If you look at the web feed URI at any LSNC website, you’ll see that we run all our feeds through FeedBurner. For example, Webdogs 2.0 itself gives you a full-text feed via http://feeds.feedburner.com/webdogs. Nominally the great virtue of FeedBurner is that, among other things, it’s a free way to get basic stats on feed traffic, something that as yet you cannot track with, say, Google Analytics, although no doubt Google has plans to throw feed analytics into the mix.

But at this stage of things within the legal services community, does this sort of tracking of RSS and Atom feeds even matter? The answer to that largely depends on who your web audience is.

Here’s an object lesson to illustrate the point: The LSNC.net home page LSNC Advocate Feed has provided a full-text feed (initially using Blogger but now reying on WordPress) since September 2003. That same home page currently averages somewhere between 4,000 to 5,000 page views per week. But after more than three years of full-on feed service to the legal services community, the LSNC Advocate “feed” averages, in a good week, maybe 100 feed pulls. Let me do the math for you: At best, maybe 2.50% of its readers get the job done using a feed reader.

So, what’s the point of tracking this kind of feed data? Hell, what’s the point of having the feed at all? Well, there are several good reasons to have feeds, and to use FeedBurner to do it. Let me explain.

First, there is the “audience” thing. In contrast to the LSNC Advocate Feed, the two-month old puppy you know as Webdogs 2.0 gets more than half the feed traffic LSNC.net gets, i.e., about 60 folks per week pull the Webdogs feed chain to rattle its cage. This is against an average of about 200 page views a week. No big shakes, but even you can do the math on this one: The tech-oriented audience that reads Webdogs 2.0 relies significantly if not predominately on feed readers to access its content.

Second, the free FeedBurner package offers a helpful tool called SmartFeed, namely, it “translates your feed on-the-fly into a format (RSS or Atom) compatible with your visitors’ feed reader application.” Granted, most current feed readers with any serious web cred should handle your feed with aplomb, but it’s nice knowing you’ve got your feed butt covered, right?

Third — and, truth be told, this is the real reason we use it — FeedBurner offers a totally free email newsletter service to complement your feed. What it means is that you can provide your readers with the option to get their feed updates via email. And this is exactly what we do with the fresh content published at our Cases @ LSNC.net and Regs @ LSNC.net sites. For example, you want to read our case summaries in your feed reader? We give you all the feed you need. Not ready for the feed thing yet? Subscribe to the email version at your discretion. And here’s an example of what you get (shown in Gmail):

But there’s more that comes with this enormously useful side of the deal with FeedBurner. You don’t need to do anything other than post your content. Each day, FeedBurner automatically formats and sends out the emails for you. How good is that? It’s this good: Say LSNC welfare guru Jodie Berger, as she does in the normal course, posts a couple of new Regs summaries using Live Writer. Her new content appears immediately at the blog site. Without her or anyone else doing anything more, at the end of the day FeedBurner sends out the same updated content to all the email subscribers. That’s how good it is. And it’s all free.

Even if underutilized, web feeds are now unquestionably a core publication technology. Why do non-geek legal services folks not use feeds more? Some argue that most folks don’t want to change how they do things, and they already get enough — perhaps too much — via email. That may be a partial answer, but I also think we are approaching a tipping point where potential feed users will buy in because the web applications they are already using will soon offer dramatically improved and usable RSS feed features. The relative ease with which web-based tools like the much improved Google Reader can now be integrated into Gmail is only further evidence of that.

Simply put, there will be real reasons for them to use and rely on feeds. And, as a practical matter, once users get familiar and comfortable with using feed features in Firefox or IE or Gmail or Yahoo or whatever — then that will become the preferred way to get fresh newsletter content delivered directly to their “inbox,” whatever form that takes. Then LSNC can drop the whole FeedBurner “email” subscription thing altogether. And then maybe we’ll have use for FeedBurner’s core product: Real feed numbers that tell us something about our readers.

At the time the threshold problem was this: Assuming you have folks with something to say and something relevant to post about it, how do you make it really easy for the less tech savvy to add to your organization’s website?

Experience tells the Webdogs there is no easy answer to how to make things really easy for potential posters. Experience has also taught us that a user interface that seems slick and intuitive to the geek inclined, well, it just ain’t necessarily so to the typical LSNC staffer. And experience has further taught us that getting folks to be active contributors demands a system that minimizes the user-side barriers to writing and posting content. If there is a verity here, it is this: Every additional barrier, extra step or speed bump that precedes the user being able to do the task-at-hand, namely, composing and posting, then those obstacles inexorably discourage folks from doing just that.

