Introduction to Blog

• Blog is the contraction universally used for weblog, a type of website where entries are made (such as in a journal or diary), displayed in a reverse chronological order.
• Blogs often provide commentary or news and information on a particular subject; some function as more personal online diaries.
• The word blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogs)


Free Blogs

• WordPress: A blog publishing system written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database.
• Windows Live Space: Microsoft's Social Networking platform, with the aim of allowing its users to reach out to others by publishing their thoughts, photos and interests.
• Blogger.com: A weblog publishing system owned by Google.

Search Engine

• Google
• Yahoo
• Technorati
• IceRocket
• PubSub

Background Knowledge
For me, blog is a place to write my personal diary, opinion regarding some issues, or something that I want to share with friends. However, I personally seldom write blogs because I am not a person who likes to publish my private life online.

What I did to find out about blogs is that I went to the Internet and did a little research. I personally like to use Google and Wikipedia so I always search these two websites first. From these two websites, I can find the definition and links to other blogs sites.

The link is provided below:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger_(service)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Msn_space

I have visited many blogs sites and thus it was easy to choose a place to host my blog when I wanted to create one. The general procedures are very easy. First, did a little research on Internet to find out the websites that you can write your blog. Second, choose one and create your personal account (you will need to provide basic information for the register process). Finally, write your blog!


Blogs in the Classroom
I agree that blogs is a helpful tool that can be used in classroom, especially for younger generations. For example, they can post their learning or findings on a particular subject on their blogs, and other people can comment on the articles. Another example would be publishing their design or research regarding a new instructional technology. Furthermore, images can be uploaded for sharing purposes.

However, as I mentioned before, due to the privacy concerns, teachers should not force students to publish their private life online. Teachers should also emphasize on copyright issues as blog is a very good example that can easily infringe copyright.