Day 6

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Lesson 6

In a previous lesson we discussed Twitter being a micro-blog. The website here at The First Place To Go contains a full sized blog. These lessons are presented as the first 10 posts of the blog.

A blog, or weB LOG, is a series of articles published in sequence by date. The newest blog post shows up at the top of the blog so that when you join the conversation, you begin at the most current article instead of starting at the beginning which could have been years ago.

Blog websites are generally nice to look at because of all of the pictures and the color scheme of the page. However, the blog publisher also uses a feed to send their content to feed reader. If you read more than a couple blogs regularly, you will want to use a feed reader. A feed reader is a program or website that collects all of the blog posts that you subscribe to in one central place, making it easy for you to read them.

Note 2.0
Blogs are one of the most prevalent types of websites on the internet. At the time of this writing, http://www.technorati.com, one of the largest blog tracking websites, cites a reports that states there are over 184 million blogs online with over 364 million readers, which is 77% of the people who use the internet.

Earlier in this series of lessons, you signed up for an e-mail account with Gmail and used the search engine Google. Google owns Gmail and many other web-based programs. One of them happens to be a feed reader called Google Reader.

It’s easy to sign up for Google Reader. You already have a Google account since you set one up when you signed up for your e-mail account. Let’s get you signed in.

1. Go to http://www.google.com/reader
2. Sign in with your username and password
3. In the top left corner, click the “Add A Subscription” button
4. Put http://www.thefirstplacetogo.com/blog in the box
5. Click the “Add” button

On the left sidebar you will see your new subscription under the Subscriptions heading. Once you subscribe to more blogs, you will see more feeds listed there. If you click on the name of the feed, the content will display. Sometimes the complete content will display in the window. Sometimes, especially for long posts, only the first few paragraphs will display. If that is the case, clicking on the title of the post will open the blog and display the full message.

Homework

Go to http://blogsearch.google.com and browse around for some more blogs. Find two or three more blogs to add to your feed reader. Use the Top Stories links on the left or the search box and the top of the page. Leave a comment below about the blogs you added today. Don’t go too crazy adding blogs to your reader. It can get overwhelming if you’re not used to managing large amounts of information.

Wrap Up

Blogs can be fun, or quite serious. They can be about anything from raising children to using the internet. I love that there are even blogs about blogging. If you become interested in blogging yourself, I highly recommend these 10 Easy To Follow Videos Showing You How To Create Your Blog From Scratch! I have used them myself and they helped me put together this very blog.