Tips & How-To


What are the personal benefits of blogging?

• A reflective tool to document your time abroad.
• A novel way to keep friends and family back home informed of your thoughts and adventures.
• Great training for those pursuing a career in journalism or writing.
• Resume builder for job interviews or graduate school applications.

An Easy Guide to Blogging:

What you Need to Know about Blogs

To Start Your Blog Use platforms that are user-friendly like:

A Practical Guide to Blogging
How to Learn Moveable Type
Start a blog with Word Press
Use your google account to start a blog:
How to start a blog through TypePad
Lonely Planet’s travel website free set up
BootsnAll Travel Blogs
A Web and Blog Design Studio
Global Voices: Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents:
typoGenerator: a graphic arts tool that allows you to design creative banners for your blog:
Flickr: Add photo albums and photo collages to your blog
Read Wesley Fryer's Flickr Quickstart Guide
SlideShare: Add photo and photo slideshows to your blog

If you want to design a website use these software tutorials:

Dreamweaver
HTML
Adding multimedia to your web page
Flash

Once Your Blog Platform is Created:

-Find a direction for your blog to avoid writing a travel diary. See our tips on the distinction between a journal and a diary. Check out other blogs before you go to get an idea of what subject you might focus on. Take up a social issue or creative pursuit and use your blog as a space for experimental play, research and discussion. Think about what kind of independent work, or senior thesis you would like to pursue and use your blog as a space to develop your topic.

-Notify your immediate community of friends, family, professors, colleagues, peers and fellow travels of your weblog and encourage them to engage and interact through commenting.

-Once you’ve settled on a blog focus find other blogs out there like yours and tap into their community by leaving comments on their blogs and encouraging comments on your own. Don’t be afraid to link, tag, and track back to further conversation. Look at The Blog Herald's Quick Guide to Referencing

-Find your style of posting. Some bloggers write directly onto their platform while others write on paper or in word documents first and then cut and paste to achieve a more polished feel. Experiment with both.

-Once you’ve become comfortable with posting word entries add some accessories to your blogs, like podcasts, photo slideshows, RSS feeds and short videos

-Most importantly, post every day and use the blog as a means for enhancing the real experience, not replacing it.

Cornell Study Abroad Advisor Corinna Lewis's Tips on Blogging

Getting over Blogger’s Block:

If you get stuck for ideas, here are some guidelines for topics to write about:
• Describe a ritual that you observed.

• Discuss an object that has become meaningful to you abroad.

• Discuss a place has become meaningful to you abroad.

• Discuss a surprising interaction that you had with a local person.

• Discuss an article/book/movie related to your host country and why it is relevant.

• Think about issues such as money, housing/home, health/medical, women, family/children – how does one of these things differ in your host country from your understanding of the issue at home?

• Discuss a time when you felt “foreign,” or a time when you felt like a “local,” or a time when you felt both.

• Discuss a time/place/experience that made you think of home and explore the similarities and differences, and why they might exist.

• Describe a gesture or phrase common in your host country, but foreign to your home.

As a Blog Journalist, you have the unique opportunity to discover and demonstrate the depth of your experience by exploring the minutiae of your everyday life abroad. Meaning will be found by paying attention to details and nuances—you want to show the reader what your experiences abroad were like rather than “preaching” about them. For example, if you want to explain how you felt uncomfortable with your host family when you first moved in but then came to feel like part of the family by the end, you don’t want to just say this—you want to show it by writing in depth about one or two of the experiences that you had with the family that demonstrate distance and then closeness.

So…focus on the details of the experiences you write about. Try to describe how people, places, or things looked, smelled, sounded, etc. When applicable, try to incorporate dialogue to make scenes come alive on the page; think back to conversations and try to reconstruct them.

