Activities
Activity One: Create a blog
Choose a blog provider (Blogger—http://www.blogger.com, LiveJournal—http://www.livejournal.com, xanga—http://www.xanga.com). Create a new account. Write and post an entry. You may also want to practice viewing your blog, reading other blogs using the same service, creating user icons, creating blog rolls or friends lists, and editing and deleting entries.
If you already understand the basics of blogging through a free service, and you have access to a web server, you may want to try installing simple blog software to see how it’s done. WordPress (http://www.wordpress.org) provides a free download and detailed instructions for installation.
Activity Two: Fortune Telling
Where does this format of personal publishing expand to, influence and evolve from here? Write a blog entry dated five years from now detailing at least one way blogs have changed. Reflect on how this change came about, what effects it had on society, and how it has changed the face of blogging.
Activity Three: Content Comparison
Find a topic popular in the mainstream media and choose one article and two contrasting blog entries about this topic to review. Compare and contrast the content, the authors, the ideas presented, and the tone of each.
- How do the blog entries in general compare to the mainstream media coverage?
- How do the blog entries compare to each other?
- How did you find information about the authors?
- What questions are you left with about the issues presented, and how do they differ by source?
- How would you compose a blog entry on the same issue?