
Yesterday, I saw a demo of a product that can make the life of a sole practitioner, whether as a legal professional, a librarian, an intelligence professional – competitive, market or business, they are all the same to me, check out the recording of the IntelCollab presentation for a more fulsome explanation – or other informational services provider that much easier. The fact that the company is Canadian is just a colourful feather in its cap. The product is called Spundge (@spundge) and it positions itself as having “Smarter Curation, Awesome Content”, which to me is just a fantastic tag line. Similar to other aggregators of content I have reviewed here, I would describe Spundge from my vantage point as primarily a social and public media listening tool. The curator allows you collect media across various platforms, and then for a tiny monthly subscription fee, create newsletters or in “stories” in Spudge language with that content once you have filtered it for your specific needs. The stories can then be syndicated and pushed out to clients as a value added service (using Spundge Pro), a business development tool and/or even to other Spundge subscribers. The product is terrific for the sole or solo practitioner for a variety of reasons including its low subscription fee, easy to navigate, low barrier to use. Imagine, you are a solo librarian or intelligence professional, supporting a series of sole practitioner lawyers or small offices as a consultant. You could log into Spundge, create customized notebooks for each of your lawyer clients, and publish a story to each of them with ease on a daily basis. Or if you were a sole practitioner lawyer, you could create a notebook for each client or industry you were covering, scan the headlines without the need for expensive subscriptions since arguably, social media often reports on events before traditional media and be up-to-date on targeted current awareness as it happens. If a new publicly available source needs to be added, you just log into your settings add the RSS feed and away you go.
Oh, and if you had social interests on top of your work interests, you could track those too in private notebooks and read them in all your spare time.