Read Corinna Lewis’s tips on good vs. bad blogs

Examples of Good Blogs
• Reflective
• Comparative
• Succinct
• Personal
• Visual/Auditory/Tactile/Olfactory
• Feelings: humor, fear, pain, surprise, dismay, excitement…
• Exploring different cultural values

Examples of Bad Blogs
• Blow-by-blow/sports cast
• Derogatory/disrespectful/rant
• Too long saying too little
• Disconnected, no sense of personal involvement or caring
• Inappropriate: personal drunkeness/drugs, invasive tabloid-style reporting…

Some Words of Wisdom

Blogging is a very public activity. Anything that gets posted on the internet stays there. Forever. Deleting a post simply removes it from the blog it was posted to, but copies of the post may exist scattered all over the internet. As such, never link to something you haven’t read – when you link to something, you should make sure it is something that you really want to be associated with. You shouldn’t post anything you wouldn't be comfortable with anyone, from your parents to potential employers, viewing. Overall, what we’re trying to say is: Think before you post!

“POLITICAL RANTS v. POLITICAL COMMENTARY

There is a very pronounced difference between political rants and political commentary; rants can be offensive. We encourage you to discuss the political scene of your host country, but take caution in your approach. Please take a look at the following examples as a guideline of what to do and what not to do.

An Example of a Political Rant

And I thought Bush made some stupid comments! It turns out that the French, too, have their fair share of village idiots vying for control of the country. France’s elections are on the horizon and each of the top candidates has made their fair share of blunders, which I’d like to share with you now, in hopes that you will realize that there is worse than George Bush out there (or at least politicians just as awful…):

The conservative candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy has announced that pedophilia is a genetic flaw. Yes, that’s right – he thinks there’s a gene that can make you like little boys.

Then there’s Ségolène Royal, the female Socialist candidate who thinks the Taliban is the reigning regime in Afghanistan. Perhaps she could use a conversation with Mr. George Bush to get that straightened out…

And, finally, we have Jean-Marie Le Pen on the far right advocating masturbation for French teens over condom use as the best way to meet their sexual needs. I don’t even know what this guy’s thinking.

So there you have it folks – it could be worse. You could be French.

An Example of a Political Commentary

With the first round of elections right around the corner, the French are in “voting mode.” On Monday, candidates were officially allowed to open their campaigns and now posters are being plastered everywhere. It’s truly a unique experience to be living here during an election year; the issues are so different in France than they are back home in the U.S.

More specifically, there doesn’t seem to be one major issue at the heart of this election. I keep thinking back to the last election in the States, and how the situation in Iraq was such a crucial factor in determining votes. Most people, at least those that I know, seemed to be very firmly aligned with one candidate or the other. For their own personal reasons, people were either very strongly supportive of George Bush or very strongly against him and, thus, supportive of John Kerry.

In France’s election this year, though, there don’t seem to be such firm alliances with the major candidates. Rather, many people seem to be shifting back and forth in their support, perhaps because the candidates keep making mishaps that alienate voters. For example, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a candidate on the far right, pronounced that the best way to promote safe sexual practices among French youth is to encourage masturbation, rather than condom use. Then there’s the opposite extreme: conservative candidate Nicolas Sarkozy’s comment that pedophilia is the result of a genetic flaw. With issues like these entered into the race, as of now, it certainly looks like anybody’s game!”

Blogging online resources:

Best Travel Blogs and Websites:

World Hum “Travel Dispatches from a Shrinking Plant”
Global Trip 2004:
16 Months Around the World by Travel Writer Erik R. Trinidad
Journalist Rolf Pott’s insider blog to world travel
Study Abroad Program Global Learning Across Borders’ Blogs:
A multifaceted site for travel writers and bloggers

Techie Blogs:

Digital Digs: a blog by writer Alex Reid that examines living and learning in a digital age
Bloglines: an easy way to keep up with your favorite blogs and news sources while you are abroad. Simply enter your top read sites and Blogline will subscribe to the RSS Feeds of these sites and monitor updates. You can also include a Blogline link on your blog so viewers can see what you’ve been reading.
Alan Levine’s space for instructional technlogoy:
How to become a techie- best ways to search the web:
Keep up with social networking news:
A Non-profit organization dedicated to the exploration and use of new media:
Social Book marking: Find communities online through tagging your interests:
Twitter: A Social Blogging and microblogging service