I don’t like to brag or anthing, but the credibility of my blog is growing. I was looking through the referring sites to my blog and I found that I have been cited as a source in a debate about video games. As a former collegiate debater at Northern Illinois University, I was thrilled to be included in as a source.
I realize that this is just some guy borrowing my blog post to help support an argument and that my post has know actual authority to it beyond my personal experience, but the reason I do this blog thing is to be a part of the internet community and share what I am thinking. So, it is exciting when what you are sharing is used and shared by others. It makes the world feel smaller and make me feel like a member of a larger community.
I was surfing through my referrers in the data I collect for how people get my blog and I often see that google.ca is a referrer. So, I decided to follow the referring link back, and I found that was again the top search result for Google for a certain topic.
I am not sure how many links deep the site goes, but currently I have two posts about American Idol on my blog front page, so that may have contributed the analysis. The site also gives a projected brain analysis:
I found today that someone had started a site called lzhsnews.com which will have news of Lake Zurich High School (which is where I work). One of the news stories is that I have a blog. I was very flattered by the comments the author made about my blog and it made me glad that I have made a more concerted effort to occasionally update it. Here is the story:
Today’s good thing was seeing that when you search Google for presidential swing set, my blog comes up first. I never thought I would see the day that my blog would be #1 on Google for any search, but there ya go.
I have recently become very interested in the phenomenon that is Twitter. I don’t know exactly how yet, but I believe that Twitter will, and is, changing the world. I started using Twitter in my classroom and in the letter I sent to my parents I expound on Twitter’s virtues, so I don’t want to rehash all of them here, but here is a link to that post which lists several of Twitter’s uses.
What I find most compelling about Twitter is its real time nature. As news or events happen you can find out instantly. This might be as mundane as your friend going to the grocery store or as big as a plane crashing into the Hudson river.
Today’s goo thing is that I had time to finish the redesign of the blog. I had installed the sliding frames theme a week or so ago and today I was finally able to turn it into a three column theme after some internet searching. This project has consumed far more of my time than I had intended, but I got a little OCD about it.
Today’s good thing was taking some time to get caught up on technology and see what the World Wide Web is turning into and producing. I am very impressed with some of the technologies that are out there. I have been trying to do a good job of looking at some useful sites and making notes about them in delicious.
Anyway, today I got to make a font of my handwriting as discussed in my previous post. It is pretty neat.
The bad thing today was that it was the second day in a row I didn’t get to see Isaac awake and I didn’t see much of Gina because it was Biggest Loser night for her and Jenny.
Tomorrow should be better on that front as we are going shopping and possibly joining the much vaunted Costco. (But that joining may wait until later depending on time.)
Today I am trying to use two new sites that I heard about on the internet. The first is http://yourfonts.com. This is a site where you can create your own font by downloading a template, filling it out and then uploading the template back to their website. Below is a copy of the template that I filled out.
I also was playing with http://scribd.com. This site is designed to let you post items that you write and display them on what they call iPaper. This is a format that will help protect your content from theft and let you embed it in a web-site as shown below.
This site was very easy to use and it accepts OpenOffice.org which I appreciate as an avid user of open source software. I don’t know that I completely have a use for this, but I could write and publish class notes on Scribd. which would allow me to get feedback on them and share than easily with students. I still always have a slight fear of putting too much storage online because sites may vanish tomorrow, but I am creating it online, just uploading it, so this would be a safe altenative.
As always I am astounded by the amount of free software and helpful tools out there. Soon I will post a review of on-line whiteboards that I found.
