ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the social networking tools that are available to individuals working with the legal information community. It encourages readers to think critically about some key issues when using online social networking tools and provides some suggestions for organizational and personal use of these tools. For many professionals social networking has become an important feature of the way they do business. Social networks include everything from project teams to sports teams, communities of practice to focus groups and many more. Online social networking has also become widespread because of the rapid and visible rise of new types of software (such as blogs, wikis, instant messaging, microblogging and bookmarking tools). These tools are more adept at helping people organize themselves, interact, communicate and share knowledge and information. Blogs have been around for about 15 years with the word ‘blog’ being short for ‘web log’. Blogs are effectively online diaries displaying entries in chronological order with the most recent first.
