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Introduction
In some ways, the literature on blogging has yet to spring onto the critical landscape in the way that blogging itself has sprung onto the cultural landscape. While I suspect that there are at this moment both articles and books in the print pipeline that examine blogging from theoretical and pedagogical standpoints, for now there are a few key resources for academics interested in studying or writing about blogs and blogging.

Critical Works
While critical literature on blogging remains largely nascent, there are some resources for academics interested in researching blogs:

• Into the Blogosphere (http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/)
  This collection currently stands as the definitive critical work on blogging. Not only is it a great collection that examines blogs from a number of theoretical approaches, but it "practices what it preaches"—readers are invited to comment on the articles as one would to a blog posting. The collection, in fact, was created using Movable Type.

• A collection of articles about blogging & RSS in the library world (http://www.blogwithoutalibrary.net/?page_id=93)
  Though not created withthe field of Composition and Rhetoric in mind, this list of the work done on blogging in library science might provide an interesting entry point to compositionists wanting to study blogs.

• "'Push-Button Publishing for the People': The Blogosphere and the Public Sphere," by Clancy Ratliff (http://culturecat.net/node/402)
  Ratliff reproduces a conference paper on blogging and, appropriately enough, she reproduces it in her blog. The paper includes links to and engagement with essays from Into the Blogosphere.

General Works
While very little critical literature exists on blogging, a great deal has been written about the practice more generally:

• A Weblog Webliography (http://kairosnews.org/blogbib)
  Charles Lowe has assembled an extensive Web-based bibliography of online articles and essays on blogging.

• EServer TC Library (http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Blog)
  This site hosts another directory of Web-based texts on blogging. Though not as extensive as the one hosted at Kairosnews, this list does allow you to sort the collection in a number of ways, including by year published, by author, and by user rating.

Primary Research
There are a number of ways to find blogs to use in primary research. One could, for example, use the random links provided by Blogger or LiveJournal or the many blog rolls available on sites across the Web. However, a number of blog search engines exist to help you locate blogs.

• BlogPulse (http://www.blogpulse.com/)
  BlogPulse indexes just over 11 million blogs (at the time of this writing). But there's more than just a search engine on this site. Using the BlogPulse Trend Tool you can map out the occurence of terms and phrases in the blogosphere across time. For example, I used this tool to map out "composition pedagogy" and "Stanley Fish." The tool returned:
  
  
  
  The graph shows the huge spike in blogging about Stanley Fish just after his Op-Ed piece in The New York Times on May 31, 2005 . Clicking on the points of the graph returns the actual search results, so not only can you see that a lot of people are suddenly blogging about Stanley Fish, but you can see what they're saying as well.
  
  The BlogPulse Trend Tool is only one tool developed to utilize BlogPulse's search index. Visit the Showcase (http://www.blogpulse.com/ showcase.html) for other examples, including an analysis of blogging during the 2004 election and in the wake of the South East Asia Tsunami.

• Weblogs.Com (http://www.weblogs.com/)
  Weblogs.Com keeps a continually current list of recently updated weblogs, which might help in selecting blogs to read or study.

• blogdex (http://blogdex.net/)
  Blogdex tracks the spread of information through the blogosphere, using a contagion model for how information moves between blogs.