An easy way to keep up with legal marketing news

Did you ever wish there was a quick way to keep track of legal marketing news on the web, and make sure you don’t miss anything? Then you should try the brand new Legal Marketing Reader “the easy way to keep tabs on law firm marketing news and resources.”

Publisher Amy Campbell calls this brand new site “an experiment and an evolving project.” I like it already. My favorite part is the list of the most recent posts from top blogs. Just by seeing everything in one place, I’ve already spotted a few items that I might have otherwise missed.

The need for tools like this grows every day. Francis Bacon wrote that knowledge is power. But that was in the seventeenth century, when books were scarce. Today, we are drowning in information, and new knowledge is more likely to make you confused than powerful.

A few years ago, two professors at Berkley published a study estimating how much new information is created every year in print, film, magnetic, and optical media. They called the world wide web the “fastest growing new medium of all time,” and calculated its total information content at sixteen times the information in the Library of Congress. Of course, that was five years go, so it’s probably 30 or 40 times by now.

But wait, that’s just for the “surface web” of static, fixed web pages. When you look up a book on Amazon, the information you see on screen is not on a static page, it is dynamically displayed from an underlying database which has been called “the deep web.” So for an accurate count, you’d have to add in all that data, plus the thirty-one billion emails sent every day, all the instant messages, and all those squirrel videos on YouTube. I’d give you the detailed totals from the study but they are already out of date because their most recent analysis was on 2002 data and they estimated then that annual new information was growing by about thirty percent a year. They haven’t updated it in the last few years. I guess they got tired of counting.

With all the information out there, it’s easy to get distracted. Now what was I talking about? Oh yeah, the Legal Marketing Reader is “designed to save you time and frustration sifting through the multiple sources of information… [and] brings the best of the best to one place.”

I’d like to believe that I am a big enough man that I would have written about this even if my blog had not been selected as one of “the best of the best.” Fortunately, I was not tested. Legal Business Development was indeed selected, and here’s my badge to prove it.

If you start watching my headlines on Legal Marketing Reader before deciding whether to come here every Wednesday, make sure you also check the Legal Marketing Blog from old friend Tom Kane, co-founder of the LegalBizDev Network. LegalBizDev is the only firm with two blogs rated among the best of the best.

The only problem with sites like this is that you have to remember to go to them. That’s why some people prefer to get the latest by email. (If you want to get this blog emailed to you every week, enter your address in the “Get email updates” box on the right side of this page.)

I’ve signed up for a few email subscriptions to other blogs, but I usually end up deleting the email before I read it. Sadly, that’s the best tactic I’ve found for keeping up with non-critical email: I don’t read it.

So I'm going to add the Legal Marketing Reader to my favorites list, and give it a try. How about you?