Blogs in Plain English
The following video explains the fundamentals of blogs and blogging. If you have trouble viewing it here, check out the video home page.
What is a Blog? and Blog History
- If you haven’t already, watch the Blogs in Plain English video above.
- Read Rebecca Blood’s articles Weblogs, a History and Perspective and Hammer and Nail
- Check out this article about Anatomy of a Blog (pdf) compiled by Princeton University.
What is WordPress?
Now that you know (perhaps more than you wanted to) about what blogs and blogging are and how they came to be and have started your own, keep in mind a few points and questions:
- For this class you are using the WordPress “hosted” service (http://wordpress.com).
- Since you are required to post a few times a week, think about what topic(s) you will be blogging about: what are you most interested in? What are your hobbies? What are you passionate about? I’ve seen great blogs on all kinds of topics from arts and crafts to technology to entertainment.
- Blogs are an example of a simple but powerful CMS (Content Management System); the skills you learn using WordPress will help in using many other web applications.
- Blogs are as simple or complex, meaningful or silly, useful or stupid, as the writing, links, and media they contain. Blogs aren’t, in and of themselves, good or bad any more than a copy machine or phone or printing press is… they are tools that can be amazingly powerful or amazingly wasteful.
Blog Searches
Thanks to the continued, dizzying rise of the blog, many tools have become available that focus on them. Although you can search for any topic and find blogs amongst the result, a specialized search will often yield more direct results.
General search isn’t always as useful specialized blog searching. Every major service is rolling out a blog search of some kind, but the undisputed king of the hill is Blog Search Engine a very simple but effective tool based on keywords.
Other blog search services include:
- Best of the Web Blog Search – one of the most credible engines. Separated by subject which makes narrowing down easier. Based on “human” blog submission rather than web crawling.
- Blog Search Engine
- Blogspot
The trend appears to be, though, that blog search will either be an optional part of general searching or even dispensed with altogether as “blogs” simply become part of “the web.”