Week 2: Blogs

Now that you’ve explored the Learning 2.0 @ Mac blog and found out all about the programme, it’s time to jump in and start playing with the tools & technologies! This week, we’re focusing on blogs. This post will give you a brief overview of the technology, explain the activities for the week, and provide links to some additional readings for those who would like to know more!

Blogs: An Overview

A weblog (or “blog” is a format for publishing content on the web. As the name suggests, blogs are, quite simply, web-based logs of information that have the following features in common:

• content that is organized in reverse chronological order, with the most recent entry appearing at the top of the Web page;
• a date and timestamp to indicate when the content was published to the blog;
• archives that are automatically generated by the blog software;

Most early practitioners and blog commentators agree that the blog format began with the simple “What’s New” pages that littered the Web in the early days of web publishing. The blog format was formalized when web/tech savvy individuals began writing their own programs and pieces of software to make it easier and quicker to publish these sorts of pages, where it was important that current content appeared at the top of the page. And once these programmers made this software freely available online, the now widely-used blog format was born.

While the media still tends to treat blogs as the domain of teenage girls (who have nothing better to do with their time than talk about the minutiae of their lives in agonizing detail), you can now find blogs being written by everyone from politicians, to CEOs, published authors, educators, and librarians! Here are a few examples of blogs used in a number of universities for a variety of campus services:

• School of Information Career Services Blog (University of Michigan)
• Appalachian Alumni Association Blog (Appalachian State University)
• McMaster University Libraries Research Help Blog (used for internal communication amongst Reference desk staff)
• Blackstone Hall Project Blog (Clark University) (used to accompany a building project)
• Library Suggestion Blog (Virginia Commonwealth University) (used as an online “suggestion box”)

Blogging Software

We don’t want to get too hung up on software talk, but it’s probably a good idea to understand the basics:

• There are 2 types of blogging software tools out there: hosted and installed.
• Hosted blogs allow users to sign up for an account and a free blog. The company providing the software usually takes care of everything for you, and all you have to do is choose a name for your blog and write! We will be using hosted blogs for this programme.
• Some of the most popular hosted blogging services are Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress.com, and Vox.
• Installed blogging services provide you with the software that you can download to your Web server. Installed software tends to be more powerful and gives you more control over the functionality and look & feel of your blog.
• Some examples of installed software are Movable Type, Textpattern, and WordPress.org.

Activity #1
Ready to start blogging? Good, because Activity #1 is to set up your own blog and add your first post!

• Use either Blogger or WordPress.com to set up your own blog. Both are free, hosted blogging tools where you can set up an account and start a blog. On Blogger, click the “create your own blog now” link; on wordpress.com, click “start your wordpress blog”. You’re free to choose either tool, if you need some help comparing the two, check out this page.
• If you set up your blog on Blogger, your blog address will be http://nameyouchoose.blogpost.com; on wordpress.com, your blog address will be http://nameyouchoose.wordpress.com.
• If you already have a blog and would like to use it to track your progress during this programme, feel free to do so!
• How you choose to identify yourself on your blog is your choice. You can blog under a screen name, anonymously, or as yourself. However, in order to track your progress, you will have to let me know your blog URL & real name. More info on this when we get to Activity #2.
• Once you’ve set up your blog, go ahead and write & publish your first post! The content of your first post can be anything you’d like — one idea would be to simply introduce yourself. I’ll be posting some blogging guidelines for this programme later this week, so stay tuned for that!

Activity #2
Activity # 2 is simple: once you’ve set up your blog, send me a message with the following info: :

• your name
• your blog URL

I’ll compile a list of participant blogs and post it right here (in the sidebar) so you can follow your colleagues’ progress!

Further Readings (optional)

• Anatomy of a Blog (skip section 2.8; we’ll get to feeds next week)
• Blog, Wikipedia article
• Weblogs: A History and Perspective, Rebecca Blood
• The Ethical Blogger, Karen Schneider
• Why and How to Use Blogs to Promote Your Library’s Services, Darlene Fichter

If you have any questions, leave a comment here or get in touch with me. Happy blogging!