LSNC has experimented with various web-based publishing platforms for three years now. The “light bulb” moment for LSNC occurred when Google bought out Blogger and stepped it up a touch by adding a Blogger button to the Google Toolbar, which offered a faltering idea about making it easier for multiple authors to contribute postings to the LSNC main page. At the time it seemed like a workable solution. We converted the LSNC home page to a custom Blogger template and recruited an editorial crew of several top advocates to share in the posting responsibilities. From that perspective, it all made sense. But Google’s implementation at that juncture of its newly slickified Blogger interface was very buggy and problematic, and the Webdogs found themselves dealing with frequent complaints from pretty much everyone they recruited as editors. It got pretty ugly. And over time we realized that, going forward, we would face significant limitations on what we could do using Blogger as a publishing platform at our domain. And we paid a price in lost good will with our editors.

So, we dropped Blogger and went whole hog for WordPress. Over time, we’ve deployed WordPress as the principal publishing tool for most substantive content areas at various LSNC web sites, including old stalwarts like its Cases and Regs summaries, and new content areas like The Race Equity Project, scheduled to debut this week.

But the challenge remains: How to make it as easy and practical as possible for contributors to compose and add content? With a fair amount of one-on-one’s to get folks comfortable with the nicely designed if fairly busy, not always intuitive WordPress Dashboard, we have succeeded in getting our long-time contributors accustomed to the quick login, composing and posting features in WordPress. That said, it seems fair to add that our WordPress users are reasonably comfortable with its interface, not because it is uniformly intuitive (which it is not), but because it is now familiar.

We are now taking a look at other options to make it (perhaps) easier or more practical for individual advocates to post items more directly than going through the WordPress Dashboard. Three options come to mind:

We were briefly—only briefly, mind you—impressed by the enhanced functionality in the truly wonderful Google Docs and Spreadsheets that enables you to create a document that you can publish from within Google Docs directly to WordPress or other blog publishing platforms. This involves configuring the “Publish > Blog Site Setting” within Google Docs to recognize either your hosted blog’s API or the URL to your blog’s call to the XML-RPC protocol (e.g., “http://www.yourdomain/wordpress/xmlrpc.php” for WordPress). It is a nice feature, and offers promise of better integration with other tools you can tap via your universal Google account. But it doesn’t integrate or support the “title” you would normally have for a WordPress post, and as good as it is the interface still needs work.

A second option we had fun playing with is the Performancing add-on for Firefox. This is pretty nice, actually, since the user can invoke the editor directly from within Firefox, compose and edit, and then post all in one swoop. And it supports “titles” and “categories.” Configuring this add-on is not particularly hard but it is noticeably less intuitive than Google Docs, especially if you need to manually configure the paths for making a “publishing” connection. For a manual configuration, if you don’t know to insert the path to your blog’s XML-RPC file, whew, you are soooooo screwed! But it offers great convenience because it is integrated into Firefox and can be invoked with one keystroke or click.

A third, and arguably the best option is Microsoft’s Live Writer Beta. Live Writer is a desktop application, so it’s use is limited to locations where the user has it installed. But it offers way more than any or all of the preceding options. Configuration is as it should be: To create a new “weblog” account all you need to do is enter the basic URL for your site (e.g., “http://www.webdogs.org/”), enter your blog login and password, and Live Writer just figures it out for you. How? Who cares. It just does. Once your publishing connection is set up, you can use Live Writer’s very familiar Word-style interface to compose, and you can do so in one of three different views: Normal (rich-text mode); Web Layout (rich-text mode displaying against a background that mimics your site’s design, illustrated below); and HTML Code (for the more geek inclined). Plus you can view a preview of your post in a display that mimics how it will appear at your site. Plus it smoothly supports both “titles” and “categories.” Plus it has a built-in spell checker. Plus … Plus … And more Plus. There’s a lot to like here.

Live Writer may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for the Webdogs this may help ease the pain of bringing more contributors on board: Open Live Writer. Check. Compose using a pervasively familiar interface. Check. Click the publish button. Check. Now that is what we call making blog posting really easy.