Write short

Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites encourage brief messages (sometimes called "micro-blogging").

Facebook even allows you to create ads, but these ads have a severe character limit - 25 in the heading, 135 in the body, or 160 total, which is the same as Twitter.

The advantage is that the "click-through" link doesn't count toward your character limit, and you can attach a picture. You can try Facebook ads yourself without actually committing to running (and paying for) them. As you compose the ad, a preview shows up in the window. Try creating some ads for your own interests and screen-grab the results and post them here.

Here's one of mine.

Is it easy? Hard? Why?

Reading and comments

I have added all of your blogs to my blog's sidebar as a "blogroll." You can use that to quickly get to each others' blog sites.

Please read your fellow students' blogs and offer comments. I have commented on each of your most recent blog posts, and have tried to match my comments to your posts. If your post was short,  my comment was short; if long and complex, my comment was long and complex. That's one of the unofficial "rules" of the internet etiquette - measured response.

As a blog author, you control who is allowed to comment and how. If you prefer, you can "moderate" comments, meaning you must approve them before allowing them to be posted. Is that a good idea? Why or why not?

Keep posting! Just making yourself do it on a regular basis is a good habit to build. Eventually it will become part of you and you'll find yourself posting to your blog almost effortlessly.

So, what are you reading???

One of the more common uses for blogs is to let others know what you're reading, and often it's other blogs.

Some of my favorite blogs I read are:

Neurologica, by Dr. Stephen Novella.

NeuroLogica Blog

Maybe the best, most prolific columnist on topics of skepticism and rational thinking. Dr. Novella regularly fillets magical thinking, sloppy logic and pseudoscience.

Weblog-ed by Will Richardson

Weblogg-ed

Will is an educator who has taken the horns of this whole "read-write web" thing. He's seeing amazing things at the elementary and high school level, and this has implications for higher ed and for web designers in general. Probably not of interest if you're not an educator, but he does have links to lots of cool stuff.

Fatal Exception by Neil McAllister

Fatal Exception | Neil McAllister | InfoWorld

McAllister is a columnist for InfoWorld. He writes about trends in web programming and development. For anyone considering a career in web development or programming, McAllister is a must-read.

So, what are YOU reading?

Post a blog entry with some of your favorite information sites on the web.

--Brad

Welcome to the Class Blog!

Welcome to the blog site for NET115 Writing for Electronic Media. You will create your own blog sites and you will be using these to write, post, read and comment on your classmates' blogs.

I'm creating a "blog roll" - a list of other blogs that I read - and I will include your blog addresses so you can find each others'. I encourage you to add your own favorite blogs to your blog roll.