Blogs, News Readers and a Wiki ... Why ?

Why are we blogging?

As I am sure you can see, this class relies pretty heavily on the successful use of blogging and the class wiki.

We are using blogs for this class for three important reasons. Firstly, we are using blogs to introduce you to one of the more recent ‘innovations’ of the web. Blogging has become very popular. Many recent articles on blogging do suggest that it is becoming a powerful marketing tool. Many of these articles are linked to our course blog (under the header ‘Articles on Blogging’). Articles include ‘Chief Humanising Officer’, which highlights Scobleizer blogging for Microsoft and ‘Blogs will Change Your Business’, the title being relatively self explanatory. It is clear this is a new medium that is changing the way we communicate with our customers and the way customers are able to communicate with each other. The book ‘Cluetrain Manifesto’ was the first book to explore this phenomena (pre-blogging) and blogging is now showing how true the cluetrain really can be!

We are also using blogs to intruduce you to HTML and CSS in a 'safe' environment.

Finally we are blogging to increase the communications among students within the class.


Why a news aggregator, why bloglines and why make it public?

It is true you can read blogs and other sites by simply visiting those sites. We do this everyday as we browse the web. The advantage of using a news aggregator, such as bloglines, only manifests when you have multiple web-sites that you want to keep up with, sites that update their content regularly. Without a news aggregator it will be up to you to visit each site, individually, and determine if there is new content there for you to read. Many such visits may be simply a waste of your valuable time if the site has not been updated since your last visit. Subscribing to these sites, via your news aggregator, such as bloglines, allows you to easily determine when a site has been updated with new content, and thus you only need to make the visit when you determine it is appropriate.

Bloglines itself is the most popular web-based news aggregator, a site you can use from any PC as long as you have an internet connection (useful if traveling and using cybercafes for example). Other features of bloglines that are useful include the ability to mark an entry as ‘new’, it thus remains to be viewed at a later time. This is great for sites that update rapidly (think of Slashdot.org), a site you may want to check quickly, yet have little time to read important entries. You can return at a more convenient time to read the entry, continue to save it, or trash it at that point.

Bloglines also allows you to make your subscriptions public, for others to view. This is an important part of your class project (that I can see which resources you are subscribed) and thus required.

Why a wiki?
The wiki serves as a medium for each student to contribute to a shared resource this class can build over the course of this semester. The wiki allows us to leverage the shared knowledge of your classmates, as well as draw from more recent examples that illustrate concepts that the book explores. The project will also allow us to learn how to work in an environment where our work can be easily edited by others, and how we can edit others' work to make it more insightful.

Be confident!

The hardest aspect of the projects is getting started and the presumption of complexity. I assure you this project is wonderful for those new to web-site development (i.e. no HTML knowledge) so don’t be intimidated by the tasks, embrace the idea that this will be a great way to get your feet wet in developing your first web project!