Teaching Blogging

Aaaahhh! Very nervous. I am scheduled to teach a blogging workshop for teens tomorrow evening. I am going to try to arrange it here. The best thing to do would be to go back to Thing 3.

Ask ages, if do any social networking, if have email accts.

Facts: There are over one million blog posts a day (Technorati).

We will be investigating Google Blog Search

Other things to know:

Google Blog Search Pinging Service: People who want their blogs crawled by Google and updated in Google Blog Search Should do this. You should ping as often as your blog changes. You can do that manually or automatically. You must have a site feed and sign up for pinging in order to get your blog listed.

You can search for entire blogs or individual postings.

SafeSearch can be used to filter out adult materials.

How to find the blogs you want to read: Use a blog search engine (Technorati, Google Blog
Search, Blog Pulse)

Safety/Consideration Tips: You are in charge of who sees your info. It's not always nice to share!

Respect the privacy of others. Don't i.d. people by name.

Do not meet people in person that you've met online. People are not always who they claim to be.

If you wouldn't say it to someone's face, don't text it or post it in any way.

Don't believe everything you read. Make sure you verify "facts."

Technorati:

personal journals to mainstream media

blogosphere is the online community of bloggers and their writings.

Updated frequently, chronological

I had to pull the following out of Wikipedia regarding permalinks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permalink. I was having trouble understanding it and may need to refer back to it.

"Permalinks frequently consist of a string of characters which represent the date and time of posting, and an identifier which denotes the author who initially authored the item or its subject. Crucially, if an item is changed, renamed, or moved within the internal database, its permalink remains unaltered, as it functions as a magic cookie which references an internal database identifier. If an item is deleted altogether, its permalink can frequently not be reused". I believe this alleviates the problem of constantly changing content by linking to the original post. The person citing the blog can link back to specific posts.

What do you notice when you read a blog vs. other journalism? Note how journalism uses blogs as sources and people in the news use blogs to talk back. Bloggers can be exposed to new media though blogging.

Blogs can incorporate RSS feeds which let you see part of an entire site.

Found this directory of teen blogs in case we want to sample some:

http://dir.blogflux.com/cat/teen.html from the teen blogs Flux Blog Directory

Blogging as a source of income or career enhancer.