to another round of spring cleaning.
So what can we learn from the death of Google Reader? First, blogging (at least conversational blogging as opposed to blogging for SEO) is on the decline (I know my friend Kevin O’Keefe disagrees – but hear me out. GoogleReader grew out of Google’s launch of Blogger and is a tool provided for it. Make it easier for blogs to get traffic. Here, my experience is typical; as a long-time blogger, I relied heavily on GoogleReader for new stories (especially when I I used to publish ten to twelve posts a week on Legal.blog hours.
Lately, however, I’ve noticed that many young people who have passed through my office as interns or employees over the past few years don’t use GoogleReader and instead rely on other services like email alerts or GoogleNews tools to track new events. . . But then again, a lot of the younger generation I’ve worked with don’t follow blogs much, except for big cahoots like HuffPo or maybe (if they’re a lawyer) Beyond the Law. In fact, when I recently berated newbies for not knowing how to blog or set up and track RSS feeds, I didn’t consider the possibility that as a blogger, instead of being drawn into the 21st century version 3.0, I came as a passerby. upside down
Instead of producing content, I find that many lawyers these days are just starting content repositories, which are basically repurposing content produced by others. In my opinion, content management platforms are a worse SEO/marketing scam than blog scrapers, which most readers realize are simply content plunderers (plus bloggers can get away with scraping by claiming copyright and restricting the copy available via RSS protect in full scale). In contrast, content management sites combine a bunch of links and a few lines of copy (fair use) and make it look pretty. While the operator diverts traffic from other people’s efforts. Of course, no one thinks to ask what happens when the abundant free content dries up or goes behind a paywall, which is now the growing trend for many news services. The demise of Google Reader heralds a move away from free content.
GoogleReader teaches a second lesson for lawyers working in a dynamic industry: don’t get too attached because many of today’s products are still in their infancy and may look different tomorrow as the industry around them develops and changes. Although service terminations and changes are more common when a product is free, it is common for many products. For example, since 2010, I have used a fee-based version of a cloud platform, Box.net, to share files with clients. At that time, the box service was still difficult for my customers, so I stopped it. After hearing rave reviews about the service, I revisited it, only to find that the cost had gone up significantly (from $45/month for unlimited external subscriptions to $15/month per user – (including from internal or external) or moving to an enterprise version that starts at least $90/month according to the vendor I spoke with). Unlike gas or electricity services, cloud-based services are not regulated (I’m not suggesting they should be) which means users are at the whim of the markets. At the same time disrupting several participants, markets favor users and we can choose our services at any price. But sometimes, the market settles on a few models that may not have the feature set or price point we’re interested in.
Don’t get me wrong – I am in no way suggesting that lawyers wait to adopt technology. Instead, the message is not to get too attached to it. Even as providers make it easier to store and create documents in the cloud (and claim to make migration easier), you should keep a mirror of your files on a local machine or server in case you have to move suddenly. Keep experimenting with different platforms so you don’t lose your cross-platform skills.
In 2010, when I wrote Social Media for Lawyers with Nicole Black, she praised Feedly for tracking news and blog feeds and sharing interesting tidbits on Twitter. I set up an account but didn’t spend time getting comfortable with it because I was already married to GoogleReader. Now I wish I’d listened. It seems that life in the beta world always requires a plan B.
