Class 2/20: In Computer Lab UPDATED (twice)

Sorry guys, I'm sick. I'd like for you to go to the computer lab and work on getting your heads around what a blog is.

I'll be near my computer so I can take email questions. I haven't worked up the complete assignment on how you'll be graded on this assignment yet and it won't end until the end of the semester. So all you really need to do is start becoming familiar with them and maybe even start an account with blogger.com (it's free).

I'd like for you to pick a social welfare topic, particularly those of you who're in the social work program. If you have a federal issue that's important to you outside of those, then let me know. I'm not opposed to co-blogs, as I mentioned Monday.

You can put as much personal info or as little personal info on these that you want. You don't have to give your full names or anything.

Some blogs to begin looking at:

http://www.dailykos.com/ The leading liberal/Democratic blog in America. Kos talks mostly about politics, occasionally about policy. (The two are different.)

http://www.powerlineblog.com/ a little mor staid and buttoned down (it's a Republican/conservative blog, after all) and not as much traffic. It's not a community the way Kos is.

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/ Another Repub blog, same comments as Powerline. Not a powerhoue community like Kos.

http://pageonekentucky.com/ Leading KY Democratic blog... although he's quite independent.

http://www.conservativeedge.com/ Ky Repub. blog. Take note of all the blog activity on the right... although Conservative edge hasn't updated their site lately, the aggregator is continuously updated and you can get a sense of what drives conservatives in KY and how they write blog entries.



Rather than go to new posts and take a chance on confusing you, I'm going to add to this one.

Some other blogs:

http://www.nccpr.org/reports/blog.htm From the National Coalition for Child Protection. I don't like the length of their posts (they're way too long) but this is a good issues blog.

http://www.dchunger.org/blog/ A DC Hunger/food stamp blog.

http://www.prochoice.org/blog/ a Pro choice abortion blog.

http://updates.zdnet.com/tags/Medicaid.html?t=1&s=0&o=0 I think ZD net is a blog about many issues and this is the compilation of their medicaid posts.

Anatomy of a post: Once you get started you'll want to start posting. The best way to do that is to write your posts on Word or other word processor and then paste. You might lose some of your formatting if you copy from a web site (you'll probably lose your spacing between paragraphs).. FYI.

To create a hyper link you'll just paste the link onto word, then hit enter taking you down a paragraph. Go back to the link and right click on it. If the link is active (it'll probably be in blue letters once it is) you'll have the option to edit hyperlink. Once you get here you'll see the following box: Text to Display. This can change without changing the link. You can make this read whatever you want.

Let me give an example. Let's say you read the following in a linked article. "Hillary Clinton said medicaid is going broke and must be shored up." You'll write something like this: Here's what Hillary Clinton said- "medicaid is going broke..."

You might select the word said and insert the link there, deleting the word said. You can then modify the link to appear as the word "said." I hope that makes sense. Play around w/ it and you'll get it.