Thursday 2 April 2009

What it says on the can


I’ve just been hunting down examples for the generic blogging course I’m starting in the summer and thought I’d do a quick post on this. I used technorati, the international edubloggers directory and blogger (Google). My tips are as follows:

1) go straight to “advanced search” and make sure you are searching blog titles, not simply blog posts, otherwise you will end up with thousands of posts which happen to mention “geography”, rather than Geography blogs.
2) limit your search to those blogs which have been updated in the last couple of months, to avoid your search taking you to a blogs' graveyard
3) try searching for blogs with a word like “GCSE” or “revision” in the title to home in on school-run blogs
4) specify “English” to filter out foreign language blogs
5) read the first line of the post displayed before clicking on the link, and look at the blog address for clues as to the level of the blog (there are plenty of Science blogs run at University level for example)
6) once you have found a decent blog, check out their blog roll before moving on – there may be useful links

And finally, once you’ve found what you’re looking for, in future bear all this in mind when titling blogs and blog posts! Spending several hours on this task has made me determined to keep a balance between memorability, practicality and (occasionally) whimsy in future when I’m thinking up blog titles.


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