the Sam Jackson College Experience

Though we have seen college blog networks come and go over the last few years, there is one especially promising network on my radar that I thought I would share with everyone today. The College Blog Network is a recent entry to the scene but more blogs join daily. It’s intended to facilitate communication between student and other college bloggers (with .edu e-mail address). You can create feeds of the general college blogging firehose, get links to new blogs, compile favorites, vote for the best, etc.

I wanted to encourage all readers with .edu email addresses to both sign up their own blogs, and also to go to the site and give the current Yale blogs a “thumbs up”! You have to register, but it only takes a second to do so.

I saw that TCBN was advertising for “college blogs” on some search engines, and driving traffic in some other ways, and I hope to see some strong growth here. The site is developing a great blog widget, which you can see in action on the homepage and at rocloop.com right now. Once it is less beta-y, I might try to put it up here.

Anyway, classes are over for most people (I have one which meets during reading period) and I have 3, 20 page final papers due in the next week and a half or so, and will have to blog correspondingly less. In the meantime, check out the archives for my blog, and go look for other interesting posts on TCBN! And don’t forget to bump this site and any others you find interesting : )

It would seem that these days, just about everyone has a blog dedicated to America’s higher education system. The Democratic Party has a website representing its college arm; even CosmoGirl has a blog to go alongside their college guide, where I am told I will get the “inside scoop” on “all the best schools!” as determined by, apparently, a miniature poodle. Then again, the internets always give mixed results.

Back to me, though. I made a lot of posts about college and the college process on my personal blog in the past, and I decided while walking down the street last week (no really) that I should separate the two so that each would be more accessible. The target audiences are pretty mixed (one has search engine crawlers, the other one has… search engine crawlers, as primary constituents), but this will allow me to frequently update both without burying too much information in the archives!

I’ve imported those posts from my own blog which I feel are relevant and worthwhile.

Look for updates here either daily, or every other day. I’ll do my best to post very frequently, but remember: I’m in the middle of the college admissions process! Rising seniors have a lot to do.

additionally: if anyone would like to contribute here, and by “anyone” I mean people who I know are excellent writers and are my peers and who know me personally in real life, then please contact me!

[tags]blogs, college, college blogs, websites, memes, trends, hipsters, fashionistas, college admissions, sam jackson[/tags]