About Blogging

This site is published using blogging software from Radio Userland. Publishing a web log (or blog as it is more commonly referred to) has become a pastime for millions of people to publish their ideas and commentaries on everything from daily living to the war in Iraq and every imaginable political topic. There are many good blogs about technology. There are 150 technologists at Microsoft who do blogs. Bloggers interact with each other to do almost instantaneous commentary on a variety of issues, using the blogging software that has built-in XML based news aggregator subscription capabilities. Bloggers amount to an increasingly interesting and profound next step in using the internet for collaboration and discourse. In a way, blogging is to members of the blogosphere the next generation beyond instant messaging.

Blogging has an enormous potential for improving collaboration and discussion within public safety and justice agencies, and for creating ways to communicate on interagency projects or high-profile cases. If you want to keep a running log of what is happening on a case or project, and have it replicated to other participants, a blog is a really easy way to make it happen. Many of the applications of blogging within the justice field would have to be secured, so just doing this with off the shelf blogging software won’t cut it. However, there are ways to secure the information and still create quick collaboration among team members.

Blogs incorporate a publish and subscribe mechanism using a standard invented by the early Bloggers called RSS-Really Simple Syndication. It allows a user with a news aggregation software to sign up to receive updates from a blog on a frequent basis. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) has already figured out how useful this technology is and has set up its own RSS capability on its web site. One of the interesting things about RSS is that it is an XML-based standard that Bloggers have solidly adopted and now mainstream newspapers and others such as FDLE have adopted. While many agencies are just figuring out how to use XML and web services, the blogging community has just done it.

If you want to read a brief definition of blogging, Dave Winer who first conceived the idea explains the concept briefly. Dave presents a more extensive discussion of web logs in his superb article found in the pages of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School where Dave defines the elements of a blog. For a discussion which may lead you to find other applications of this technology in the justice world, Andrew Grumet has written a very thoughtful and visionary article about blogs.

Diego Doval has published a two part practical guide to getting started as a blogger or as a subscriber to existing blogs in case you want to just be updated in near real time on technology happenings. His first article, which is an introduction to weblogs gives you the basic instructions on how to get started and is rich with helpful links. The second part talks about the ways to introduce subscription capability into your own blog but also how to subscribe to blogs that may interest you.

The list of blogs on the navigation part of this site includes some of the thoughtful people who keep enhancing this concept and the surrounding software, but also those who think critically about the relevance of this new form of collaboration.