A while back now, I posted about Blog Scholar, a site which acts as a portal to academic blogs. Another resource I have just come across is Research Blogging. This has similar aims to Blog Scholar but the focus here is on bringing together blog posts about peer-reviewed research. The site guidelines mean that blog writers use a “blogging on peer-reviewed research” icon when they are posting thoughts on research rather than a simple mention or link to the work. In addition, a full citation of the work being cited is generated.
You can view the latest Computer Science posts or view the available RSS feeds from the site to subscribe to areas of interest.
Today is RSS Awareness Day so I thought it would be useful to celebrate this by sharing some information on RSS (Really Simple Syndication).
Some of you may already be familiar with RSS feeds and even use the RSS feed on the SCIT blog. For those that aren’t, RSS is a simple way of subscribing to your favourite web content. You can use a desktop RSS reader (Outlook 2007 and ThunderBird have RSS feeds integrated to their e-mail applications), or you may prefer to use a web-based RSS reader. Bloglines and Google Reader are both popular RSS readers which you may want to try. Once you’ve got your RSS reader sorted you can subscribe to any RSS feed (usually an orange button like the one on the left column). BBC News website has RSS feeds you may be interested in, and almost all blogs have an RSS feed to subscribe to. You can also set up RSS alerts for searches from some of our databases such as Computer Source.
There’s a great video demonstrating the basics of RSS from YouTube:
As the volume of information available on the Internet continues to increase, we need to learn more ways of finding the good stuff. One way of locating useful and more “academic” blogs is to use Blog Scholar which is an academic blogging portal. It invites academics and others working in education to submit their blogs to the directory so that they can be found by those interested in their subject matter. Worth a look is the computing category.
Just a quick update….if you’re not using RSS feeds and would prefer email alerts to new blog postings, it is now possible to subscribe to SCIT Blog via email. Simply click on the link to the right under subscribe to this blog and enter your email address.
The British Computer Society should be a familiar organisation to SCIT students and the website is well worth a regular visit. Among the range of useful resources you’ll find on the site are the BCS blogs which I have recently added to the blogroll. There are currently six blogs focusing on different aspects of computing and IT including gaming, data migration, process modelling, digital rights management and the weird and wonderful side of IT. A great way to stay on the ball in the ever-changing world of technology.
Found any other useful computing blogs? Leave a comment or drop me an email with the details.
Welcome to SCITblog – the learning resources blog for computing and IT staff and students at the University of Wolverhampton.
This blog aims to keep you informed of learning centre news and of new online resources for computing and maths. Please let me know what you think by leaving a comment or send me an email especially if you’re an experienced blogger with some tips to share!
Blogs are a great way of keeping up to date with what’s happening in your field of interest. If you’re new to blogs, have a look at the BBC’s guide to blogging and to start you off, try the Guardian’s technology blog, which at the moment is buzzing with talk of the Apple iPhone.
Posted by Helen Curtis 
Posted by Jo Alcock 
Posted by Helen Curtis 
