You've probably seen that orange icon over on the right side of the page, and maybe you've heard someone talk about "feeds" or use the acronym "RSS." But what exactly do they mean, and how can they help you in your legal education or research?
RSS stands for "Real Simple Syndication," and it's essentially a means for distributing information over the internet with very little effort on the part of the sender or the receiver. You can subscribe to RSS "feeds" on many websites (including the New York Times, CNN.com, and the Law School Faculty Blog, to name a few) using a program called a "feed reader" or "aggregator." Stand-alone examples include Google Reader, MyYahoo!, and Bloglines, but feed reading capabilities are also now built into many popular web browsers (like Firefox) and email programs (like Microsoft Outlook). RSS feeds are also the driving force behind podcasts and "podcatchers" (feed readers for podcast feeds) like iTunes. When you subscribe to a feed, the feed reader will, on a regular basis, automatically check to see if the feed has been updated. If it has, the feed reader will grab that new information and display it to you. This means that you can easily view information from multiple sources in a single space, without having to go out and visit the actual websites yourself.
What does this mean for your legal education or your research? As UChicago Faculty Services Librarian Margaret Schilt points out in her Legal Times article "Is the Future of Legal Scholarship in the Blogosphere?" there has been an explosion of law-related blogs, and "blogs are where... scholarly dialogue increasingly takes place." Since almost all blogs offer RSS feeds, subscribing to ones that interest you via a feed reader is a great way to stay on the cutting edge of legal research.