Week 1 - Blogs and Blogging

Welcome to Week 1 of Ezra Edition

Blogs and Blogging
(Using Blogspot – same service as Ship Library Blog)

The purpose of this exploration is to go through the process of creating content to share with others online. We're not here to turn everyone into an A-List Blogger, just to get our feet wet and share ideas and/or feedback about our jobs and our interests.

• Create your own blog to track your impressions while doing this activity
  
• Have fun, find things which will help you with your job as well as away from work 

More blogs have been started and abandoned than all the books in the world ever written (I made that up). Thinking about it, I know I've started several blogs and cannot remember where they (the URLs) are or under which pseudonym(s) I've written.

One of the reasons (given by my friends in the computer) for starting a blog is to keep track of a particular project, another is to keep track of thoughts on particular topics.

Another thing to remember as you create blog content, phrasing things with a positive tone can generate informative discussions. Informative and helpful is the tone and purpose I aim for in my (sporadic) blogging.

Discovery Exercises:

• Create a blog (use a pseudonym if you wish) to track your impressions and ideas for this week
• Reply to this Blog Post with a link to your Blog
• Review what we did last week with Google Reader
• Does your organization of feeds make sense?
• Skim through your new items in Google Reader and write a blog post on something which catches your interest
• As a Work-related-wise example: "eBooks" is a very hot topic in libraryland right now (see the Harper Collins 26 circs and you're done brouhaha) - if this touches on what you do at work (or as a library user) maybe toss out an idea or two on how to address this event and discussion.
• If this seems artificial, feel free to write about something that interests you (gardening, knotting, good books, motocross, Bourbon, whatever. The idea here is to go through the process of putting something online which others might find and/or read. It's not as easy as it sounds.
• Another idea could be to respond to the reasons given by my friends in the computer (which I referenced above)
• If you track what you are thinking while you're participating in this program, we could take the feedback and use that to tailor future activities, too :)