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
