Introduction to Blogs as an Information Resource Kevin Reiss Rutgers School of Law- Library

Workshop Background Introduction to Blogs and Blog-related terms How to read Blogs – Introduce an RSS Reader – BloglinesBloglines – URL: – Let’s sign up to use it now – Don’t worry this site doesn’t spam you Introduction to Legal Blogs Why it might be useful now and in the future

What is a Blog? Shortened version of the word “weblog” It is a website Consist of chronologically posted items Each item is archived Also known as “feeds”, “News Feeds”, “RSS feeds”, “XML feeds”, or Plain “RSS”

Let’s Look at one: beSpacificbeSpacific

Blogs Have Many Purposes Political Observations News Updates Online Magazines Organizational Calendars/Notices Personal Observations An alternative to bothersome listservs Database Vendors/Current Awareness – Westlaw now offers them

Blog Terms Aggregator – Piece of software that allows you to read, manage, and subscribe to Blogs or feeds Blogging Software – allows you to publish a Blog; see a list of toolsa list of tools RSS – Structured File Format that stores the postings made to a Blog, acronym for Really Simple Syndication Subscription – A Blog that you have directed your aggregator to monitor Syndication – Incorporating the content from a Blog into your own website; ex JURSIT on the Library Page Feed – Alternative term used to describe a Blog. Used in the context of subscription, as in “subscribe to my feed”

Blogs Are Powerful You can Subscribe to a Blog – Automatic Updates on new content Just copy the URL of a Blog and supply it to your aggregator Look for these symbols Blogs “push” information out to subscribers Blogs are published as web pages and as structured data in the RSS format which aggregators consume RSS-Another Acronym – Really Simple Syndication – Allows you to “subscribe” to a Blog – Allows “subscribers” to be alerted every time a new posting is added to the blog – You subscribe to Blogs using an “RSS Aggregator”

Using an Blog/RSS Aggregator We’ll Use Similar interface to programs like Outlook, Groupwise, Mozilla Mail RSS Aggregators a.k.a. – RSS Readers – Aggregators – RSS Aggregators – News Readers – Feed Readers

Legal Blogs Also known as “blawgs” Growing Popularity Law Library Maintains a list of popular Legal Blogslist Let’s starting using Bloglines to read some of them now The Law Library’s online Blog tutorialtutorial URL: library.rutgers.edu/resources/workshops/blogs