In apparently first professionally published article by [Morgan Wilson] good essay explaining
- Weblog terminology
- Weblog history links
- Weblog applicability to Law Librarianship
Good things about blogging: QUOTE [Morgan Wilson]
- Blogging software makes it very easy to maintain a blog.
- Blogging blurs the distinctions between reader, author, and commentator.
- Informality – most blogs have no pretensions about being polished work and there is a general understanding that blog information is not to be taken at face value.
- News feeds offered by some blogs can help with the information overload problem.
- Blogs can be very current and are a good way of keeping one’s finger on the pulse of developments affecting the profession.
- Blogging can be fun and opens a door into the blog community.
Bad things about blogging:
- Blogging is too easy – anybody can maintain a blog.
- The informal nature of blogs makes it possible for the blogger to add inane or inaccurate comments, or even do more sinister actions like alter /distort another person’s words.
- There is a lot of redundancy in blogs – many point to and feed off each other – although this is not always a bad thing.
- Combined with listservs, group emails, automated searches, clipping services, print and electronic journals, and everything else, blogs simply add to the information overload that all law librarians (also known as human filters) must deal with daily.
- The power of blogging can be abused. Blogs have been to create Google Bombs, a deliberate way of associating one item (usually unfavorably) with another unlike item
UNQUOTE [Morgan Wilson]
I disagree about how easy. I think this is a user beholder issue, in that there is a big learning curve to get into it, and not well defined where the threshholds are.
In PC hardware world there are standards of stuff to have to be able to accomplish certain tasks.
In Blogging documentation world it is not at all clear what the prerequisites are to learning how to do things.
Anything can be abused. e-mail viruses, spam, flames, crackers, denial of service attacks
some aspects of computing can be abused far worse than blogging.
YOU decide what you want to subscribe to, turn off a subscription if too much duplication, or it diverges from your interests.
TOOLS available to manage the information overload
Something else about RSS ... I am getting a list serve archives in headline form, like how we get USA Today headlines.
4:26:31 AM 
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