Digital Media Services

Blog World

Feel the need to share your stream of consciousness with the rest of the world? What you need is a blog. Blogging has been around since 1998, but has only in the last year begun to attract some serious attention from mainstream press.

A blog, short for "weblog", is a collection of links to interesting content and other sites on the web, a journal of the authors thoughts and opinions, or, most often, both. Web journals are as old as the web itself, but the micro-publishing explosion of blogging took off with the release of free blog hosting and free blog software in the late 1990's. One of the most popular blogging sites, blogger.com, hosted more than 40,000 new blogs in January 2002, and is home to blogging superstar Instapundit. We even now have the "Anti-Bloggies," dubious honors awarded to "the bad hair blog" and the blog "most obsessed with Radiohead." As with most web fads, and with fads in general, there's a lot of garbage out there in blog world.

Perhaps most intriguing for the Northwestern community, however, is the recent rise in educational, or school-based blogs: "edublogs," as one observer has dubbed them. Some educators see blogs as valuable tools for knowledge management, a way to build learning communities online, or even simply as writing tools for students.

Northwestern University has some fervent bloggers among the faculty. Jim McGee, professor of Technology and Electronic Commerce in the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, and AKM Adam, Associate Professor of New Testament at Seabury-Western, have both integrated blogging in their classes and maintain extensive professional blogs of their own. Based in part on Adam's experience and recommendation, three Fall 2002 Seabury classes have added blogging to their course acitivity: <http://www.seabury.edu/academics/mt.htm>

Further reading:
Anti-Bloggies winners, 2002. Accessed 2 December 2002 <http://www.antibloggies.com/2/index.php>

SchoolBlogs. 26 August 26 2002. Accessed 2 December 2002. <http://www.schoolblogs.com>

Blood, Rebecca. "Weblogs: a history and perspective." Rebecca's Pocket. 7 September 2000. Accessed 2 December 2002. <http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html>

Daniel, Grame and Kevin Cox. "Web logs in Education -- Edublogs?" 29 July 2002. Accessed 2 December 2002. <http://webtools.cityu.edu.hk/news/newslett/edublogs.htm>

Manjoo, Farhad. "Blah, blah, blah, and blog." Wired News. 18 Feb 2002. Accessed 2 December 2002. <http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,50443,00.html>

Shachtman, Noah. "Blogging goes legit, sort of." Wired News. 6 June 2002. Accessed 2 December 2002. <http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,52992,00.html>

Tedeschi, Bob. "Internet experts wonder if Weblog technology is a powerful new media species, or just another fad." The New York Times. 25 February 2002.

NU bloggers:
McGee's Musings: http://www.mcgeesmusings.net/index.html

Explanatory gap: http://www.psych.northwestern.edu/~tew/

Green Hat Journal: http://rover.cs.northwestern.edu/~surana/blog

AKMA's blog: http://www.seabury.edu/MT/akma/

Current Copyright Readings: http://copyrightreadings.blogspot.com

Blogging software:
Radio: http://radio.weblogs.com

Movable Type: http://www.movabletype.org

Blogger: http://www.blogger.com

Grey Matter: http://www.noahgrey.com/greysoft/