Introduction to Blogs as an Information Resource

Kevin Reisskreiss@kinoy.rutgers.edRutgers School of Law-Libraryhttp://law-library.rutgers.edu

Workshop Background

Introduction to Blogs and Blog-related terms How to read Blogs

– Introduce an RSS Reader – Bloglines– URL: http://www.bloglines.com– 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: beSpacific

Blogs Have Many Purposes

Political Observations News Updates Online Magazines Organizational Calendars/Notices Personal Observations An alternative to bothersome email 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 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 http://www.bloglines.com Similar interface to email 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 Blogs Let’s starting using Bloglines to read some of them

now The Law Library’s online Blog tutorial URL:

http://law-library.rutgers.edu/resources/workshops/blogs