Betty Online

Well, still not really keeping up with the challenge but so far I’m finding that I’m much more willing to post on other blogs and beginning to find excellent resources. Today I found Dr. Scott McLeod’s blog, Dangerously Irrelevant, by following up on some library resources on blogging at the college/university level. McLeod writes about why university campuses are slow to embrace blogging. On his site I found the following excellent video, which I watched over and over to figure out who all of the people speaking are. I wanted specifically to sort out who Daniel Pink is, but was even more taken by the comments in the video by Stephen Heppal. That led me to search out his blog.

This video is well worth watching and will definitely become a part of my toolkit for encouraging teachers to work with the available technology.

I’ve joined the 31 day comment challenge. In joining cocomment to try to understand how to track comments and conversations, I’ve been directed to Technocrati which I’m now trying to understand. Here’s the link to my  Technorati Profile on technocrati.

Day 1 - Ok, so I’ve joined the 31 day blog challenge. At the moment 31 days seems like a long time but here goes. Our first activity is to answer three questions.

• How often do you comment on other blogs during a typical week?
  • Typically I haven’t been doing my fair share of commenting at all. I comment when something catches my eye but that is not regular at all.
• Do you track your blog comments? How? What do you do with your tracking?
  • By tracing my blog comments I’m not sure if this refers to comments that get posted on my blog or somehow keeping a link to the comments I post on other peoples sites, honestly something I hadn’t thought about before. For my own site I have the moderation features turned on. I have included a widget to track recent comments. When I do get posts I always follow up with checking out who it is that is responding, usually by visiting their site. Actually I blog a lot for my own clarity in thinking and so comments and tracking comments hasn’t been a huge interest. More recently I think I’m struck by the power of this medium and the potential to connect and share ideas. I’m much more interested which is why I’ve decided to participate in the 31 day blog challenge.
  • As for tracking the comments I post elsewhere, this is new idea for me and now I’m going to look into that. I haven’t used or investigated cocomment at all yet. Watch for an update as I go off exploring.
• Do you tend to comment at the same blogs or do you try to comment on at least one new blog per week?
  • No pattern as yet.

Now off to visit Gina Trapini’s guide to commenting. It is actually pretty common sense but a good reminder. This would actually be a good resource for students when setting up blogging with a group. The idea of always needing to add new information to a blog comment can be daunting though. I might rephrase that as a new perspective or a good question. That would be worthwhile too. Interesting that there is no way to comment on her article.

And finally, I’ve just added a “comment08″ tag to this blog entry. I know a little about tag, but now I’m going to go and search out the ramifications of where that puts my entry.

Day 1 and already I’ve got new questions!