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For the Birds: LegalBirds: Twitter Directory for the Legal Community

By Timothy Stanley

Hi Friends,

In early December, Justia and the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School setup a pre-beta version of “Legal Birds” of legal twitterers and their tweets, and integrated twitter feeds into the attorney profile pages in our Lawyer Directory. We have now enhanced the twitter section with graphical tools, community-building functions and better search functionality. The updated version can be found at LegalBirds.com.

Currently, LegalBirds.com

1. lists legal tweeters (“the community”) ranked in a few different ways,
2. displays Twitter user IDs and a hash tag cloud (e.g., #salmonella) for the most mentioned users and terms,
3. groups tweeters by practice, location and occupation (lawyers, academics, legal professionals) so that you can find kindred spirits,
4. spotlights tweeters in Google Maps and Google Earth,
5. provides RSS feeds for subscribing to tweets by category or term,
6. allows users to perform full-text searches of tweeters and the tweet archive,

We have further integrated Twitter into the Lawyer Directory with ia Twitter tab for individual profiles. And we have opened the directory to accommodate profiles from academics (professors, school librarians, students, etc.), legal professionals (legal publishers, experts, consultants, firm librarians, non-practicing lawyers who want a community profile, but do not want to be in a “lawyer” directory), and the judicary (judges, magistrates, and court staff).

Of course, we will be adding in more features and will be integrating a version of LegalBirds.com into the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School website with some extra academic focus :). And, we will be tying it into Justia BlawgSearch as well (the Justia version of LegalBirds.com design is based on the BlawgSearch.com‘s look and feel).

Rankings

Everybody loves rankings… and so we have set-up a few different versions. Find the one you rank best on, and use that one when talking with folks. First a few terms:

“Community” members are those tweeters currently in the Legal Birds Community (i.e., LegalBirds.com is indexing their twitter feed). If we are not following your twitter feed, be sure to Join Legal Birds today. We are continually adding feeds from new Legal Birds.

“All” are all twitter users.

“Connections” mean two tweeters are mutually following each other (i.e., tweeter A follows tweeter B AND tweeter B follows tweeter A). We view connections as the most valuable type of relationship because these are more likely to lead to conversations in the twittersphere.

“Followers” are those that follow a tweeter.

We rank tweeters by:

Community Connections – mutual followers from the community of legal tweeters.

Community Followers – followers from the community of legal tweeters.

All Connections – mutual followers from all twitter users.

All Followers – followers from all twitter users.

Tweets Today – the number of tweets a user has made in the last 24 hours.

We have set Community Connections as the default ranking because we value it the most (both tweeters in the legal community, following each other is more likely to lead to interesting legal twitter discussion).

Google Maps and Google Earth

You can view the people in multiple ways:

• list view showing their last 4 tweets (often useful when trying to determine who to follow),
• grid view which has quick ranking stats and
• map view (see below).

We also display community tweeters on Google Maps. You can view all of the community tweeters, those in a particular category or location, or just your own community connections, followers and followees.

Of course, you can also download a KML file to see all of the legal birds on Google Earth. We also provide KML files for each of the categories and for your individual community connections, as well as tweeters you follow and those who are following you. Click here to download the KML file of all Legal Birds.

In any event, enjoy LegalBirds.com, more will be coming soon :)

Peace,

Tim & Ken

:: Free Bird, Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd by Lynyrd Skynyrd

Full post as published by Justia Legal SEO Blog on February 02, 2009 (boomark / email).