Blogging
Kevin Curran, Computer Lecturer - Magee College

Blogging - one of the fastest growing crazes to hit the net

...Behind the scenes of today's Web, swollen with e-stores, and commercialized content, a real revolution is taking seed. The Web is going back to its early days, but it's taking back technology that promises to stir the sleeping giant - all in the form of a "blog."

The word "blog" evolved from "Web Log" because, like a periodic element, it deserves its own moniker. Blogs feed off the Web, digest it, recycle it, and infuse it with new life. Created by feisty, intelligent, opinionated, and sometimes subversive people or small groups, blogs are the future of personal publishing.

Blogs can be flatly defined as pages that maintain annotated lists of Web links. Yes indeed, the idea behind blogging is simple. Browserware, or Web-based software, allows a person to work in a friendly, familiar environment, while behind the scenes crazy John Woo-style digital action is taking place. Your thoughts, links, and pictures are being uploaded, formatted, placed according to your preset design, and saved to your Web page. This means that you can surf around as you normally would, occasionally contributing to your blog and when people go to your Web page they think you are an amazing Web publishing tycoon.

Check out these blogs:

http://www.beblogging.com/blog/
http://radio.userland.com
My friend Fergus who gave me this project idea
Sean McGrath - a friend of a friend (see above...)
Ray Ozzie (lotus notes creator)

Task

Visit a blogging portal such as Blogger.com and register to create a new blogging page. It should only take five minutes. They have a help page here.

One of the keys to the success of this is to find fellow university of ulster students who already keep blogs or indeed encourage your friends to also set up blogs. These blogs should comment on course life, topics, research, etc,. This unfortunately is a crucial part of the project becuase you then need to suck the rss feeds into a central source which can then be viewed through something like Feedreader. We would be stressing the 'information retrieval' aspects of this with regards investigating the value of collecting feedback concerning the universities courses from web blogs.

NOTE : Feedreader is a freeware Windows application that reads and displays Internet newsfeeds aka RSS feeds based on XML. It supports all major RSS formats - 0.9, 0.91, 1.0 and various extensions such as Dublin Core and Slashback. Feedreader utilizes advanced caching methods to reduce bandwitch usage, making the program ideal for mobile communication.

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