blogs from this week

hey class....if the blog you analyzed for paper #2 was a good one, please copy/paste the URL for it in a comment to this post. this is a good resource that you should check over the weekend or on tuesday for ideas for next week's blog, as well.........blob

check out this blog

this weblog is maintained by one of my professors from law school, doug berman:

sentencing.typepad.com

it is a great blog and is gaining a national reputation. most importantly, even though the blog is about a highly specialized area of the law [federal sentencing guidelines], this is a very fun blog....just looking at it today i found links to the baseball hall of fame, the movie being john malkovich, and the west coast offense that many college football teams use. the point is that while maintaining a serious blog, my friend the blogger has a LOT of fun and keeps his blog as humorous as his class was....

another cool thing about this blog is that my friend started it months ago, before federal sentencing guidelines were an, uh, "hot" topic...and once they became hot, he was uniquely positioned to speak about them and has made many TV appearances and speeches about this issue across the country.

your goal with your blog #2 should be similar--try to establish a blog that is unique and will be informative and entertaining and will position you as an "expert" on something.......so that, who knows, maybe one day you can gain national notoriety from your blog like doug has. also, this is the kind of project that doesn't have to stop when the quarter stops. in fact, i hope some of you [or many of you in fact] keep your blogs for a long long time....they offer you a chance to make your voice heard to the whole entire world, or more specifically, let's say you want to become a creative writer, you can start a blog which features your poetry or stories, and you can create an audience for your work even if none of the big publishers want to print your poetry and put it in the bookstores. ha! [also, if you want to apply to law school, it would be impressive to tell the admissions committee that you have been paying specific attention to an issue in the law for years and have created a blog about it, etc.]

more thursday tidbits

1) i am not going to collect an electronic copy of your blog analysis #2, so simply print out a copy for me and consider saving a copy for yourself. [maybe email it (copy/paste or attach it) to yourself if you don't have a disk or flash drive]

2) as you look at these blogs each week, you should be keeping track of which free blogging sites seem to offer the most services. for instance, at least this summer when i was using blogger.com, there was no easy way to upload photos on my blog...this may have changed by now but i'm not sure......so, as you evaluate the blog content, keep in mind that you should also be paying attention [in the "describe the blog" section of your analysis paper] to the blog interface, and the layout and design capablities of the blog...........soon, you will start on your blog #2 and you want to use the best interface possible...

have a great weekend, blob

thursday, week 3

hi folks......by the end of today's class, you should turn in your blog analysis #2. when you are writing this, please stick to the format i gave you last week. i know that it is not a creative format, but my advice to students has always been: when a teacher ask for and expects information to be presented to him in a certain way, the simplest and best way to accomplish the assignment is in the exact manner he asks for it.

with this in mind, your analysis paper should have only 4 sections, perhaps just 4 paragraphs. but if you choose to use more than 1 paragraph in a particular section, then skip an extra line [this is called a page break] before moving on to the next section. you could also use section headers if you want--just to make it as easy as possible on the reader to know what information to expect in each section.

finally, remember that this is a class about learning about America, so make sure to concentrate the most on this section—section 4—of the paper.

take care and have a nice weekend, blob

ps. please include the URL for the main page of the blog somewhere in the first paragraph [the description of the blog]…

assignment for tuesday (optional but recommended)

if the blog you analyzed last week is worth recommending--i get the sense many of them are *not* from your papers though, ha!--please write a "comment" to this post [there is a link below] and give a brief one-sentence description of the blog as well as the web address [URL] for it. thanks!!

ps. if the blog you analyzed last week was no good, you might also send a message advising your classmates to stay away :)

tuesday, week 3

good morning.....today in class i will return the blog analysis #1 to you. overall, i think the class did a good job considering it was the first time you have ever done anything like this. i tended to give them high marks--as i suggested i would in class--but over the next few weeks, i will expect them to get better and it will be harder and harder to get the same high grades. [okay, not that HARD, but i want you to know i expect you to improve.]

today in class, you need to find the next blog you will analyze. this should be much easier than it was last week since you have discovered some tools, such as blogsearchengine.com ......good luck and welcome to week 3.

bob