Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Blogging

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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About
Blogging

• But were afraid to ask

Jim Gaston Associate Director, SOCCCD IT
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New Stuff From District IT
MySite 2.0
MAP
New SIS
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Overview

• What is a blog?
• Consuming
• Finding
• Organizing/Subscribing (RSS)
• Producing
• Creating a blog
• Creating blog postings
• Promoting
• Tracking Usage

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Web Sites

• http//del.icio.us/jgaston/blogs
• http//digitaledu.blogspot.com

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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

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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

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Reading Blogs

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

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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

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Web Based RSS Readers

• Reader.google.com
• Bloglines.com

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Producing a Blog

• Blogger.com
• Wordpress.com
• Edublogs.org

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Creating Content

• Blog Posting
• Adding images and video clips

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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

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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