LexBlog aggregation and syndication platform coming this month

LexBlog is launching a new aggregation and syndication platform this month that will power the LexBlog site.

Earlier this year, LexBlog’s new editor-in-chief and publisher, Bob Ambrogi both set forth the future of LexBlog and challenged our team in stating:

We want to make the LexBlog network valuable for both publishers and readers of legal blogs. For publishers, we want to help them extend their reach to a global audience. For readers, we want to offer as wide a range of content as possible, but curated to make it useful a reader’s specific interests.”

LexBlog’s mission was now to aggregate all legal blogs, worldwide, and syndicate them in which the blogs and bloggers could be discovered and read. The technology that ran LexBlog was equipped to aggregate and syndicate, thus the build of the new platform.

As with any platform, it’s impossible to know where we’ll end up going with new features, new technology and new products that will emanate from the platform. 

Core to the platform’s evolution though will be publishing. How to shine a light on the authors? How do we provide a good experience for the authors (one they don’t pay for)? And most importantly, how do we provide a good experience for readers?

When LexBlog, then known as LXBN for the “LexBlog Network” was developed seven or eight years all of the blog posts were merely excerpts. When you clicked on a brief excerpt of the post, not enough to even get the gist of post, readers were taken to the blog site to read the post.

I am not sure we could have done it any other way. Law firms would have freaked had we displayed their content in entirety on LXBN, to be read there.

Today’s a new age. Users need to have a simple, eloquent and fast reading experience – particularly on mobile.

For that reason, like any publication, LexBog will have the full posts for easy reading. And unlike eight years ago, law firms and lawyers are not freaked out about it. They like the exposure and influence LexBlog can give them. Syndicating content, just as a TV show is syndicated makes good sense.

Law firms, large and small, are signing up to have their blogs in LexBlog – at no cost – in large numbers.

We’re not going to index their content on Google, their blogs and posts on their blog siwill be indexed. We want the bloggers and the blogs to get featured on search. 

But for a good reader experience and ease of syndication, both benefiting the the authors, we’ll have the full post for reading on LexBlog.

Make sense?