Serendipity35

Reading Tim's thorough dissection today of the blog getting a million hits in April is illuminating, but it doesn't address what gives me the most pleasure from the numbers.

Last year at this time, I wrote a post called "Bookmarklets and Favelets" about using social bookmarking tools and sites. It's a very average post with a useful list of links to social bookmarking sites. The week it was posted it probably has about 100 direct hits. (The number at the end of each post tells you how many people actually linked directly to that post. A hit on our home page probably leads someone to read the latest post but that post doesn't get any "credit" for that in the count.) I looked at it today - 21, 333 direct hits. The post has a life.

I thought briefly about being a journalist when I was an undergrad. If I had ended up making it to the big show - say at the New York Times - I would write pieces that people would read and then throw away. True, some pieces get reprinted, clipped out and saved (I still do that all the time), anthologized or end up in books, but the vast majority disappear. That's depressing.

This post (and hopefully some others that are much better) will be read more in the months to come than it will be read this month when it is fresh and new. I like that a lot. Traditional (and paid!) journalists are also reaping this benefit of online publishing. Their writing gets read again and again online long after it appeared in print on paper.

I guess Tim & I could think of getting hit on a million times in another way too. I checked the dictionary and found "hit on" (No, not to make, especially sexual overtures to) also means to discover or meet especially by chance. That's a perfectly serendipitous way of looking at this.

Add another milestone to the history of blogging. I read "Finding the 'Ultimate Blogs': An interview with Sarah Boxer" posted by Kelly Heyboer on the Jersey Blogs site last week.

Sarah Boxer has put together an anthology of the best blog writing. She admits the term ultimate is:

"kind of tongue in cheek. (I guess I needed an emoticon to cue people how to read that word.) There are no ultimate blogs, of course. The blogosphere is an endless stream of constantly changing material.

I went through hundreds of blogs, following recommendations, links, contests, and the "favorites" lists of bloggers I like. I looked for variety in terms of subject matter, use of language, age group, geography, and type (there are a couple of poetry blogs, a few cartoon blogs and one photo blog in the book).

The blogs I ultimately chose are the ones that I thought were exceptionally well written, bloggy in tone, and -- most basically -- would work in a book."

The former New York Times reporter is not a blogger herself, so she created this traditional book of paper about digital writing.

Ultimate Blogs: Masterwords from the Wild Web is made up of posts from 27 blogs. Some blogs are pretty well known (Go Fug Yourself ,The Smoking Gun) others are not - though I suspect their ht counters will surge this month.

• An American-abroad blog How to Learn Swedish in 1000 Difficult Lessons,
• military blog Midnight in Iraq
• classical music blog The Rest is Noise.

Boxer was asked

Q: Did you have a favorite blogger? Were you surprised by what you selected for the anthology?
A: I love all of them actually. The ones that really stick in my mind are the ones I think of as alter-ego blogs or character blogs: AngryBlackBitch, Eurotrash, El Guapo.

I also love the cartoon blogs Micrographica and Get Your War On. I find I Blame the Patriarchy hilarious. I can't pick. They're all great.

There are tons of fabulous storytellers in there: There's an Iraqi blogger who tells an amazing tale about a t-shirt. There's an American Marine interviewing some Iraqi kids. There's an American living in Sweden who is a master of short anecdotes. A music blogger tells the story, with the help of Mozart and Wagner, of how applause between musical movements came to be frowned on.

Another blogger retells the story of the Iliad and Odyssey from the point of view of one of Odysseus's sidekicks.

I was surprised that so few of the bloggers in the book turned out to be political bloggers. I have only two -- Rootless Cosmopolitan and Matthew Yglesias. It is incredibly hard to find any political blogs that don't rely heavily on links and that don't go stale the day after they're written.

Do you use blogging in your classes? I know that there are courses taught at the college level on blogging. I wouldn't say that this anthology is appropriate as a textbook, but the sites and some of the examples might well be used to show the styles & genres that are developing in blogging. Did you know that there are cartoon blogs? (Personally, I like indexed.) Could you use under odysseus in your classics unit or pair it up with Rosencrantz and Guilderstern Are Dead to talk about changing the point of view in a story?

Will we see a time when there will be Best American Blog Posts (though "American" may not work for the Net) as we now have the Best American Poetry or Best American Stories et al?

I use an open source blog software for this blog, and the "commercial-but-free" Blogger software for a poetry blog. I also have created blogs on other sites - mostly just to experiment with the software - as with nes I have on Eduspaces, VOX, Xanga, and even MySpace. One site that I probably should have investigated earlier is Edublogs.

Edublogs was started in 2005 in Australia as a blogging platform and community for educators. It has grown to host over a hundred thousand blogs. There's even an enterprise blogging solution called Edublogs Campus that might be a good solution for your educational institution.

There's a recent post on their site called "10 ways to use your edublog to each."

It's a good list of educational uses of a blog. You can read their full text, but here's my take on the list.

1. Use a blog to post materials and resources - especially useful to those of you who have no access to network/server storage for your classes that will be accessible by your students from school and home.

2. Host online discussions - having students respond to blog posts and discuss topics without a CMS. AS a teacher, you can receive emails when comments are made & you can manage and edit all responses.

3 & 4. Create a class publication - do a class newsletter, offer parent information, a site for a club or group. Students can be contributors, authors and editors.

5. Get your students blogging - your blog can be a "hub" for their work and a place where they can easily visit other blogs. Teachers of writing should be writers themselves. Teachers who ask students to blog, should be blogging.

6. Share your lesson plans - That may seem radical to some teachers - to open source your plans.

7. Integrate multimedia - embed online video, multimedia presentations, slideshows without CDS, coding knowledge.

8. As an organizing tool - clubs, activities, student government, single events...

9. Get feedback - You CAN allow anonymous commenting on your blog (or force all comments through moderation) but if you're not afraid or even welcome feedback...

10. Create a fully functional website - blogs can look like multimedia rich websites. No one says you have to do all the comments and typical blogging functions. (Though I suspect that if you use a blog for a few months, you will WANT to use those functions!)

The finalists are posted (no, not Serendipity35). Check them out. Good things to read there and you can vote if you wish.

Try the Most Influential Posts as a starting place.

Gone Fischin’ - Dangerously Irrelevant

How to Grow a Blog - blog of proximal development

How to Prevent Another Leonardo da Vinci - Wandering Ink

Is It Okay To Be A Technologically Illiterate Teacher? - The Fischbowl

The Ripe Environment - Discourse about Discourse