I often feel as if people have forgotten the social part of social media.
When I see people who are following some ridiculous number of people on twitter, like 200,000 I know it is impossible that they are reading what all those people have to say. I asked someone about this and she said,
Oh, I never pay any attention to the people I follow unless they directly mention me.
O-kay.
I write three blogs, this one, my blog on The Julia Group site, which is mostly on statistics but occasionally on running a business or just life, and my personal blog, which is mostly about judo and rambling on life in general.
I don’t read other bloggers as much as I would like. This is bad, in my opinion. We’ve gotten away from the idea of blogging – and since I write three blogs, you can see that I like the idea of blogging. The whole point of blogs, and social media in general, is INTERACTION. That’s how a blog is different than a book or newspaper. You get to talk back to the author.
So, today, I decided to head over to all those blogs I had favorited on twitter and actually read and comment on a few. I’m going to do this regularly from now on.
American Association of School Librarians blog – Originally, I went to this blog because I was interested in the post on using educational games, and I *did* get some good ideas from it. Confession: I am one of those “awful adults” that someone in the New York Times wrote about who reads young adult novels. An added benefit for me was the reviews of books I found there. Good site for both business and pleasure.
Iowa conflicted teacher blog  – from (surprise) a middle school teacher in Iowa. As a former middle school teacher, and a volunteer at a middle school for the past three years, I completely relate to his discussions at being less than perfect at a job that really matters.
Bodil’s blog – a teacher from the United Kingdom who blogs about education and maths and is so interesting that I forgive the gratuitous ‘s’.
Dan Meyer’s blog – a math teacher from the U.S. who has pretty much the opposite view on teaching as the blog above. Being a fan of cognitive dissonance, I like to read these back to back.
I created a personal home page (Did you know that is what PHP originally stood for?) and added these links to it, along with links to all of the other stuff I’m always needing.
I am really interested in suggestions for additional blogs. I read once that the average blog has the lifespan of a fruit fly – 30 days and people give up. I’m looking for blogs that are updated regularly, at least a couple of times a week. Let me know your favorites!