The Blogging Landscape: Radically Simplifying Web Publishing & Communication

This same article is also duplicated as a blog site for comparison of the different ways one might distribute a set of  information and to allow comparison of an alternative way to gather feedback which further expands an essay or document.

A Terse Introduction to Blogging

Blog is short for web log, a largely automated way to post information to the Web. Information is posted (uploaded, sent) to a Web server in chunks called postings. Postings might contain just text or photos or audio or video or some combination of all depending on how the blog server software is designed. The amount of information in a single posting could be almost infinite but is generally a paragraph or few. However, some blogging systems specialize in microblogging (ex. Twitter.com), a single posting being no more than 140 characters, which means that cell phones and smart phones can be used to send postings to the server. All kinds of problems are headed off and advances made by timely presentation and discussion of ideas and events. Blogging is one of the latest communication innovations that speeds up the sharing of information and the formation of community. The nature of blogging must also be seen as a concept that has built on deep and largely hidden philosophical roots (Deflem, 1996; Dewey, 1916; Habermas, 1984), roots that seem unconsciously contributing to the ongoing nova of blog invention (Wikipedia.org).

The best blogs have developed writing and communication styles that are honest, conversational, colloquial, and interactive which builds loyalty and mutual trust. This page will explore the blog concept, provide examples, build a blog, discuss search tools and new developments, and consider their values and limitations. Blogging is not only the simplest and quickest way to manage communication with a larger and widely distributed group, it is truly simple and quick. This is equally true for blog communication using text, images, audio or video.

Sharing and reacting to information is one of the most basic communication skills. Using blogs to facilitate this invokes all four major problem solving  functions of computers and the Web. All kinds of news needs rapid distribution. Doing this personally with those standing around us is simple and quick. But most of us must deal with a much larger group of individuals who cannot reach us when we are available and we often cannot reach them when they are. For example, teachers are busy in their classrooms and parents are busy at work. Communicating with these larger widely distributed groups is seldom simple and never quick. Most blog systems not only make posting simple, but provide links for comments or replies, which can be made visible or invisible to other readers.

 These blogging features have numerous advantages for educators working with a classroom full of children and their families for months at a time. The concept also has the same general application to any group and one individual might manage a blog for each of their major social groups. That is, an entrepreneur might have separate blogs for communicating with business partners and customers and while a company team might  use a blog to track ongoing project activity.

What are some examples of a Blog?

If you had never seen a book, hearing a description of a book would be useful and yet lead to a very limited understanding of books. Nothing beats getting your hands on a wide variety of books to better know their value. Knowing that a blog is a kind of online journal with date and time stamped postings of information to a web site suffers from the same problem. Consequently, use the links below to jump into a few of these blogs and give them a skim. Millions of blogs are currently available on the Internet for searching and browsing. Some are actually worth reading. Make your own judgments on this set below. News of more highly rated blogs in these and other others categories is always welcome.

Instead of blog categories, another approach would be to explore the top 100 "power" blog writers voted most influential. If use of the blog site goes beyond professional needs to be used for school classroom needs, examine it for thoroughly to determine if the writer covers topics or uses titles inappropriate for younger people.

What are free/fee ways to get started making a blog?

To blog requires blogging style software running on your local networked computer of your own or a hosted service. Long lists of web hosting services or blogware applications themselves are readily available. Some users have taken the time to provide annotated reviews of blog services and make comparison tables of blogware options but choices and features change frequently, so doing your own research is essential to having current information. Free services include free hosting services and free blog server software, in contrast to paying a fee for more features or buying blog server software.

The quick approach is to use one of the free big three blog hosting services which includes Blogger, MSNspaces and Yahoo 360. I've tried all three and find it easiest to start people using blogger.com, a company recently purchased by Google. Blogger's procedure for creating a blog is clear, simple and fast. Unless you browse the Tour and explanation links extensively, the setup and first posting takes just a few minutes. The opening web page of the blogger.com site reviews the first steps:

1. Create an account. This means working out a username and password.
2. Name your blog. Is your name related to its content?
3. Choose a template. This can be changed easily at some future point without starting over.

After these 3 steps, all that is left is to post a first comment. Use this link to get started and get your first comment posted.  www.blogger.com.

