More on the Pope Blog - and the Net moves fast!

Wow! This is what happens when a search engine (Google) buys up a blog host (Blogger) - almost instant indexing!

Within hours of leaving the comment on Elizabeth's post about the Pope Blog I received this email:

Dear Sean,

My partner Andy Hagans recently stumbled upon this comment made by you at "Blog On!"

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While the Pope Blog looks like the project of a student at The University of Notre Dame, a little more digging has revealed it is actually the work of a pair from Jimandi Corp - a marketing company - according to this article on PRLEAP.

Despite the fact that "A representative from Jimandi Corp stated that the company would not attempt to secure any revenue from the Web site" and the site is only inspired by an interest in the Pope, the cynic in me can't help but think this is a clever way of getting some exposure for their company.
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We are delighted to see that our Pope Blog has had such far-reaching effects so far. We only started it up a couple of weeks ago in fact. And you are right that the blog is indeed the work of Jimandi Corp, a company founded by Andy and myself, Jimmy Atkinson. Unfortunately, it seems as though you have made one erroneous conclusion: Andy is in fact a student at the University of Notre Dame and I am a recent graduate of the University as well. I suppose it is an understandable mistake as we have yet to post bios on our website
www.dotmarketer.com.

Jimandi Corp is a profiting marketing company based in Los Angeles, California that specializes in niche content websites. The Pope Blog, however, is our one non-profit website which was started by Andy as a hobby. If the Blog gains extra exposure for the company, Andy and I simply consider that the cherry on top. The main purpose of the Pope Blog is to deliver timely news about the Papacy. I'm glad I was able to clear that up. If you have any more questions, we would love to hear from you.

Best to you and all your fellow bloggers!

Jimmy Atkinson
Jimandi Corp.
jimandi@gmail.com

It can normally take months for a regular website to be indexed by Google.

So watch out people - what you say will be noticed!

St George Meeting

I went out to St George today to do a show and tell on what we had been doing. I found that simply by taking people through our three blogs- Sean edublogs.info, this our team blog and our facilitators blog I was able to give a pretty good overview of the uses and features of blogs. Thanks Sean for doing such a great job on the blogs- it's only when I went through them closely that I realised how well you have set them up and are maintaining them.

Mea culpa

Thanks Wendy & Sean for your comments. I figure it is better to face stern feedback & keep on blogging than sit on my hands! Wendy, I fixed the link, as I fell asleep last night I realised why it had not worked, it still took me 2 attempts this morning to correct.
Sean I appreciated your comments on ascertaining sources, Fellow Bloggers please note, however I did try to find out who Boney really is, & got nowhere, clearly you did better than I , so now I want to know how you found out that information?

Blogging goes mainstream

By Mike Barton
June 26, 2004
Icon

"Call it a latent revolution with weblogs. Even if you're not looking for fame as an unintentional journalist like Pax, or the thousands of the intentional armchair journalists who put their own spin on the news of the day, weblog tools allow everyone to easily build a site and update it with text and photos."

Read the full article: Blog, baby, blog

Blogging is going more mainstream every day. With this article in Saturday's Icon we should see an increased awareness of the phenomenon.

This article is a good overview of what blogging is and how to get started.

Send it to your friends who want to know what the hell you are talking about next time you say you are learning about "blogging"!

Journal entry 28/06/04

This morning we had a Fab session on Moodle.org and lots of nutritious info on how to cross the border into webhosting and domain names.
And hey, have you seen the headlines:
Pope too busy to bless, prefers to blog

Did you notice a small white clad man muttering in a creole of Polish & Latin in the corner of NG.23? Neither did I, which leads me to believe that someone in our class has set themselves up as HHPJPII's official blogger.
See for yourself:
Pope's blog

Thanks Wendy & Sean for an Intensive but stimulating series of workshops. The few days I have off when I am not in the shop during the holidays will be spent honing my skills before they are lost in time.

footnote added this

Blog-On! Project Moodle Demo installed

For those who attended today's Session Four on Moodle - I have installed the Moodle demo:

http://www.blogon.info/

Please create an account and profile for yourself then send me an email so I can assign you Creator status so you can start creating your own test courses.

Updated article on Blogging

I felt very chuffed this morning when one of my students enailed me about a piece on blogging in Saturday's SMH Icon that I could reply:

"If you go to our website www.edublogs.info and look under latest blogging news on the RHS you will see that a link to the article you mention is already there thanks to the RSS (Real simple syndication) feeds which our project manager set up for us.

This is one of the wonderful things about the blogging software now available !! You can set it to trawl various sites like newspapers and pick up and forward anything relevant to your blog. Magic!!!"

Setting up Team Blog

Well I've gone ahead - the address for those who want to have a look is
erp4142.blogspot.com

There seem to be problems with the member invitations - some cannot follow the link to log on. Am I doing something wrong? I want this to work easily for the students otherwise they will get frustrated and give up...

Happy Snap

Elizabeth (L) and Tricia (R) at Session Two

Session Notes Posted to the Facilitators' Blog

I have posted the session notes in the sidebar of the Blog-On! Project Facilitators' Blog.

For those of you who attended Session Three, this demonstrates another use for placing links in the blog template, along with the web links list and the list of important posts for creating "permanent" content.

Cascading Style Sheets Style Switchers

For those of you who did Session Three that would like to visit those great sites that demonstrated switching between style sheets:

• Wordpress CSS Competition


• css Zen Garden

Web site for colors

I found another website which gives the codes for a wide range of colors:

http://www.reeddesign.co.uk/test/pantone2rgb.html

It looks brilliant

A quick way to create a blog for your class

I created a class feedback blog for my students to practice giving positive feedback to each other.
I simply put up a post for each student and ticked the box to allow anonymous comments.

Back to Blog School tomorrow

Wendy, thank you for those other addresses, they are encouraging!
Thought you might like to know that I have set up another blog, wearing a different hat
http://nortonstreetbookshop.blogspot.com

Some interesting bits on blogging

An example of a group activity blog for college tourism degree students. Task: work in groups all semester to create media kits promoting an event or region. One group has been working on a ficititious mountain-bike festival in North Vancouver. Like the other groups, their kit consisted of items like a brochure, a media release, an article, and a Website about the event.
"The Shore" Mountain Bike Festival 2005

Posting of minutes of a meeting or conference
Minutes of Distance Learning Contacts Audio Conference (6/10/2004)

College Counsellor’s Noticeboard
The College Blog

A blog set up for trainee teachers of literature
Literacy & Technology Instructor's EduBlog

Springfield Technical College Library blog
STCC Library 'blog

A fascinating blog (more like a journal) by Aaron about teaching English in China.
Chinglish - TEFL in China

A good article on how to promote your blog
Promote your Blog

Kay Trammel did a PhD on blogging
so this is mass communication?

Creating a Team Blog

Sean and Wendy how did you do this? I'd like to set one up for my night class before next week - couldn't come to the practice session today - at SD. What I want to know is how did you set up the members who had access, could view and add posts? Do they all have to have set up their own blogs?

Buzz-spreading the word

At UTS last night, our lecture was on E-learning. They showed my blog !! & I received some nice feedback. Even inspired a couple of people to try it for themselves