Editor's Notes

1. Welcome!How many of you read blogs written by eLearning and project management professionals?How many of you write your own blogs or contribute to professional blogs?
2. Aggregating, filtering, and monitoring the constant flow of information posted on blogs can be a daunting endeavor.Importance of weeding through everything out there and finding the information that you need, that will inform your practice, be helpful to you in some way.Blogging is becoming more popular, more accepted…. But not regulated or peer reviewed in any way, so some curation is necessary on the reader’s part. How we got here – one of us currently blogging about instructional design and technology and one of us contemplating a blog – looking for a niche….. And of course, we are constantly sending each other links of blogs/blog posts we find interesting. Decided it would be interesting to make a more organized effort and so documented this effort.
3. Created search terms that we felt relevant to our fields and interests.Combined the search terms you see here, used Google, and filled in a spreadsheet with details about the blogs (based on definition in paper) came up on first page of search results Now – we realize that search engine results, analytics, and algorithms are another whole presentation! But needed to start somewhere. Also – we did this in March of this year, so the search now might provide different results.
4. We independently filled out a spreadsheet with our search results – using these column headers.Then combined our spreadhseetsand culled out the unique blogs Our focus on reporting for this paper included:Individual/Business/school – who ‘sponsors’ the blogs?Target Audience – who are they writing for?Topic(s) covered – what are they writing about?
5. Just a couple of the blogs we found in this process and share here. A full list with URLs in proceedings! As Appendix.
6. What we found here is just a snapshot of what was up and running, with the limitations we placed, over a couple of days in March 2010…. New blogs appear on the scene (and leave the scene) every day. As we (Amy and MV) continue our quest as bloggers – looking for niche, staying current, joining the global conversation as bloggers…. We want to continue to organize our assessment and filtering of what is out there….
7. For more about the references used in our paper, please refer to the proceedings file. Here are a couple of items to get you started.
8. Thank you!Questions?