Hi Everyone,
Just found a helpful tutorial on how to subscribe to news feeds using bloglines from the American Community School Of Abu Dhabi .
If you are still having a hard time with news feeds, check it out :
Once you have read this post, please check out the links to blog examples on the right hand side of this blog. Let your mouse rest over the link to read a short description of each blog.
What follows is a crude and basic definition of what a blog is:
The term ‘blog’ is short for web log, which is basically a net based website that is organised in chronological format. David Tosh and Ben Werdmuller offer a more precise definition in “EPortfolios and Weblogs: One Vision for ePortfolio Development:”
Ethos of the weblog:
A weblog is defined as any web page with content organised according to date. Originally, these were pages keeping track of a user’s discoveries on the newly emerging World Wide Web; later the definition expanded to encompass personal diaries, work-related progress reports and even summaries of current events on newspaper websites. Weblogs have enormous strengths as a communication medium. This is in part due to some of the technology underlying them, but it is also related to the ease of publishing. A weblog author can press a button to load their weblog client, type some words into a box, press another button – and it’s posted up for the world to see. This immediacy and ease of use is paralleled only by email, which may go some way to explain weblogs’ increasing popularity. Technorati.com, a weblog search engine, watches nearly 2 million weblogs, while LiveJournal.com, a weblog community, has a further 2.5 million members. (“Eportfolios,” 3-4)
This may seem like an everyday occurrence now, but as Tosh and Werdmuller state in “Creation of a Learning Landscape: Weblogging and Social Networking in the Context of e-Portfolios,” the inception of blog technology allows access to those who are not necessarily ‘net literate:’ “[Blogs allow] average users with no technical ability to easily maintain a regularly updated web presence ( “Learning Landscape,” 4). The implications of this user friendly interface are that they enable efficient and free access to net real estate that is open to anyone who has access to a computer with an internet connection (or even a cell phone. At the time of writing this (10/05), websites like Blogger are enabling their hosted blogs to be posted to via cell phone (and email). The blog is not limited to solely text entries. Multimedia such as photos and podcasts can be posted to blogs as well. The implications of these developments on the internet have been exemplified in the use of cell phone cameras in documenting the events surrounding the recent hurricanes in Louisiana on sites such as Wikipedia. This is lending credence to the reputation of blogs as they are moving from a more marginalises, subversive form of net technology into something that is being more widely accepted and implemented. Prestigious universities such as Harvard and Stanford are now using blogs in their law schools, “Webloggers currently include members of government (both US election candidates have weblogs for their 2004 campaigns), businessmen such as Bill Gates, and entire corporations like Google” ( “Learning Landscape,” 3).
WORKS CITED
Tosh, David, and Ben Werdmuller. “EPortfolios and Weblogs: One Vision for ePortfolio Development. “ University of Edinburgh, 2004. [accessed October 23, 05]
Tosh, David, and Ben Werdmuller. “Creation of a Learning Landscape: Weblogging and Social Networking in the Context of e-Portfolios.” University of Edinburgh, 2004.[accessed October 23, 05]
