Anne Reed takes a day off from explaining why juries don’t think lawyers are nearly as brilliant as lawyers think lawyers are, and provides  a helping hand to lawyers who would like to keep up with “Alll” the “Top” news and info but just can’t seem to find the time.

Many of you are already much more sophisticated about all this Web 2.0 stuff than I am, or will ever be.  I just started using an RSS feed about a month ago, because things with initials combined with the word “feed” tend to scare me.  When I learned that RSS stood for “really simple” something, I realized that I desperately needed something “really simple,” so this was something for me. 

Here’s the problem:  For working lawyers, browsing the web, not the mention the blawgosphere, takes time.  Not just the time to read whatever somebody writes, but the loading of web pages, the navigating, the time that your computer sits there staring back at you doing nothing. 

For a fellow like me, who makes an effort to keep atop the news and commentary in the blawgosphere while trying to earn a respectable living as a criminal defense lawyer, time is a problem.  There are a lot of posts by people I respect and admire, or hate and loathe as the case may be, every day.  Does anybody have enough time to read all these posts? 

And then new blawgs appear out of the blue, and we want to give them a shake and not ignore them because they aren’t “established”.  I can’t speak for anybody else, but I remember how hard it was to “break into” the blawgosphere, when other blawgs wouldn’t link to me or put me into their blogroll because I was just the new kid on the block.  The big boys were a bunch of snotty jerks, looking down their nose at me if they were looking at all.  They wouldn’t give me the time of day. 

But every now and then, something new comes along that has the potential to make some serious changes in the way the blawgosphere exists to the outside world.  And Anne has announced one of them.  I would have announced it, except I didn’t know anything about it until I found out from Anne.  I try very hard to be firmly positioned as a second stringer in Web 2.0 news.

The law page at Alltop.com, a brand new directory from marketing guru Guy Kawasaki.  I wish I’d had this when I first started.  It’s a “single-page aggregation,” with “the latest five stories from thirty or more sites on a single page.”  (Even Alltop finds this hard to explain:  “You can think of an Alltop site as a ‘dashboard,’ ‘table of contents,’ or even a ‘digital magazine rack’ of the Internet.”)  The sites and the order they’re in keep shifting, and if you want to go beyond law, there are dozens of other pages and new ones coming all the time.

Alltop.com?  Nope, never heard of it.  So I checked it out.  It’s pretty darned cool.  One page, a bunch of blawgs, a bunch of post titles.  I even found my blawg there.  Way down the page, mind you, but there.

Conceptually, this is a great way to keep an eye on what’s going on in blawgosphere.  It saves a bunch of clicks, page loads, etc., and allows the busy lawyer to check out the blawgosphere quickly and effectively.  There are some drawbacks, since titles often fail to provide much of a clue as to what the post is about or whether it’s a substantive post of just a link to someone or something else.  For example, most of my post titles tend to be more a matter of my sense of humor than particularly informative as to the content of the post, so this isn’t going to help someone like me unless I start playing it a little straighter with the titles.

It also is going to give an odd impression to the person who doesn’t know much about the blawgosphere, since there doesn’t seem to be any particular rhyme or reason to why blawgs are listed in any particular order.  Anne says the order keeps shifting, and I saw that as I renewed the page.  But let’s face some blawgospheric reality: There are some blawgs that carry more and fresher content than others, and there are big boys and the rest of us.  This page makes no distinction for the looker who doesn’t know what he’s looking at.

On the other hand, this presentation creates a democratization of the blawgosphere, where past performance is no indicator of future performance.  The newest blawg on the block can get as much play as the most well established.  This may give everyone a fair shot at new eyeballs to the blawgosphere, and then it will be up to the individual blawgs to hold onto them.  Nothing wrong with that.

But anything that saves me time and allows me to navigate the blawgosphere more effectively is good by me.  What would I do without Anne Reed?

Update:  And the Turk gets hosed again.  While Alltop covers all the important blawgs, it seems that no personal injury blawgs made the cut.  A commentary or an accident?  You decide.  But I see a pattern developing.