By Clay Bounds

Blogs in the Beginning

According to the Common Craft video (http://www.commoncraft.com/blog-categories/blogs on blogs). There have been 70,000,000 blogs created since 2003. From http://Wikipedia.com/ the web site http://www.technorati.com/blogs/directory/ "as of December 2007, were tracking 112 million blogs." Blogs are a community of bloggers who share information and ideas on particular topics.

Blogs evolved from earlier digital communities such as Usenet. Blogs are about the democratization of information on the internet.

See how to create a blog @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnploFsS_tY
or @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIk-KC6buhw&NR=1

Blogs Today: The Blogosphere

Blogs are fast becoming the ubiquitous websites of choice for a variety of information and media communication (see technorati link below). The appeal of this form of communication is as diverse as the type of information and the authors of the blogs that create them. Whether it is a home site that communicates with other family members or blogs dedicated to personal diaries. Other blogs on business, entertainment, sports, politics, or technology, blogs are as varied as the imagination can take you.

The use and purpose of blogs are as varied as its users and creators. The Blog community can be located according to subjects, interest, and topics of all kinds. Wikipedia refers to a community of local blogs as a Bloghood

Media makes use of the blogs as a way of measuring opinions, Surveys can also be dispersed in a timely way to measure public opinion on everything from politics, religion and law , to topics of a more existential nature like the meaning of happiness.

http://www.donorschoose.org/donors/motherboard.html?motherboardId=1. This site dedicated to gather donations for schools to support various projects. There are a number of other blogs listed on this site, even one devoted to knitting.

Naturally blogs can become effective agents for advertising where one blogger will 'link' with other bloggers for the sake of expanding either the reach or the intent to sell products related to the bloggers interest.

Also from Wikipedia. the blogs are usually considered by a popularity index that is either based on citations or affiliations. The Blogroll. Additionally , the blogdex was invented by the "MIT media lab to search the internet (crawling)to gather data from thousands of blogs to investigate their social properties" Wikipedoa".
"Blogs are given rankings by Technorati based on the number of incoming links and Alexa Internet based on the Web hits of Alexa Toolbar users. In August 2006, Technorati found that the most linked-to blog on the internet was that of Chinese actress Xu Jinglei.[13] Chinese media Xinhua reported that this blog received more than 50 million page views, claiming it to be the most popular blog in the world.[14] Technorati rated Boing Boing to be the most-read group-written blog.[13]" Wikipedia , (popularity of blogs).
Blogs incorporate so many of the developments in internet technology that there importance cannot be underestimated. From RSS feeds to Asynchronous discussion tools., Blogs are here to stay and to grow.

See web site below to find various collection of blogs and the blogosphere.

http://www.technorati.com/blogs/directory/

The Future of Blogs and Blogging.

Advertisers are finding good use of blogs to target specific audiences with attention to there products. Also, on the more malicious side of the internet, blogs can be fraught with dangers from slander to outright lies about individuals and entities. The political blogs are also a timely and immediate part of the blogasphere. Politicians can respond to comments from their opponents or the media in a more timely manner. Reference, Twitter in the most recent elections.

A blog can be personal or private, one of the great appeals of blogs is that they can be anonymous , the author can speak or write unedited or restrained by any outer influences. The accusation being made that much of the mainstream media is too obligated to commercial interest to be completely unbiased. There can also be an element of self discovery in blogging. One of the most well known blogs is the http://www.huffingtonpost.com/. There, Arianna Huffington shares her sojourn from a past conservative to a liberal and how her politics inspired the creation of this blog.

The windows tool bar has a tab called, "Blog It". Also, select a site named {{tp//www.blogger.com}}as a create blogger tool.Be sure to refer to the Read This Section on this Wiki. My beginning blog can be found at http://www.ccbounds.blogspot.com

The current environment for blogs is so ubiquitous that a literally a career can and is being made around all the blogs and blogging sites that are available.
The most popular are in Blog spot, and [[http://www.wordpress.org//}}

Blogs are as limitless is seems as the imagination will take you. This suggest that it will also evolve over time. The form may be basically the same as the fundamentals of its creation, but new bells and whistles are bound to emerge that will perhaps not reflect the original form.

Form the start the first blogs were essentially Forms of Diaries or topics of personal interest. Just a cursory review of the blogoshpere shows how varied and inclusive of many types of blogs there are.

Some of the recent news has some alarming questions that must be addressed , where the blogosphere for the most part is like the wild west with little regulation and a total dedication to "free speech'. The stories surrounding the recent suicide of a young teen that was humiliated by a neighbor in the Bloghood, takes on new and pressing issues that must be heard in a court of law and measured against the tenets of the Constitution regarding Free Speech.

There is also the controversy in the local news surrounding the efforts of the Police department to identify a blogger that was criticizing the police department (anonymously).
The identity of the blogger was ultimately revealed through a petition to the court. Questions of ethics or personal bias must be measured in order to protect against existing laws regarding "slander".
Ultimately the questions of personal safety and the dangers of blogging without regard to the truth may themselves prove to be challenges to the evolution of Blogging that may or may not enhance the wide open spaces of the Cyberspace.

Our recent class assignment to visit the web site {{http://Wordpress.org//}} demonstrates just how easy it is to set up and begin a blog of your own. Wordpress also has a very thorough process of creating and developing a blog. All the tools and explanations are available on this site.

Blogs , simply are the ongoing effort of humanity to reach out to the rest of the world in some way or another to feel the sense of community and belonging. As the Beatle song said, "Across the Universe."

Clay Bounds

Per, Dr. Martindale : a few web sites related to blogging in education:

http://www.blogcatalog.com/directory/education_and_training

http://www.education-world.com/a_tech/tech/tech217.shtml

http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/techtorial/techtorial037print.shtml