All of us know that blogging is a great way to express how we feel about a certain issue; however, if you do go overboard, there can be repercussions that can happen due to the posts being so visible on the web. I have provided below two stories of repercussions that have happened to individuals because of this:

Nina Yoder:
Nina Yoder is a Nursing student at the University of Louisville. She maintains a blog on her MySpace account with content such as health and pop culture. Nina just recently published a blog post relating to some other people with relationship to a health study. After this blog post had been published, the university found out about this post and had expelled Yoder from the school.

The school’s reasoning for her expulsion was because it interfered and violated the University of Louisville’s honor code. With this premise, Yoder has arranged to take legal action against the school for her to resume her class work.

(Source: WLKY)

Amanda Bonnen:
The social network microblogging service of Twitter allows you to express what you are doing and/or how you feel about a certain topic in 140 characters or less. Back in May, Chicago resident Amanda Bonnen tweeted about her experience that she had with a local real estate firm.

Popularity of Bonnen’s Tweet grew and eventually was made aware to the real estate company that her complaining was referring to. Upon the real estate’s notification of the tweet, Bonnen had a law suit filed against her due to the nature of her tweet, along with her Twitter account removed.

Other iEntry Network site WebProNews asked local tweeters about their response this issue, and I have provided this video below:

More WebProNews Videos

(Source: WebProNews)

What are your takes on the Yoder and Bonnen stories? Who is in the wrong, and can blogging go too far?

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If you have not heard about it recently on Twitter, SquareSpace is a new trend with blogging technology.

Not too long ago, SquareSpace gained publicity by giving an away an iPhone for 30 days. Past this point, the site has continued to draw in bloggers and website creaters alike to this new technology.

SquareSpace is a fully hosted and managed WYSIWYG design environment for creating and developing a website. All of the arranging of the site’s design can be done just by clicks of your mouse–no coding, and no hiring any over-priced web designers. Some examples of some websites from this service can be found here.

What do you think about SquareSpace? If there is anyone out there currently using this as their blog platform, please feel free to leave your feedback.

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While recently watching the show Diggnation, one of the hosts, Kevin Rose, stated that he has been thinking about redirecting his personal blog to his Twitter page.  At this point the other host on the show, Alex, told Kevin he didn’t think the idea was a good one.  Alex further explained that Kevin would loose money from the ads which his personal site contains.  The debate brought up a good debate, should you give up blogging for Tweeting?

There are some advantages that blogging has over tweeting.  As pointed out by Alex in the debate, there is ad revenue.  If your ad revenue is covering the price of your hosting and domain renewal, you aren’t really loosing any money, and any extra you are actually making a profit.  So in this case, blogging would be a benefit.  Another benefit of blogging is you are not limited by the length of your post.  The 140 character limit on Twitter, really limits what you can express in that amount of characters.  If your blog is like PureBlogging, most ideas can not be expressed in 140 characters.

On the other hand, Twitter does have it’s advantages.  With Twitter you don’t have overhead cost of hosting and domain renewal.  You also don’t have the responsibility to update your blogging software when ever it is updated.  This itself can be a huge benefit if updating your blogging software can be a headache.  You can express ideas that you can’t really create blog out of, is another advantage.

So as you see, blogging and tweeting has it’s advantages and disadvantages.  Each person should access what they think is best for them, but I encourage you to use both.  Use your Twitter account to tell people when you updated your blog, and to give more personal information to your followers, like what you think about the restaurant you just ate at.  Keep your blog to express more insightful information.  One person that has really done well combining the two is Infinity Ward’s (Developers of Call of Duty 4) community manager Robert Bowling aka FourZeroTwo.  His blog is used to keep Infinity Ward’s community up to date with the latest news, while his Twitter account will give small but more personal updates.

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RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds have become really popular in within blogging circles. Using an RSS reader, a user can read content from multiple websites/sources without having to visit the actual source.

From a blogging perspective, this means that a blogger can read all of their blogroll/blogging associates’ posts within one place without having to go to multiple sites to read them separately. This would be a big inconvenience if a blogger has a large blogroll, or a lot of blogs to read.

I have found that subscribing to my blogroll’s RSS feeds are a great way to keep updated with their happenings. If you have a medium-large amount of blogs that you want to be updated with on-the-go, I would highly recommend subscribing to their RSS feeds.

With this premise in mind, the more the blogosphere grows, everyone’s blogroll with grow with it. Will we one day get to a point where we do not actually post to a blog, but post to a place where it will automatically push the post through an RSS stream, and the post not really having a central location?

What are your thoughts on the future of RSS-related blogging?

