Legal Research

Lexmonitor & Threaded Law Blog Posts

By Steven Matthews

Something that we haven’t mentioned here on Slaw is the new law blog monitoring website Lexmonitor. The site was developed by Kevin O’Keefe and Lexblog, who are normally in the business of building lawyer blogs, and now expanding into the world of aggregations & web publishing. If you subscribe to the make your own media approach, which I frequently do, then a monitor tool aligned with the company product makes a lot of business sense.

When I noted the launch of Lexmonitor a couple weeks back, the concept I thought the most of was the threaded discussion tracking. I called it, and still believe it to be, Lexmonitor’s killer feature. Very similar to the functionality of techmeme, a technology tracking site of similar utility, lexmonitor connects posts that are on similar topics, or have a linking relationship.

Here’s a screen capture of a recent post by Connie, and the related discussions from other legal bloggers:

Now, if I was to fire a couple arrows here, I’d probably suggest:

• more frequent updates;
• more than 4 discussions on the homepage (10 perhaps?); and
• dedicated subject area pages, with a smaller number of pulled blogs & more focused discussion threads.

But not today… For now, I’ll call it a great start. The opportunity to get demanding isn’t going anywhere. :)

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on July 15, 2008 (boomark / email).