Power Blogging

Blogs – the harsh abbreviation for “web logs” – are everywhere, and everyone, it seems, either has one or reads them. If you don’t have one yet, and if you don’t read them yet, that’s about to change. In many writing classes, the hard work and effort that students put into their writing goes unnoticed and unappreciated by all but the professor, and possibly the few people in the students’ particular class. In this course you will be writing weekly (at least) posts for your blog – mini-compositions that may be read/heard/seen by anyone with an Internet connection. You’ll be writing for an audience, and without a net. No one said being a new media superstar would be easy…

The blogosphere (a.k.a. blogtopia, blogistan, and blogrovia) is a vast (estimates peg the number of active blogs at over 8 million in this country alone) network of inter-linked web sites, each of which presents information, opinion, and references to other sites. Blogs originated as simple lists of interesting web page URLs. Today, there are full-text blogs, audio blogs (known as “podcasts”), video blogs (known as “vlogs” or “vogs”), and every possible combination of these three types.

You will be required to publish a new post to your blog and comment on at least 2 posts by your classmates at least once each week, starting on September 1st. (You will be posting at least once on the long Labor Day weekend, and then at least once each Monday-Sunday week.) Your mission in this assignment is to create a blog that is popular and/or respected. Popularity and respect are the coin of the realm in the blogosphere, and you’re going to study the ‘sphere to divine how that coin can be gained. You’ll use these insights to make your blog a force to be reckoned with.

I suggest that you use Blogger as your blogging software, but you may use any of the extant blog packages. UVM also offers free Movable Type blogging software and hosting, though it takes some time to get your MT blog created. In the first two class meetings we will discuss these options, and you and I will assist your group in setting up your group blog.

This project consists of four elements: a blogging proposal, in which you explain your plans to achieve world-wide blog dominance; your weekly blogging and commenting requirement (5% of your final grade); a mid-semester evaluation of your blog progress (5% of your final grade); and an end-of-the-semester analysis and reflection on your efforts (10% of your final grade).