Blogging Takes Center Stage at the Blogger Boot Camp

(PRWEB) January 10, 2005

A November study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project showed that 27% of online adult population in the U.S. has checked out a blog or two. That’s up from 17% in Febraury.

With blogging rapidly gaining in popularity, the people at the DaVinci Institute have decided to put together a Blogger Boot Camp on Jan 15th to help people who are interested in developing their blogging skills.

“Blogging is simply a way of sharing your thoughts and opinions, and things you find interesting with the rest of the world,” says Greg Reinacker, founder of Newsgator and one of the instructors at the Blogger Boot Camp. “But it ends up being much more than that.”

The Blogger Boot Camp is for people who are interested in blogs, may have read some, and perhaps have even started one – but seek a more detailed understanding, some advice, and some hands-on experience. The morning will be an introduction to blogging. We’ll talk about what makes a blog, some of the history of blogs, and some of the different types of blogs are out there. We’ll see blogs used in academic research, knowledge management in business and for breaking news. We’ll see personal blogs driven by diverse concerns ranging from socializing to tracking an obsession with cell-phone photography. We’ll talk about some of the tools for blogging (e.g., Movable Type, Blogger, MSN Spaces, Typepad) and their differing strengths and emphases. We’ll look at blog standards such as Trackback, RSS, the Blogger API et al, and Atom. We’ll look at blog community building and analysis tools (e.g., Technorati, del.icio.us) and aggregation tools (e.g. Newsgator [Online and Outlook], FeedDemon, and NetNewsWire). We’ll discuss related developments such as wikis, and the larger field of social software.

For the techies, a blog is a web application that contains periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts on a common webpage. Some are maintained by single authors, while others have multiple authors. Many blogs allow visitors to leave public comments, which can create to a community of readers centered around the blog; others are non-interactive. The total universe of blog-related websites is called the blogosphere.

“Blogs today are rapidly transitioning from the early text-only blogs, to photo blogs, to audio blogs that include a new distribution system known as podcasting, to video blogging,” said Thomas Frey, Executive Director of the DaVinci Institute. “We have recruited some of the top experts in Colorado to help us teach te fine art of blogging.”

Instructors include Greg Reinacker – Founder and CTO of NewsGator Technologies, Gil Asakawa – Executive Producer of Denver Post Online, Bill French – Co-founder of MyST Technology Partners, Pat Maher – founder of Maher Media, and Jock Mirow – Chief Strategist for BroadbandVideo.

The Blogger Boot Camp is designed as a Weekend Crash Course from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm on January 15th at DeVry University, 1870 W. 122nd Avenue, Westminster. The cost to attend is $ 195 with a $ 50 discount for members of the DaVinci Institute. More information can be found at http://www.bloggerbootcamp.com.

Top 10 Interesting Blog Facts:

1.) In pre-blog times Ham radio had logs called “glogs” that were personal diaries made using wearable computers in the early 1980s.

2.) The first blog was the first website, http://info.cern.ch/, the site built by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. (Archived at http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/News/9201.html)

3.) In 1999, the early blogging software produced by Blogger and Pitas opened the doors to for non-techies by offering a simple way to create a weblog. These hosted services allowed any person to easily sign up, create a blog, and write numerous postings.

4.) Blogs have made such an impact this year that Merriam-Webster named it the word of the year.

5.) More than 10,000 new additions are added to the “blogosphere” each day.

6.) 2004 was the first year, bloggers were permitted to cover the national political conventions firsthand.

7.) Some of the most compelling images of 2004 found their way to blogs first, from the Florida hurricanes to the war in Iraq.

8.) In November 2004, Boulder’s Christopher Locke was named as the world’s first Chief Blogging Officer for HighBeam.

9.) Blogwise, a specialty search engine for blogs, now has 34,917 sites listed, of which 348 were listed in the past 7 days.

10.) According to Technorati, the two top rated blogs are Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things and Instapundit.com

For information or interviews, contact:

Greg Reinacker, NewsGator Technologies – 303-552-3900 or gregr@newsgator.com    

Thomas Frey, Executive Director, DaVinci Institute – 303-666-4133 or dr2tom@davinciinstitute.com

About the DaVinci Institute

The DaVinci Institute is a Futurist Think Tank based in Louisville, Colorado. The Institute goes beyond the traditional role of a think tank. We believe that shaping the future requires more than ideas; it requires action as well.

The DaVinci Institute believes that the people that will shape the future are people that take brilliant ideas and make them become reality. Inventors and entrepreneurs will shape our future. That is why the DaVinci Institute produces futurist event designed to assist the revolutionary thinking inventors and entrepreneurs, and helps them get their ideas off the ground.

The DaVinci Institute is a 501-c-3 non-profit organization supported by memberships, sponsorships and attendance fees for the programs we produce.

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