The Web site called Blogger has major competitors and detractors and has grown from critique and reviews in a number of ways. Walter Mossberg's Wall Street Journal column on blog creation (2005) ranked MSN Spaces first, Yahoo 360 second (not publicly available until July 2005) and put Blogger.com in third. The two major factors in his ranking were Blogger's lack of control over private viewing and ease of photo management. Those issues disappeared as later version of the site appeared.

He notes that Blogger.com is the exception in not providing the possibility of private access to view a blog site. As that is a longer story, it will require its own heading for the details. The short answer is that the approach to private-view blogging provided by Microsoft and Yahoo should not be used by K-12 educators, making this factor irrelevant in the rankings. As to whether others will find the complexities of the privacy process worth negotiating, the market will decide.

Private or Protected Viewing of a Blog Site

Private or protected viewing and commenting for a blog site has many valuables uses. All three of the majors, Blogger.com, MSNspaces and Yahoo 360 provide features to control the leaving of comments on a posting.

This process will be a significant concern for K-12 and post-secondary educators who will want to set up private viewing and commenting for a class of students. School districts and educators can also buy control for these problems. That is, they might buy their own blogging software and run it on their own school district servers. They could also do this by buying network access to online blog software designed for schools, such as http://classblogmeister.com/. Adding control always comes with management overhead headaches of maintaining the blogserver computers.

Where are the search engines for hunting content in blogs?

A specialized blog search engine is not always the best first approach to finding the hot blog. For  example try a web search with something like best book blog or best technology blog or best science blog and explore your results. On the other hand if you wish to search the content of what folks are writing in their blogs, blog search engines are essential. These specialized search engines update their search databases at least daily whereas large search sites such as Google are updating just once a month.

Blog search engines include: http://technorati.com/ ; http://www.pubsub.com and  http://www.daypop.com/ .

What makes a blog of value?

What makes a blog of value? One might also ask why do we read. We do so to be informed and stimulated. This implies that the author is writing about something that they are knowledgeable about, poses opinions and ideas that shake up the standard thinking from time to time, communicates clearly, and is effective at keeping a discussion going once it starts. This also implies a group that needs to share and inform each other. This makes blogs valuable to all, from community groups to classroom groups. Blogs also are valuable for their global system of syndication, an almost instantaneous form of distribution that will be addressed later.

Those writing characteristics are important to good teaching in the classroom, and to effectively teaching writing as well. Blogs have the potential to play an important role in teaching the reading and writing process. But the publicly available nature of blogs needs modifying for classroom use. Teachers and their students need a more protected way to learn to write and to blog; they need some privacy and mechanisms for controlling who can read and comment on the blogs. Computer programmers have been creating blogging systems that meet such requirements for classroom use, systems that keep the teacher in control of approving written pieces before they appear in the student blog. The link above to BlogMeister leads to a site and blog model designed by a North Carolina educator with classroom teachers in mind.

In the classic blog format, blogs vary in the degree of connectedness of their postings. Some stay close to their overall theme and others are extreme ramblings related to the spark of the moment. But blogs have value because they can be re-invented. Instead of a series of disconnected thoughts in diary style spread out over time, they can also represent a coherent essay. Each heading in the blog can represent a different heading in an composition. The headings are put in order by the date, so editing the date changes their place in the sequence. The essay you are reading has been duplicated as a blog to demonstrate this. By turning on the comments feature, writers can gather comments about each section of their composition. These comments can be further edited within the section or posting itself, creating a kind of continuous modification system until such time that the sections of the composition might be copied to a word processor or web page for further publication, whether in a magazine, refereed journal, or web site. The blog might remain as the "live" publication with the journal or web publication just a snapshot in time in the life of the blog. The web page could then updated from the blog as frequently as the author chose. I've coined the term partner blog for this concept in paring a blog with other forms of sharing. The blog might also be closed down once the journal article was published, a one-shot blog approach that somehow seems out-of-date with the 21st century.

For those with more developed writing skills and those with sufficient experience to have something to share, blogs start out with an inherent advantage over many forms of information distribution. Their easy to post and comment qualities allow fast response to thinking, events and news. Because good blog posters add their information daily or even more often, blogs are one of the most current forms of information available, faster than all other news sources. Further, some blog search systems update their indexing data daily. This means the information you search for in blog sites has the added value of being as current as the last few minutes.

