Blogging - The Long And The Short Of It

Through the duration of the course, Blogger's usability has stood out. Set up was quick. Editing has been smooth. There hasn't been any real downtime on their servers. The themes available are tasteful, and seem to have been created with editing the styles in mind. Blogger has also made it easy to have the blog hosted on a different site. This has made the embedding of media simpler.

The many alternative host sites include WordPress, Blogsome, Movable Type, MSN Spaces, Squarespace, TypePad and Yahoo 360. A review of these and other blogging tools can be found in a very helpful Forbes article.

Tumblelogs - For the last several weeks, I have been thinking a lot about Tumblelogs, an interesting variation on blogs. Wikipedia defines them as follows:

A tumblelog (or tlog) is a variation of a blog that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, tumblelogs are frequently used to share the author's creations, discoveries, or experiences while providing little or no commentary.

A Blog Site which is tuned for tumblelogs is Tumblr. This site came up before on a couple of our blogs. A few (kind of edgy) sites highlighted by the Tumblr group are here, here, and here. Merlin Mann authors another example. [Warning, M.M. doesn't mind swearing in print some days]

These pages have quite a different feel than the blogs I am used to reading. I like the style, and I'm pretty sure that some students will feel more at home moving towards this way of expressing themselves. The trick is to avoid having your page become simply a video repository.

Microblogging - An even lower word count has been experimented with using sites like Twitter to microblog. Using their service, you have exactly 140 characters to express your idea. The text box even counts down the remaining characters as you type. Twittering works best when you have a separate application to appear and fade as tweets come and go.

I am a lousy microblogger right now, but there is some potential with its use. Doug Noon wrestles with the concept here . I am not participating in "the flow" in any real way. I am just lurking on Twitter, but love following the tweets of some of technology personalities I have admired. As a TL, watching some great ideas and fantastic links just float onto my desktop has led to many great discoveries.

posted by John Lobe @ 11:30 PM