JD Supra Widgets Make Content Portable

One of my Stem clients that I've previously blogged about is JD Supra, a web 2.0 legal document sharing service. And while I like to show support for all my clients, as a librarian, I've always been drawn to this site's purpose: give content, get noticed. It fits my whole philosophy of using information driven marketing tactics, and for those medium to longer pieces of written discourse that lawyers so often produce, I find the product to be in a class by itself.

This past week, one of the features I've really been hoping for finally went live - web widgets. Widgets are important to me for a number of reasons. But mostly as a long time fan of RSS technology, I see them as a final end-product to making content portable.

The same way my Canadian legal publications website is a consumable offering for the latest product releases from legal publishers, JD Supra's web widgets will give lawyers & law firms an opportunity display their content anywhere they decide to web-publish.

But perhaps the biggest value I see for lawyers, is the ability to create a personal document collection once, and then to automatically re-publish the latest entries from those collections anywhere they see fit. Got a blog? Put it there. Got a lawyer profile on your firm website? Put it there too. Intranets, social networks, association websites, and so on.

Anywhere you represent yourself online, you're a cut & paste of a small piece of code away from dynamically inserting your latest publications and documents. It's an easy way of adding professional context, and best of all - it's completely automated! Once your widgets are in place, you've created a personal (& professional) syndication network that will automatically display your latest work product.

For me, that's an awesome capability to be able to leverage for clients. And for lawyers, that's simply working smart.

Congrats to everyone JD Supra for getting this new feature launched. Way to build the vision! :)