Audio Blogs

Blogs are not limited to sharing words and text. Blog sites now also routinely share audio files, including telephone messages, voices and music. Terms like audioblogging and audblog have been coined to describe a new form radio station, an online on-demand source of audio (Google search for audio blog). The term Webjay has replaced DJ as the person who select the audio files to be shared. The growth in the number of people in the U.S. using computers to listen to radio has grown to over 50 million people, showing 18% growth in 2005 while traditional radio listenership, though huge, fell 4% (Hesseldahl, 2005), a total hovering around 200 million people each day. Experience an audio blog by putting headphones on or crank up your speaker volume. Click the listen button at NPR or click the image of the audioblog site from The Nation site below.

Audio blogs are creating a new form of radio. The term podcasting (Wikipedia.org, 2005) was coined to describe the process of using blog sites to send web-based audio files to Apple Computer's ubiquitous player of mp3 files, iTunes, and then passing these files on to their portable player, the iPod. This way, the listener could download and listen anywhere to a wide variety of audio files from music to specialty news, corporate reports, lectures, comedy and other entertainment shows. Podcasting has quickly moved from amateur experiments to marketplace impact (Nesbitt, 2005).

The podcast term then took on a more generic meaning. Podcasting now refers to moving audio files to any portable digital audio player or to any computer and cell phone player capable of downloading and playing audio files. A podcast is then any audio composition created and made available for Internet sharing using blogs and other Internet communication forms. Users can register or subscribe to the postings of many blog sites, and very quickly receive the files or receive notice of the availability of the podcasts. This subscription process, called syndication, will be described in greater detail below. Sequenced in whatever fashion listeners would like on their own hard drives, each user becomes the organizer of their own personal radio collection.

The collection of sites offering podcast syndication is diverse and significant. It includes major radio broadcasters, TV network broadcasters, major newspapers, and more. A partial list of major providers of podcasts as of May, 2005 included Clear Channel, NPR, Rush Limbaugh, ESPN, ABC News, NBC News, TV Guide, Sundance, BBC, Yahoo, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, Forbes, Washington Post, Denver Post, Seattle Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Disney, Warner Bros. Pictures, Ford, General Motors, Proctor & Gamble, and General Motors.

Standard tower based radio stations have taken notice of the availability of the thousands of these podcasts. As an example of the appeal of the podcasting format, Infinity Broadcasting, a radio operator of more than 180 stations in the United States, has converted its San Francisco AM station, 1550 KYCY, to the world's first all-podcast format as of May, 2005 (Jardin, 2005, May). The station requests and screens digital audio files from their broadcast and Internet audience and plays them. It also makes these compositions available for download from their web pages KYOURadio.com. The satellite radio service called Sirius is also offering a podcasting channel. Your podcast might be playing on someone's car radio.

Always wanted to have your own radio station? This required some "out of the box" thinking from net innovators but it now works. By thinking about audio distribution in a new way, blogging makes it not only possible but easy for entities and individuals to leverage both the concept and the power of radio in a way to fit their budget.

The Blogosphere Show - Simple Podcasting Systems

Click above to listen. The transcript is below. Perhaps an actual example of a simple podcasting system will help. Only a single phone is needed to create a podcast. Both the speakerphone and the cell phone shown in the picture are only needed if someone at a distance needs to participate. To start an audio conference, I begin holding the cell phone next to my head for some initial comments, then set it on the speaker phone. The picture shows what this setup looks like.

Here's the transcript of this 3 minute 17 second podcast.

"This is another podcast in the Blogosphere Show with Bob Houghton speaking. Welcome to this podcast on simple podcasting systems. This is a test of using my cell phone for automated podcasting. I'm using my cell phone as a microphone to record an audio conference using a speaker phone. When I finish recording and tap the # key on my cell phone, I have the option of replaying it, deleting it, or immediately posting it to one of my blog sites as an mp3 file. If I post it, when my blog site is opened, an icon for playing the audio file is visible and plays with a single click.

Here's what I'm doing right now. The current most simple set up I can think of is to open the cell phone and place it on its side on top of the speaker phone. The speaker phone is sitting on top of an upended standard size box of Kleenex to put the phones close to my lips. The microphone within a cell phone only records well within a very short distance. Within the speaker phone, I have the phone number I'm calling on speed dial so the tap of a single key will dial. This procedure will waste as little cell phone time as possible. To test this equipment without interrupting someone else, find a local number that plays a tape of information, such as a movie theatre that plays a recording of its shows and showtimes.