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If you are new to the blogging scene and looking for ways to get involved in the blogosphere without spending money on servers and domains, I have listed a a few popular services below that will get you started…

• Blogger – This is a great place for a first time blogger. Blogger provides a clean and user-friendly interface to help you start your blogging experience.
• LiveJournal – This blogging site provides a social community where you can link to groups and networks that have a presence within the livejournal realm.
• WordPress – You have seen me mention WordPress on here as a blogging platform, but they do also host free blogs on their .com website. This is a great way to get introduced into the WordPress system.

If anybody out there has any favorite free blogging services that they use, feel free to post them in our comment section. Please also leave any feedback regarding the above services.

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Blogging has really emerged in this past year (2008). It has become more of a household term, and been more widely used than any other years past. This is because of blogging being mentioned immensely through various mediums such as social media/networking, TV, and radio.

One of the biggest ways that blogging has emerged this is year is the election. Various bloggers and blog circles came into the limelight to help persuade/sway your decision on political aspects, such as CNN, and NPR (National Public Radio).

Even the President political candidates had blogs integrated within their own campaign websites (e.g. Barack Obama and John McCain).

According to Trendpedia, there were approximately 8,687 election-related posts made on the day of the returns. That may seem like a small number, but that is a lot of bloggers being active on such an eventful day.

With this being said, whatever is happening in the media, expect that it will be blogged about. For example, a Blagojevich blog dedicated to the Illinois seat scandal, and New Years Eve @ Times Square, NYC.

What will be the trends and direction of blogging in 2009? We shall see!

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Really Simple Syndication (often called “RSS”) feeds have become a growing trend within the blogosphere. Most blogs out there do have RSS feeds enabled within their content management system, allowing various blog readers to keep up-to-date with blog posts on the fly. This is mainly done through hand-held devices like cellphones and PDAs.

RSS feeds can also provide a way for you to view all the blogs that you read in one place, allowing readers a way to manage the numerous blog posts into just one system. To “subscribe” to the RSS feed on a blog which you desire, just click on the RSS icon () within the address bar of your browser.

The personal computer can also view and read RSS feeds as well. With companies like FeedBurner, RSS feeds have become mainstream within blogging circles.

I have provided a list below of a few free readers that you can download or utilize to view RSS content:

• Google Reader – If you have a Gmail account, you may use Google’s RSS reader to view your blog content just like you check your e-mail.
• FeedDemon – This reader presents your content in a Mozilla Thunderbird style arrangement, letting you sort your blog posts by folder.
• RSS Ticker – This is a Mozilla Firefox add-on that will let you view your RSS feeds in a stock market type arrangement as it scrolls across the status bar of your browser.

If you have any favorite RSS feed readers that you use, feel free to share them in the comments of this post.

Happy Blogging!

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Twitter, the social networking site that allows users to describe what they are doing in less than 140 characters is becoming quite a companion for bloggers and the blogosphere.

You may even think that it even might be considered “a mini blog” since you are sharing the events in your life with fellow Twitter users that are following your account.

A trend that has been happening is that Twitter users have been using their account to spread the word about the happenings on their blog. You will often see users in the Recent Updates feed mentioning something like “New blog post!” followed by a link to their blog (mostly seen as a TinyURL redirect link). This method can also be an alternative to an RSS feed as people will “Tweet” the update of their blog right after it is posted.

If you have been blogging for quite a while, and have a vast amount of readers and blog partners, most likely that the majority of them will have an account there.

What are your thoughts on Twitter in relation to the blogosphere?

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Hello! I’m Chad, and will now be providing the frequent content for this blog. I would like to commend Chris on his contributions to this amazing blogging resource. I am honored to blog here in his stead, but be on the lookout for occasional posts from him on here in the future.

Guess what? Blogging has it’s own month! If you are familiar with National Novel Writing Month (commonly known as NaNoWriMo), blogging now has it’s turn! National Blog Posting Month (nicknamed NaBloPoMo) is a challenge to write one post a day for the rest of the month. Are you up to this challenge?

There are various prizes (now I have your attention?) to be awarded to bloggers that win this contest–mostly donated by others that are contributing to this project.

If any of you out there are participating in this challenge, make yourself known by leaving a comment. It will be interesting to see how many readers of this blog are contenders of NaBloPoMo.

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Here we go again. The blogosphere is dead. Nicholas Carr at RoughType.com writes:

Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they’re part of a “blogosphere” that is distinguishable from the “mainstream media” seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion.

And the fate of blogs conversation goes on.

Jason Miller at WebProNews has come good commentary on it.

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