80 things to do with your weblog

(feel free to contribute or comment-see message below)

1. Link to all your friends in the template.
2. Link to all your favorite sites in the template.
3. Put the best picture of yourself that you can find in the template.
4. Use the present perfect progressive tense a lot.
5. Post pictures of your pets, or of your recent trip to Murphysboro or Marion.
6. Post about some cool place you've been on the web, and link to it.
7. Contribute to the political dialogue.
8. Make the world smaller by writing about someplace like Benin or Laos that you know a lot about.
9. Speculate about why tornadoes always seem to flatten trailer parks.
10. Tell people you'll link to them if they'll link to you, then do it.
11. Reorganize or alphabetize your friends or favorite sites in the template.
12. Put pithy sayings or quotes in the template.
13. Complain bitterly about some total stranger, or about your lover.
14. Post about something that happened to you one day on the way to the ATM machine.
15. Join and link to weblog-directory sites that make your site more "powerful" by linking to it.
16. Find out how much your site is "worth", and see if it's "worth" more than your car.
17. Find out where the people who read your site are located and go visit the map often.
18. Point out all the cool stuff your class has done on weblogs and point people to it.
19. Rename your weblog in a fit of upheaval. Then rename it again.
20. Change the subtitle too. Over and over again. Use the present perfect progressive tense.
21. Redo the "About me" section; include a cartoon character as yourself.
22. Change the settings. Regularly.
23. Mess with the color of the fonts or the size of things. Make ticker tape, scrolling text, and blink.
24. Put enough pictures of your area in the template or the header to give people a sense of what it's really like.
25. Use the "Edit Post" function like a file cabinet and tuck away ideas that you intend to work on later.
26. Find cool things on other peoples' weblogs and see if you can do that yourself.
27. Test the limits of free speech and see if anyone notices.
28. Post research ideas and see what fellow researchers think about them.
29. Hide poetry in the template code.
30. Post haiku brazenly and out in the open, see if anyone notices.
31. Link each syllable of your haiku to something. Then link the commas, dashes, etc.
32. Tell everyone the log-on and the password and see if anyone uses it.
33. Start new weblogs for different aspects of your personality, for example, your creative work, or your obsession with Star Wars , etc.
34. Colonize the "free servers" by starting a weblog at each one. Make them point around in a big circle.
35. Go visit your different weblogs and follow numbers 1-34 on each one.
36. Reorganize the function of each weblog according to what might work better.
37. Post stuff in other languages.
38. Make all your pictures into links.
39. Make secret doors that go places that are interesting. Make punctuation into trap doors into cyberspace.
40. Make things that look like advertising but aren't.
41. Make stuff blink so nobody looks at it. Then put something important in there.
42. Make changes deep in the archives where nobody will ever see them.
43. Write entire novels deep in the archives where nobody will ever see them. Compose entire papers out of sight.
44. Invent your own writing system: start leaving out vowels. Or adding extra ones.
45. Make your url's say something interesting.
46. Go look at your weblogs on other computers.
47. Connect to important people and see if they ever find you.
48. Make it appear like you just ran a paint brush across your weblog.
49. Make it appear like you just bled to death on your weblog.
50. Make it appear like someone else bled to death and you tried to clean it up.
51. Make it seem like someone got really angry with you over something you posted.
52. Deny that you ever had anything to do with a certain rumor.
53. Leave "Post removed" and "comment removed" tags all over your weblog.
54. Try to figure out how to deal with "comment spammers" without just running them off entirely.
55. Distort pictures so viewer feels like his/her mind is being bent.
56. Do extensive self-promotion for no apparent reason.
57. Make things you've written open source/free use, as if they're in high demand and it's easier that way than tracking down copiers and making them ask permission.
58. Make your background clear-looking so that it appears that the words are floating through space.
59. Let your friends know that you've been reading their weblogs.
60. Let your children know that you've been reading their weblogs.
61. Let your wife/husband know that you've been doing something else besides reading other people's weblogs.
62. Upload photos as you walk around town.
63. Put a survey on your template so that you know, for example, who your readers think will win the Super Bowl.
64. Criticize your favorite sports team for their most recent trade.
65. Scorn FEMA for their handling of Katrina.
66. Try to find all those weblogs that you set up around cyberspace. Try to remember their logons and passwords.
67. Post a live weather map with a storm system passing through the area.
68. Put a movie of a crocodile eating a duck on there.
69. Make a national anthem play the moment your weblog is opened. You choose the nation.
70. Do the same only with a country song. Drive away the serious people.
71. Post a virtual tour of your favorite city.
72, Post a virtual tour of your least favorite city.
73. Put snapshot pictures of other people's weblogs on your weblog.
74. Delete your entire blog regularly and see who gets angry or even notices.
75. Post your artwork or career work and get feedback.
76. Provide people thousands of miles away with a view of your life that they'd never get otherwise.
77. Link to the blogs that are about as far away from you and yours as they could possibly be.
78. In the corner, put the weather, but of someplace you'd rather be than where you are.
79. Make a memorial of someone who died who was important to you.
80. Explain why you celebrate Guy Fawkes Day.


updated 3-06
(More? Just write...-TL, 11-05

update

Welcome to 056! Time marches on. This weblog is not main street. But here are some developments:

1. Check out the virtual cigar. Congratulations to Colin and Lourdes!! Hope it's still lit when you finally come around to check it out...

2. Welcome, Liz!

3. Some pretty nice virtual tours of New York City...you can take that virtual carriage over there on the left. But you'll notice there are a lot of summary-responses interspersed in there. We're still learning the difference between the class weblog and the personal portfolios...

4. Once again, weblogs score at TESOL...people want to know how to use them, do them, etc.

5. Tom (yours truly) & Jessica are working on an online conference presentation, This is your class: this is your class on weblogs!...come visit the site!

6. I'm studying teacher's relationships with learning with the new media...do we use the LMC much? at all? are we using it to its full potential?? is that possible? etc. any input is welcome.