I'll dial that now. [I put the cell phone down on the speaker phone. The phone rings, the tape answers, and I talk over pieces of the playing tape which forces the speaker phone to silence the theater recording until I stop talking.]

At the moment the speaker phone is still sitting approximately some 7 to 8 inches away from me. I'm going to pick it up now and put the cell phone next to my head. I'm putting it next to my face in the usual manner. You should now hear the voice quality improve somewhat. The free web posting service that I'm using is through a sign up with Blogger.com which in turn uses a service called Audioblogger. For better recording quality, plug a headphone set with microphone into your cell phone. This allows you to experiment with positioning the speaker phone and your lips further away from the cell phone and still have decent recording quality. However, it does require you to remember to carry around a headphone set to carry this out.

This is the Blogsphere Show and Bob Houghton. Check blog-study.blogspot.com for other broadcasts."

The audio quality is not as crisp as a live phone conversation because it is compressed in making it an mp3 file, nor is it is as high a quality as one could create with professional microphones.  That said, I find this phone based approach useable, mobile, fast and efficient.

Photo Blogs

Fortunately for photography, photography blogs have not been abbreviated to phlogs or phlogging. The term photoblog has been coined to describe a new form of near instant image uploading and viewing, an online source of photos, graphics and imagery (Google search for photoblog). The site Photoblogs ( http://www.photoblogs.org/ ) notes thousands of photoblogs in over 80 countries in over 35 languages. (See also flickr.com; fotolog.net, buzznet.com, and Yahoo's photoblog service directory). At such sites each click of the next button brings up image after image. Visit the photoblog site  digital.lifekapptured.com/ by clicking this link or the screen shot below. Once there, click the small pictures (thumbnails) to see their larger versions.

Unimedia: Merging Text, Image, and Audio

One can also combine all three, so that one could create a class blog site where each posting displayed student work such as photographs, paintings and drawings which could each have a button for the student's voice talking about the picture. Text annotations could just as easily be included if students are able. That single Internet connected computer in most of American's classrooms could serve as the loading station for a class web site collection of rich media, easily and quickly generated by students of a wide range of abilities. (These free resources for information sharing are the best gift the wealth of global corporations has ever indirectly given to public schools. Now how do we get the digital hardware onto the digital desert of student desktops so that all can use this free gift?)

If net innovators would now merge audio blogs and photo blogs, a compelling and never-seen-before form of communication, photo-radio, could emerge. But wait, blogger.com offers this capacity for free today. For a very basic media- merger example, see my  iThink Blog for a unifying of text, photos and cell phone audio. Automated tools made available through blogger.com automatically inserted the media into the posting. As each media posting whether image or audio drops into its own separate posting. My role was to make a quick copy and paste of the HTML media code that Google creates with each photo or audio posting and paste it into its matching blog posting with its other media elements.

In time, such unimedia designs will include video. Because of the huge files sizes required for quality video, this development is in its early stages of problem solving.

Videoblogs and Moblogs

The very small file size of compressed video coming from cell phones, PDAs and digital camcorders stimulated the idea of moblogs, vlogs and videoblogs. Moblogs are focused largely on the low quality small file size video and still images coming from cell phones, clips of no more than 20 to 30 seconds and which can also be played back on cell phones. Others focusing on video appear to expect viewers through computer displays. These sites, http://www.vidblogs.com/ and textamerica.com, compete as hosting sites for those that wish to video blog. Each site will have its own patterns to follow to actually reach video that can be played. This may require clicking on text or an image as appropriate.

Examples of individual sites include Video Link Japan and Steve Garfield's Videoblog while Demand Media - A Collaborative Video Blog is an example of a team effort. The site MoBuzzTV is extending the moblog concept to a news and documentary format. Perhaps the most advanced vlog service is avblog.userplane.com/ which automatically detects microphone and webcam or other digital video device. This site allows up to 10 clips of 10 minute duration to be created for use in any web media, clips which are then streamed from the Userplane servers with a copy of code that can be copy-and-pasted into your own web-based media.

Google co-founder Larry Page also reported plans by Google to follow their own lead with photo blogging at blogger.com with a new service on video blogging (Kapustka, 2005, April 4).  Given past practices, it would be logical to presume that Yahoo and MSN will follow with something similar of their own. To learn more about video blogs, online video and tricks of the trade, visit videoblogging.info/ and www.video-link.com/.

