Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Blogging as Diary

Today we're digging into blogging as a form of diary.

A few to check out from LiveJournal:
Lalitadasa
SamIam
G-Whiz

Elsewhere:
Apifera Farm
BabyLalai

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

The strange relationship between blogging and journalism

Today we are tackling the issue of journalism as it relates to blogging.

Take a look at these heavily trafficked blogs:

Firedoglake
Redstate
Gizmodo
Gawker

And, take a look at:
Slate
The Times Union with a special emphasis on their blogs
EPluribusMedia

Monday, November 3, 2008

Additional Places to Find Blogs

As students beginning working on their fourth essay, they are looking around for a blog to observe and participate on for a week. Finding blogs isn't hard, you just have to know where to look.

Technorati.com has a blog directory that provides a comprehensive index of blogs by topic.

It also offers an "authority" and a rank. The authority number is the number of inlinks to a blog (that is, the number of links from other blogs to the blog you are reading). The rank is calculated based on your authority rating. The higher the authority the closer the blog is to the top and the smaller the rank. So, a rank of "1" is a top-authority blog, if you will.

Technorati's front page also provides headlines of "rising stories" in the blogosphere that are interesting to peruse in their own right.

Another useful source for finding blogs is Google's blog search. In addition to being able to search the blogs indexed by Google, it also provides on its front page top stories on the blogs or on Web pages that are inlinked from other blogs.