The Blog Olympics

I was asked to check out a few different blogs and to compare them; which ones are good, which are bad, do they all have good and bad qualities, and which is just the best blog overall. These three blogs are very different so how can someone tell which one should earn the gold medal?

Well, the first blog that I looked at was a blog for "tips and downloads for getting things done". Lifehacker seems to be a blog by many different authors, but they all give tips about about many different things in life. This could be a very helpful blog. The only thing that could be a problem is if the people writing these blogs give good tips. There isn't really a way to make sure that these tips are valid so I guess a person's own judgement is needed. I've read a few entries from this blog and they seem like they might be pretty helpful. There was an entry about how to navigate by using the night sky. There was also a really cool entry about a map that shows you where police officers usually hide out to track your speed. I would go to this site a lot if I wanted to see if I can get tips on something.

The second blog that I looked at was one written by members of the Huffington Post Internet newspaper. This blog focuses on the main issues of today. As I'm looking at it right now, most of there stories have to do with the election (mostly for the democratic side) and major political events. Even though the election is really important in the lives of Americans at this time, it's not the only newsworthy thing out there right now. The writers do write about other things such as entertainment and world news that but these entries have the option of a "quick read" which makes it seem like these entries wouldn't be as interesting or as important as the others without the "quick read" option.

The third, and final, blog that I looked at is written by a math teacher naming himself dy/dan. He seems to write about what he finds in his everyday teachings and comments on it. Some of the entries are very interesting and have a humorous tone to them. Sup Teach? written on September 27, 2008 really caught my attention. It was funny and it was great how he was reflecting on his beginnings of teaching by reading this of another teacher. He also writes about how his school just started to add advisory and his thoughts on how to go about utilizing it. Dy/Dan is a funny guy and it seems like he really loves to teach

The sum everything up, blogs can be for personal use, informational use, or something to help others. There can't necessarily be a best blog. There are so many categories that you can't pick one best blog out of all of the blogs in the world; that would be impossible. I have to say that all of these blogs are "the best" in their own way and they all deserve the gold!

The Importance of a Blog

A blog can be very helpful in the learning process of this class. Learning about online journalism is very important because this day in age, media and online are used more than print. By posted entries and discussing other authors' works, it will help us understand what kind of topics we should write about and how we should write it. A great benifit of using a blog for part of our learning is that we get experience with online writing and people can even look at our blogs and comment on them. A drawback to using a blog could be that a person may comment on something that you wrote that you thought you did a good job on but they think the total opposite. All in all, writing a blog is such a good way to get your ideas out there and really helps with learning about the journalism of today.

Blogs can also be very helpful with learning in general. I recently learned that you can even search for different kinds of topics that blogs are about. Being able to do this will allow a person to learn about anything. If someone was interested in reading someone's thoughts about the election it would only take a two second search to find an infinite amount of blogs.