Those who want to focus just on finding video can use ANT, a feed-reader, which uses RSS or syndication service to find and download video directly to your hard drive shortly after their creators post them to their vlog, moblog or video log or whatever they will be called in the future. Though ANT is a feed-reader (video player of material from subscription service), it is also a video aggregator along with mefeedia.com that provides sites to which one can subscribe.

Always wanted to have your own TV station? Once again, if you adjust to this "out of the box" blog thinking, it's yours today. Will TV stations start a vlog channel and someday play your video blog, as standard radio stations are now doing for audio? It is as inevitable as sunshine.

 News "Feeds": Automated Broadcasting of Blog Postings

There is more to blogging than just quick web site posting of text, images, audio and video. Blog sites can choose to allow their own specialized form of automated and global distribution, a process called syndication. This syndication system enables instant distribution of content updates to syndicated readers. It also makes a quick review of a large number of sites possible.

Syndicated sites are also called news "feeds" which feed data to those who want to know. Fans of different blog sites can set software to watch for updates of those blogs allowing syndication and grab and download postings for immediate display on their own computers. Readers subscribe to a blog and receive updates automatically by using a reader or feed aggregator, also called a news aggregator. At this time there are multiple standards for syndication, though a merged standard of RSS and Atom is appearing likely (Chen, 2004; Festa, 2003 ; Festa, 2004). RSS means Really Simple Syndication.

The blog newsreaders, the software tools for organizing blog postings and notifying readers of blog news and information feeds, are readily available yet still innovating in their designs. Stand-alone software applications that read and display syndicated blog newsfeeds are readily available including NetNewsWire (Mac) and Newsrover (Win). Web server based designs include: My Yahoo! ; and Bloglines. criticism and evaluation of the dozens of blog readers available is developing (Blog Newsreaders Links & Reviews; Google search for blog newsreader reviews). In a blog reader, the list of blogs selected for monitoring will typically appear on the left of a window; selecting a blog puts new postings from that blog in a frame on the right.

Web browsers are also getting into the act as blog newsreaders. One method being explored is to create a browser plug-in which extends the browser's features, such as Lekora and Sage. Programmers are also building these features into the browser itself so that add-ins like Lekora will not be not required in the long run. The Opera web browser included RSS blog reader features as of May, 2004 while others are announcing the inclusion of such features in the months ahead (Hicks, 2004). As of late 2004, the Firefox web browser supported some blog reader features for all forms of RSS feeds, that is, forms of blog posting distribution. As of May, 2005, the newest version of the Safari browser for the Mac that came with OS-X included a fully integrated blog reader and browser. The forthcoming Internet Explorer 7.0 will include significant RSS integration. Downloading and installing an RSS capable browser or using an add-in and learning to use it to explore blog space is highly recommended.

Limitations of blogs?

Blogs will not completely replace newspapers, radio and TV stations or even standard web sites. But they can and do replace components of what these other forms do and do it more simply and efficiently than any of them. That is, they can quickly distribute any form of information that the available bandwidth will allow as long as the given blog form or style fits your needs. They represent one more new wrinkle invented for cyberspace.

An effective blog requires some discipline with personal scheduling to achieve regular postings and build a loyal fan club or a strong collaborative group.

Blogs will reduce but not replace email, though blog syndication makes it possible to subscribe to certain species of blogs so that any new posting to your favorite blogs is reported to your email account or to specialized blog reader software. Blogs needs other forms of communication, such as email. For example, just because you created a blog does not mean that anyone will use it unless you tell them about it and provide its web address. Blog information will also lead to using email for private comments that you do not wish to share with everyone.

Blog authors must recognize that not everyone who reads blogs has the best interest of the author in mind. Putting personal information in a blog can be dangerous. That personal information can come back to bite you in terms of identity theft, harassment, reputation endangering mistakes in grammar and logic and more. Further, comment links open to all readers can lead to blog site vandalism by those who insert foul ideas, language and web links to trashy web sites such as pornography or hate promoting sites. However, there are a number of effective and quick defenses against the "dark side" while the personal side just requires good judgment and editing.

Teachers and younger students need password protected private blogging for limited audiences. Work teams and social groups may have reasons to be public or private, a decision the group will need to ponder. Most blog site tools provide options for "teams" that wish varying degrees of privacy for their work. Further, many thinking and writing needs require a totally private space where thoughts are explored without fear of any exposure. That still makes those cellulose sheets a valuable technology.

