Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Blogging * *But were afraid to ask Jim Gaston Associate Director, SOCCCD IT.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Blogging *

*But were afraid to ask

Jim GastonAssociate Director, SOCCCD IT

New Stuff From District IT

MySite 2.0

MAP

New SIS

Overview

• What is a blog?• Consuming

– Finding– Organizing/Subscribing (RSS)

• Producing– Creating a blog– Creating blog postings– Promoting– Tracking Usage

Web Sites

http://del.icio.us/jgaston/blogs

http://digitaledu.blogspot.com

What is Blogging?

• From Wikipedia: A blog is a user generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.

• Derived from Web log

• Began as online journals/diaries but has now evolved into a new form of media

Impact of Blogs

• Dan Rather, Mark Foley and Trent Lott

• Daily Kos and Joseph Leiberman

• Around 60 million blogs• Every Day:

– 100,000 new blogs created– 1.3 million new postings

Reading Blogs

• Blog Index and Search– Technorati.com– Blogsearch.google.com– Search.blogger.com– Blogpulse.com

Subscribing to Blogs

• RSS (Really Simple Syndication)– A text file that contains updates to the

content of a site

• Often blogs will provide the entire text of a blog post in the feed

• Latest browsers (IE7 and Firefox 2) have full RSS support– Called Live Bookmarks or Feeds

Web Based RSS Readers

• Reader.google.com

• Bloglines.com

Producing a Blog

• Blogger.com

• Wordpress.com

• Edublogs.org

Creating Content

• Blog Posting

• Adding images and video clips

Promoting your blog

• Register your blog with your favorite blog search sites (i.e. Technorati.com)

• Link to other blogs

• Post comments with a reference to your blog

Tracking Usage

• If you build it, will they come?

• Site tracking– Sitemeter.com– Analytics.google.com

• Sites will provide small section of JavaScript that you can copy and paste into your blog