Back in the summertime, as we pondered the seeming imminent demise of Detod and the Daily Whirl, we briefly flirted with the idea of some form of replacement service that we might offer from our website ... the short version is that, although we are huge RSS fans, we have difficulty envisioning legions of lawyers downloading, installing and running client application software, irrespective of the relative ease or value.  We didn't see commercial potential for EDDix but we did see a hole in the market that could be a neat little value-added feature ....

 

Open window, billowing sheers, calendar pages on desk flip ... summer's gone ... we get caught up in publishing the EDD Supplier Landscape book ... we do nothing to pursue the idea ... NYT and WSJ go RSS ... Yahoo disintermediates the RSS reader, allowing users to just bring RSS feeds into My Yahoo ... these things are good -- they build the category ....

 

And now, Condesa has launched a web site and service, Blawg Republic, that categorizes blawgs and collects new posts hourly.  User access is free.  Listing your blawg is free.  There is some low-instrusion advertising corralled into the right-hand column a la Google and others.

This is not about dusting your own RSS reader -- we're keeping ours and have subscribed to the Blawg Republic feed.  This is about extending audience reach to a lot of potential readers that might be interested in blawg content if they didn't have to materially change their behaviors to do so.  The reality is that, for the vast majority of people in the legal community, downloading and installing an application is an unnatural act; moreover, if you are behind a corporate firewall, downloading and installing an app is not only unnatural, it may be outright prohibited.

 

Right battle.  Right place.  Right time.  Right on!