"The one-year pilot project will work with a group of about 20 college students from one of the major universities, and provide them with blogging and journalism expertise and guidance. They would commit to a year of “blogging for others.” Each student participant would start their own blog, as well as a blog for their “partner” (the person for whom they will blog). Each partner would be someone who has been effected in some way by the AIDS virus."[via Ev]
While the 65-plus age range is notoriously tech-shy, many say that the blog-hosting companies make it simple to start and maintain one. Mr. Reichek said that when he went to Blogger.com — which is owned by Google — the site showed him how to set up a blog in easy steps.Nice!
"I'm a technophobe," he said. "But 1, 2, 3 and suddenly, I've got a blog."
"Back about two years ago, I got the opportunity to work with Blogger on a redesign. Our goal was to dramatically simplify the "first post scenario" -- that is, how quickly can someone who has never even heard of blogging through a sign up process and writing something?""At one of our first meetings with the Blogger team, we agreed on a goal: 3 steps. We didn't know what those steps would be, but we knew we wanted to boil the whole process down to something that sounded really easy. After about two months of intensive design and usability, we ended up with something that both accomplished our goal and resonated with a whole new audience of bloggers."
"Our favorite service is Blogger. The first major free blogging tool (launched in 1999), Blogger stays ahead of the game by remaining incredibly convenient to use and by offering a rich complement of features. If you have a Web server, you can use Blogger to publish your Weblog via FTP. But we like the easy way: hosting the blog on Blogspot. In about 5 minutes, we were able to create a blog, pick an appealing design, and start posting. Uploading images is a simple process, and the service supplies a generous 300MB of photo storage."A few of our siblings here at Google also got some love:"Blogger is especially friendly to mobile bloggers. Can't get access to a computer easily? Send a picture or a text message from your phone to a special SMS address, and up it goes. Blogger's Audioblogger service even offers voice blogging: Just call a special number, enter a code, and say your piece. Blogger converts the sound of your voice (up to 5 minutes' worth) into an audio file and posts it for all to hear."
"We also wanted to give our readers a greater voice and sprinkle a little more serendipity around the site by providing prominent links to a list of most e-mailed and blogged articles, most searched for information and popular movies."