Social Capital: The "Disruptive Value" of Blogging

One of the values of disruptive inventions is the way they force a re-examination of past practice. Blogging stimulated more fundamental debates about social practice. What is the best way to build social capital? What are the best ways for group or team communication to take place? How should the different tools of the communication sandwich be balanced and used?

Communities and institutions stand on their shared history. From classrooms to professional teams, shared history leads to the shared intelligence that becomes useable knowledge (Geoff, 2005; Vygotsky 1978; Wenger et al, 2002). There are many practical aspects to keeping knowledge used and useable. Much of the social intelligence of an organization is now flushed down the bit drain minute by minute with the tap of the Delete key or buried beyond community searches in email archives. A given email idea often nourishes just a few individuals who may soon leave the group or organization. The greater the turnover of individuals in a group, the lower the value of email. An email quickly becomes buried forever in institutional email archives, not searchable unless retrieved by the occasional subpoena in legal wrangling. Blogs are far more effective than email in keeping the emerging intelligence of an organization visible and useable for long periods of time.

Because so many now blog instead of email, the capacity to listen to this largely public discourse, to do online anthropology, has been greatly magnified. The major blog search engines provide key word searching and cross-link counts for free. Other more specialized tools are being honed to also listen for and provide analysis on subgroups or demigraphic subsets. This can potentially impact composers at all levels who are inspired and motivated by the expressed concerns of others, whether song writers or marketers. The vice president of a public relations firm noted that "we look at the blogosphere as a focus group with 15 million people going on 24/7 that you can tap into without going behind a one-way mirror" (Bulkeley, 2005).

A distinction should be made between emerging intelligence (real news for the team) and the formation of considered social conclusions. The process of creating and updating reflected policy, guiding philosophy, position statements and encyclopedic facts need something a bit different than blogs. These constructs require collaborative writing. The concept of the Wiki emerged as a powerful complement to blogs (Goodwin-Jones, 2003). Emerging in the same era as blogs, a Wiki site or application allow potentially anyone to edit a web page, keeping an elaborate history of developments and fast reversion when necessary. Access to a Wiki document can be as public or as controlled as needed. More in-depth consideration is beyond the scope of this writing, but voluminous explanation of the wiki concept awaits in cyberspace. Both have their advantages which has led to experiments weighing the best features of blogs and wiki sites (Tonkin, 2005), and led to a new design, a bliki.

The concepts of formative and summative communication can further serve as a useful lens through which to position different kinds of thinking and communication. Blogs, wikis and email systems have special value for collaborative formative activity. They gain most of their value through use of the computer networks' unique capacity for interactive communication. More static and stable concepts and policies may best appear in web pages and other media more devoted to one-way communication, including print, radio, theater and television/film. The eventual major role of a web page could be to serve as a hub to all forms of formative and summative media.

Stayed tuned to this page for new design examples of the merger of blogs, wikis, multimedia and standard web pages.

Those interested in best practices in institutional and organizational development should build functional knowledge of blogs and wikis into professional development so that they begin to take priority in professional practice over email. Experiments in the partnership of blogs, wikis, email, standard web sites and the necessary level of privacy should be underway to find the right balance. Each has a role to play, but for the good of the social group, revising the cultural emphasis on email is overdue. Is email the last place a good idea should go?

Educational Uses of a Blog

From higher education (Glenn, 2003) to public education (Carr, 2005), educators are taking advantage of the lightning fast and free way make ideas available across the Internet using text, images, audio and video. New uses are constantly being invented.

Educators (teachers, instructors, professors, administrators) are using them to: teach writing with the blog as a kind of public word processor for student assignments; teach collaboration and build a sense of audience using the comments features; support institutional teamwork and collaborative thinking activity from curriculum development to policy formation, which was discussed in the section of social capital; build reputations as they distribute what they are learning in their field of study and share what they find important to their peers and students; create instructional tips for their students and parents as a course progresses; make course announcements and make assignments; provide a collection of annotated links to important resources; offer students and/or parents another place for feedback and discussions of what is being taught; and to get out news on anything.

