Miscellaneous

RSS and Competitive Intelligence

By Bill Gratsch

Dennis Kennedy's column in the March edition of the ABA Journal, Really Simple Competitive Intelligence, offers an interesting, quick read on using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds for competitive intelligence purposes.

Especially useful is that Mr. Kennedy highlights free options readily available to the average lawyer and explains them in layman's terms:

While sophisticated, expensive and impressive CI tools are available, let?s look at two free tools that will give you a good taste of what CI is and how it can help you. Both tools fall into the category of alerts.

The first tool is e-mail alerts. An e-mail alert is like a customized e-mail newsletter on the subject of your choice...

...If your e-mail inbox is already overflowing from other sources, then you will want to experiment with another type of free alert tool known as an RSS feed. RSS stands for really simple syndication, but all you need to know is how it can work for you. RSS feeds are a way to have items from frequently updated sites (like blogs) delivered to you without the need for visiting those sites individually.

You subscribe to RSS feeds (some­times called news feeds) and you read them in a news reader. For our purposes, let?s use the free Google Reader to illustrate news readers and RSS.

Good stuff.

You can read the above snippet in context (along with Mr. Kennedy's column in its entirety) by clicking here: Really Simple Competitive Intelligence

He also mentions the subject in a recent post on his weblog, Really Simple Competitive Intelligence.

Full post as published by Blawgs Blog by Bill Gratsch on February 28, 2008 (boomark / email).