106: Week One

If you are looking for baby photos, then you should scroll down to the previous post. If you are looking to pass English 106, then you should scroll down to the baby photos, sufficiently oooh and aaah, and then scoll back to this post.

Wednedsay, August 22nd, lecture notes:

1. Review the syllabus, especially the course description.
2. Examine some sample blogs:
   • Joystiq
   • Games for Lunch
   • 3,079 Miles to Fenway, 3,448 miles to Yankee Stadium [sports team blog]
   • The Sartorialist [New York fashion blog]
   • Pitchfork [Independent music blog]
   • Superficial [Celebrity Gossip]
3. Other blog possibilities:
   • Fantasy Football
   • Restaurant Reviews
   • AFI Top 100 films (Cult classic movies, classic B&W, dramatic movies, oscar nominated foreign films, blockbuster movie of the week, horror, top grossing films)
   • Books
   • Graphic Novels
   • Street Culture (skateboarding, shoes, music, etc.)
   • Travelling
   • Vinyl
   • Presidential politics
   • Photography
   • Simpsons and society
   • NBA Basketball (Bulls)
   • Chicago Sports
   • Learning to cook: (dorm food)
   • Surviving Freshman Year (campus hot spots–what to do at Purdue?)
   • Painting / Fine Arts
   • Video Game / Television community: reality tv
   • Celebrity fashion
4. Blog resources:
• Blogger’s Choice Awards
• Tehnorati [blog search engine]
5. Setting up our del.icio.us accounts:
   1. What is del.icio.us? It is a social bookmarking site. Imagine bookmarking a page in your browser. Now imagine doing it online and categorizing the site. Now imagine a program that sorts every page bookmarked by every user. You are going to create del.icio.us accounts and link them to my account so I can see what you are looking at.
   2. Visit del.icio.us homepage.
   3. Choose to create a new account
   4. YOUR USERNAME CANNOT BE YOUR REAL NAME OR YOUR PURDUE USER NAME. I REPEAT: NO REAL NAMES. You are likely 18. I want to protect your anonymity. I know that I wouldn’t want the public to access what I wrote when I was 18. Chances are, you won’t either. Even if you want to user your real name, I’m telling to you can’t.
   5. Now we are going to set up a “post to del.icio.us” button. Chances are you’ll want to do this on your home computer too. On the loggin menu, choose “help.” Under bookmarking, you’ll see a link to create a button for any browser. That’s what we want.
   6. Now we want to learn how to tag. Tags are single word descriptions of a page. SINGLE WORD. If you want two words, use a hyphen to connect them. Put spaces in between tags. Let’s do a sample one together.
   7. Finally, I want you to “link” to my account. This way, I can see what you are looking at and you can see what I am looking at. On the top menu, under the del.icio.us page header, choose “my network.” Enter my user name into the “your network” text field and press the “add” radio button. Poof, the world becomes that much more connected.

Over the next couple days I want you to surf the web, using technorati and blog rolls to start exploring a community. I am going to ask you to email a list of blogs you might want to write by Saturday at 10:00am. As you begin exploring these communities, tag the blogs to del.icio.us. As you form groups, I’ll ask you to share your links with other students of similar interests. This will be our first step toward forming a blog roll for your group’s blog.