I would like each of you to have a News Aggregator and Blogroll set up by no later than Sunday night, October 3rd, at 11:59PM.
For the significance of aggregators and blogrolls as tools of organizational communication, see my earlier post here.
Aggregators
Web Syndication is a powerful tool that organizations are beginning to use in conjunction with blogs. Your Blogger blogs produce a feed, a sort of constantly updated index that alerts anyone who subscribes to your blog when you have posted something new. In this course I would like for all of you (01 & 02) to set up a news aggregator and subscribe to the feeds of both the Study Guide and Project blogs of everyone in both sections (01 & 02).
This will help us to communicate better as a class, and it will give us some experience with one of the newest communication technologies organizations are using. There are two types of news aggregators. Web based, and local. The advantage of the web-based aggregators is that you can access your feeds from any computer. If you use lab computers, I suggest you use a web-based aggregator. With a web-based aggregator there is no program (application) to download. A list of the best aggregators can be found in my left sidebar under "SYNDICATION TOOLS."
There are two types of syndication formats, Atom and RSS. By default, Blogger blogs are set up for Atom syndication. To add the Atom feed of a classmate's blog to your aggregator, add the following suffix to their blog address: /atom.xml
For example, Gage's Study Guide blog address is:
http://twelvegage.blogspot.com/
So his Atom syndication address would be:
http://twelvegage.blogspot.com/atom.xml
[Note: the (RSS) feed for my blog is: http://mod.blogs.com/org_comm/index.rdf]
Blogrolls
There are several other important tools that can be used in conjunction with blogs. A particularly useful one is the blogroll (also known as a "links list"). You can usually find them in the sidebar of a blog, such as the left and right sidebars of my blog. In this course I would like for all of you (01 & 02) to set up a blogroll on your Project blog.
You can set up your own links list by inserting links in your blog's sidebar. This involves going into your blog's template. Read this Blogger help article about templates (scroll down to the section on the "sidebar").
There are two ways to set up a blogroll. One is to type all the links manually in the sidebar section of your blog template; another is to use a blogrolling service. Two of these (free) services can be found in my left sidebar under "LINKING TOOLS."
How will I know if you've done the assignment?
- I will be able to verify your blogroll by looking at your blog.
- To help me verify your news aggregator, I would like you to take a "screen shot" of it, after you have set it up, and email that pic to me. Instructions can be found here for PC. For Mac, use "Grab" which is in your "Utilities" folder.
Comments