Here’s a picture of Laura Ficker via Flickr. (I’ve always wanted to say that:) On behalf of one:ten communications, Laura is introducing NDeRC blogging to the new cohort of NDeRC Fellows. Using a cell phone, you can upload an image to Flickr, edit it in Picnik, and post it from Flickr to this wordpress blog, all in well under 5 minutes. I’ll post a screencast here (shortly:) to show how each of these steps work. The point here is that you can blog pretty real time.
All that was written from Flickr, which is a good way to blog if you want to introduce some simple content. The wordpress blog has more powerful editing tools, which you can use after posting from Flickr (to add hyperlinks, for example.)
Blogging involves living life more in public, aware that your experiences are valuable to and often should be shared with others. But living with others is a conversation, rather than a monologue. So blogging and reading the blogs of others are complementary practices. Collaboration literacy in the current age involves doing both. To follow other people’s blogs, you can subscribe to them via email or rss notifications. (Here’s a link to a screencast introducing notifications.) Some of what you read you might want to read real time: there are a number of services (like dial2do) through which you can get sms (text) notifications of new posts to blogs you like. So take advantage of these expanded capabilities for sharing life, real time: blog, and read.