http://blog.lib.umn.edu/ (then follow the ‘Blog Directory’ link – for whatever reason, MT is gawking on the actual URL)
You’ve likely seen the UThink site before, the University of Minnesota’s MoveableType-based blogging site. But I wanted to point out the ‘Blog Directory’ sub-page on that site for the little things it does right to direct new readers to existing blogs.
Like almost every ‘directory’ it has an alphabetical list of all the blogs on that site, but really, is that helpful? Sure, if you want to troll through hundreds of pages looking for interesting titles, but typically not. What is helpful, though, is how they highlight “Recent Posts,” “Blogs with the most comments” and “Blogs with most Posts” – yes I know this reinforces so-called ‘power laws,’ and that ‘more’ doesn’t always mean ‘better,’ but as someone coming in from the outside to this server, these provided great starting points to explore this sub-universe within the blogopshere.
This seems to me to be part of the trick in rolling out blogs in academic settings – they have their uses if they are only being read by the instructor and the rest of their class, but blogs have stood out precisely because the network the create and participate in is not formally bounded (as say a CMS-based threaded discussion is.) So you need to (or at least are able to) grow the readership/network; one way to do this individually is to use all of the tricks that existing bloggers do (post on other people’s comments, post links to other people’s posts, blogrolls). But pages like this directory page also serve as an institutional means to grow the community, and are aimed at (but not restricted to) the next grouping ‘up’ from the course level, the institution-wide audience. – SWL
