Learn About Blogging
Start with Wikipedia's Blog article.
Blog Connection's Blog Articles covers a lot of blogging territory.
Blood, Rebecca. "weblogs: a history and perspective," Rebecca's Pocket September 7, 2000.
Stefanac, Suzanne. (2006) Dispatches from Blogistan: A Travel Guide for the Modern Blogger. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.
Bloging Resources
The best list could be Mashable's Blogging Toolbox: 120+ Resources for Bloggers bringing you a "vast amount of resources, tools, and advice for bloggers."
Some Good Blogs
Here are some links to blogs that I think are good to follow. IMO, they either raise the bar regarding the sorts of writing one can find on a blog or are specifically related to education.
Into the Blogoshpere. An "online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs."
BlogPulse Trends is "the one-click answer to the simple question: "What's the buzz?" BlogPulse Trends identifies the topics and subjects that people are talking about in their blogs."
Stanford University Law School Professor and founder of the Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig's blog
Weblogg-ed News "All about the potential K-12 educational uses of Web logs and related technologies. Featuring a long list of edubloggers and best practices."
Stephen Downes' Half an Hour
And here are some directories to blogs: elearnspace's Learning & Technology Blogs, Blog Search Engine
What Does RSS Mean?
Read the Wikipedia article, RSS (file format)
RSS is an XML format that stands for "really simple syndication." It works for blogging and it is also used by news syndicators, such at the New York Times. RSS feeds are sometimes referred to in terms of XML, Extensible Markup Language (XML). The XML formats that "syndicate" content -- that is, make content easier to redistribute -- are doing RSS. You may hear them called news aggregators or content aggregators. If you look at one of the MovableType blogs on the LTC's MovableType installation, you will see "Syndicate This Site (XML)." It points to an index.rdf file. This is the URL that you add to your subscription list on your personal aggregator.
Radio UserLand has a nice, clear explanation on its site and with links to more information. Check it out.
What Is An Aggregator?
Aggregators are incredibly useful ways to bring the blogs and news streams that you follow together at one site. The one that I use is Bloglines, a free service that I can connect to from anywhere on the Web. I can easily add or delete feeds that I have selected.
News aggregators will periodically read a set of news sources that appear in one of these XML-based formats, and display them in reverse-chronological order on your page. For my personal new aggregators I have subscribed to news feeds from the New York Times, BBC, CNET, and Wired, as well as to various blogs that I am interested in following.
At this time, my first recommendation is to use Mozilla's Firefox browser and take advantage of its LiveBookmarks feature. Here is an explanation I wrote up on my own blog. If you are teaching and each student has her/his own blog, believe me when I say that this is the way to monitor their activities.
There are a number of for-profit and free aggregators. Before Firefox, I liked Bloglines a great deal -- it was free and pretty much free of advertising and accessible via the Web. Various aggregators work a little differently.
SG
