COMM 337 assignment: Starting your blogs

You'll notice on your syllabus for Communications 337 I'm requiring you to create a blog and do a lot of your work in the form of posts to that blog. I think you will enjoy this part of the class once you get used to it.

A couple of places to look to begin with:

1. There's a good brief (500 words) definition of blogging by Jill Walker Rettberg, an associate professor at the University of Bergen in Norway. She's writing a book on blogging and also has an academic research blog on blogging called jill/txt. Some of her discussion is way over my head, but she's one of the best people I've read on the theory behind the phenomenon.

2. To see what a major metro newspaper does with blogs, go to The Chicago Tribune's homepage and look for the "Latest from our blogs" box. Today's is in the middle of the page, a little to the left and directly below the chicagotribune.com nameplate. It'll probably be in more or less the same place tomorrow (Monday) when you see it. Read several of the blogs, and they'll give you a good idea of some of the possibilities.

We'll look at several other blogs in class, and you'll link to several in one of your first posts. So start looking for blogs that you can model yours after. See what interests you and what doesn't. One thing you can do is express your personality (although maybe not in the same way(s) as MySpace) in a blog. So look around and see what appeals to you and what techniques you can use in your own blog.

By the end of the week, you should be ready to start your blog. I suggest Blogger. It's relentlessly user-friendly. But you may have another host that you like better. If so,

One warning, though: Blogging is a form of publication. One of my old bosses, an elected state official, used to say: "Never put anything in writing you wouldn't want to see leaked to The [Chicago] Trib or The Sun-Times." Good advice! Never put anything on your blog you wouldn't want to see printed out and clipped to your resume before a job interview. But you can -- and should -- express yourself more informally in a blog than you do in a college paper. In evaluating your blogs, I'll be guided by the applicable standards in the Writing Assessment Rubric linked to my faculty page.