Saturday, January 21, 2006

Few excuses for not blogging in Knoxville... Well, I guess there are a few excuses left, including "no time" and "nothing to say..." But if you have the time and something to say, there are more places to say it every week. The artist formerly known as South Knox Bubba, still wearing that orange UT cap, but going by the less colorful name "R. Neal," is back in town with a blog-hosting and community discussion site called KnoxViews. It's built on a software platform called Drupal that has become popular with citizen journalism websites like Bayosphere in San Francisco, UrbanVancouver, Phillyfuture, BlufftonToday and h2otown in Watertown, Mass. (More about that last one in its founder's guest essay at Pressthink.) There are plenty of welcome mats unrolling for KnoxViews -- see No Silence Here at the sound-alike KnoxNews for some examples from local bloggers. Meanwhile, KnoxNews itself offers not only News Sentinel staff blogs like Michael Silence's, but a YourHub system for hosting blogs as well as local community information (UT-Knoxville, for instance). Even closer to campus, RockyTopBrigade.org's webmaster, Johnny Dobbins, has been testing out a hosting location he calls KnoxBlogs. Finally, although facebook.com seems more popular with students, I remember hearing that UT has a blogging module in its BlackBoard courseware system, but I haven't even had time to look at it. (Student alert: Speaking of Facebook... While digging up a couple of those links, I also ran into this UNC doctoral student's Facebook study (which I think I've linked to before), and this Career Journal article on the downside of Facebook revelations, which also could apply to blogging and other online networking. For your jargon file, see the site -- and verb -- Dooce.) 9:40:08 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2008 Bob Stepno. Last update: 7/19/08; 1:11:40 PM.