a short guide to this and other blogs

Please click here to read What's a Blog and Why do Blogs Matter?

Generally, blogs post new entries at the top of the page and older entries can be found as one scrolls down the page. Each entry is delineated by the bold heading and each day's entries are delineated by the section break. Bloggers set a number of entries to display on the front page and after that number is exceeded, older entries can be found in the archives along the sidebar.

Under posts are links that contain information regarding the entry. First is the entry's author (I'm annie). Most useful, is the comments button. This button allows you the reader to comment on the entry, thereby initiating that interaction that makes blogs so great. Some blogs also have a category that each post falls into. If you like the post topic, you can click on the category to read more like it. I'm not doing categories here, but it's useful if you're mixing personal, educational, and professional entries on one blog.

The time stamp makes the web address in the URL window into a permalink, the URL that directs readers to just that entry on its own page that never scrolls with future entries. Because blogs change every day, if you want to link to a blogger's entry, it's best to link to it via the entry's permalink so your blog readers will be directed to exactly the entry you refer to in your blog. Some blogs' permalinks are a number sign (#) at the bottom of the post, and some are a time stamp (3:54 p.m.) either under the entry heading or at the bottom of the entry.

Along the sidebar, blogs typically contain a blogroll, which is a list of the blogger's favorite blogs and websites to frequent or recommend. In the web culture, links are a unit of power, so a blogroll as well as the links embedded in entries' text are reserved for sites you want to boost. The main reason links are so powerful lies in the methods Google and other search engines use to rank search results. They send out 'bots, programs that crawl through, or spider, web pages cataloging content, and find which sites are linked to which sites and which words were used in the link. The search rank for the word "jew" is a famous example. Last year an anti-Semitic group googlebombed the word. Because I don't want to give this group any links or references [read, power], I don't want to name them or link to them, but look for yourself at the now-second ranked search result for a google search on the word. The anti-Semitic group organized a bunch of sites to put the word on websites over and over again, and to make each occurence of the word a link to the anti-Semitic site. It worked, and their site became the top search result for the word on google. But bloggers came to the semantic rescue and launched a counter-campaign to instead link the word "jew" to the wikipedia entry for the word on thousands upon thousands of blogs. Ironically, because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia written in the public domain via wiki format, the attention helped make the search term one of the longest and most contributed-to entries. In fact, Wikipedia now contains an entry detailing the web event.