Student blog composition can create unprecedented attention to student composition. Students at Hunterdon Central Regional High School read the Secret Life of Bees, then used a literacy style blog to create dialog around the book. Their site, Weblogs.hcrhs.k12.nj.us/bees, has received more than 2 million hits (Richardson, 2005). Students use blogs to: create reflective or writing journals; create blog postings as submitted assignments; engage in collaborative writing teams using comments to provide critiques of the writings of classmates; build e-portfolios using a variety of media; share their findings of useful resources to support the learning of a course; and bypass adult restrictions on their communication.

Blogs can also be re-invented for additional purposes. This set of thinking about blogs is an example of using a blog site to support the gathering of comments for different sections of a larger document or essay. Each section heading in this essay is both a blog posting and a section of a standard web page. Each blog posting is used to collect responses and feedback which is used to further edit that section. The concept applies just as well to sections of institutional documents including guidelines, planning documents, policies and curriculum development.

Richardson (2005) has used his own blog (www.Weblogg-ed.com) to collect best practices information on educational blogging. Blogs bring great power to those numerous situations in which students must construct, collaborate, and communicate, what he referred to as the three C's.

Please leave comments which point out other educational uses.

Do blogs have a future?

"At the Aspen Institute's Conference on Journalism and Society in mid-July, a question was put to executives of major news organizations: Whom do you trust in online media today?" (Lassica, 2004). Their feedback showed that a major transformation is underway. Observers are finding that "a nobody with a Weblog can build up a more loyal audience than news brands that have been around for a century or more" and that bloggers make up a large and growing number of the national top 40 attention getting sites on the web whose credibility and respect matches or exceeds major news outlets (Lassica, 2004). Not only are these audiences more loyal, in many cases they are larger, with more readers than major newspapers and magazines have subscribers.

This transformation in communication is happening at several levels. At one level it is changing whom we trust, from large organizations to individual voices. At another level it is changing the understanding of cyberspace. Outsiders and beginning users of the Web first see it as a place for random searches for information, for googling data. More experienced users recognize that blogs have given mainstream legitimacy to a long standing but often overlooked value of cyberspace, the Web as a place for talk. Through such online chat the Web serves as community builder, consensus maker, and hub for intimate social and political conversations. Decades before the phenomena of blogging made Web sharing an instant simple act, millions of email conferences were taking place within systems of communication called newsgroups and email lists or listservs. Blogs help reduce the email glut and also serve as a wedge to bring more cyberspace users into these older forms of dialog as well.

By combining intelligent and informal thoughts with this inexpensive design, blog voices are also contributing to brand and reputation building on a scale from individual writers to Microsoft and General Motors (GM). In the short time since the concept emerged, the Wall Street Journal noted that some 4% of major U.S. corporations have blogs available to the public. Blogging jobs are not only well paid but growing in popularity (Needleman, 2005). Some have found that blogging has been added to their job description and others have used their blogging skills for advancement and promotion purposes.

More importantly, by changing the nature of public voice, blogs have changed the nature of power distribution (Gillmor, 2004). Gillmor provided multiple examples of the power pyramid being inverted. Prior to the Web, society's priorities for distributing information were based on wealth. The bigger your city or organization, the bigger your media outlets from newsprint to television stations, and therefore the greater your influence. Further, the more money your institution or corporation had, the more global their reach with advertising, and "spin" or propaganda. This influence dictates public policy and consequently the distribution of wealth.

Blogs increasingly provide hope that the least powerful groups, the poor, the rural, the public educators in public schools, have a tool to match the power reach of the wealthy. Currently Gillmor (2004) reports that only a relatively small slice of the polity have had the digital knowledge to have engaged the top of the power pyramid and to have been successful in getting heard and having an impact. A far larger portion of the population stands outside this digital conversation, unaware of this new powerful contribution to democracy. Educators at all levels should explore their free use, for the value of their contribution to culture, to professional communication and in teaching and learning to determine which of the many values of blogs makes the most sense for their educational situation.

Can we effectively spread the word about blogs? Will the lower rungs of the power pyramid also use the web to find and share their voices? Is there the will and the discipline to do so? For those who need to share a perspective on the conditions around them, blogs provide a quick way to get started, but they too are limited in their power. As the culture moves past the hype on blogs, a true partnership between blogs and other new ways to communicate will emerge. For those individuals or organizations with a need to develop local, national and international reputations as voices of change, blogs are simplicity personified. Welcome to the blogosphere!

Blogging Bibliography