Getting started with blogs

So you want to set up a blog? Nothing could be easier. There's a very good step by step guide for setting up a blog in Blogger available from the Ohio State University.

If you're going to be reading student blogs then you should probably get familiar with RSS, and set up a Reader. RSS is a simple way of streaming web content to your computer, by subscribing to websites that frequently update. For example, you could subscribe to a news site and then be alerted every time a new article is published (careful, it gets overwhelming fast!).

More about RSS here.

How do you keep track of your classmates' blogs?

You may remember me suggesting at the beginning of term that you familiarize yourself with RSS and subscribe to a service like Google Reader or Bloglines to make it easier to read your classmates' blogs. Well, I'm curious to know how you are getting on. How have you been keeping track of your classmates' blogs? Please give me some feedback by filling in the poll in the sidebar. Or you can leave your comments here.

Update
Thanks for taking part in the survey to those who did. The results are in now and for the record, here they are:

Votes: 15
I use a feed reader like Google reader: 3
I click on the links in the Blackboard course: 3
I click on the links in Christoph's blog: 2
I click on the links in my own blog: 7

RSS in plain English

RSS (really simple syndication) is a technology which allows you to keep track of web content that you are interested in using a feed reader like Bloglines or Google Reader. Instead of visiting your favourite sites and retrieving the information yourself, you can subscribe to the content and be alerted whenever content is updated. That way, the web comes to you, not the other way around.

This video does a really nice job of explaining what RSS is all about, and how it should make keeping up to date a whole lot easier...