My blog was mentioned on the American Public Media radio show Weekend America today. It featured discussion from the members of the Harrisburg Bloggers Meetup group (I have mentioned the group previously on this blog ).

Photos from the interview with Stu Kennedy can be found on my Flickr account.

Other bloggers in our group include:

• Ross Karchner, the organizer
• Terry Pinder
• Dave Roberts's Beyond Second (Every city needs a good photoblog.)
• Dick Strawser

If you want to get a feel for what blogs can be, these provide a good introduction. But I would suggest a few more blogs:

• Quasi-professional city blogs in the "ist" family like the Gothamist, DCist, and Phillyist
• Sometimes, authors and journalists have blogs. William Gibson and James Lileks, for example. What's the difference? Compare those sites to Malcolm Gladwell's site. Gladwell does not have a blog.
• I don't know for sure, but I think that NASA's excellent, educational Astronomy Photo of the Day may be one of the oldest photoblogs.
• Some Alternative Reality Games use blogs to distribute information.
• My college hasn't yet embraced the idea of using blogs for marketing. But last year, Maryville College had students with cool internships post blogs about their experiences. Many schools are using blogs in the classroom. Adrian Miles at RMIT and Jill Walker at the University of Bergen are among the pioneers. My own institution, Elizabethtown College will start to use blogs to provide writing experience in select language classes this year. Jill walker has recently published an article about weblogs and classes: Weblogs: Learing in Public.

For more information about blogs, check out:

• If you want to start a blog, start by reading Mark Bernstein's marvelous "10 Tips on Writing the Living Web." This was the article that convinced me to start my own blog.
• Bloggers like to rehash the same conversation on "what is a blog anyway?" over and over, with very little agreement and many self-proclaimed experts. Get the encyclopedia definition of a blog, written by Jill Walker, who co-write the very first scholarly analysis of blogs with Torill Mortensen, whose blog I also like (posts like this are why).
• If you're interested in Electronic Literature, check out Grand Text Auto, a collection of posts from researchers electronic literature. The current discussion? An interactive play called Facade.
• If you want to start your own blog, you might want to get a free blog via LiveJournal or Blogger. If you need to host photos, try a Flickr account. I use an information tool called Tinderbox, which doesn't just handle my blog. I use it for nearly all my writing, information gathering, TODO lists, and brainstorming. The weblog quick-start tool will set up a blog for you. Editing and formatting a blog is much easier in Tinderbox than in the plaintext tools in Blogger and liveJournal. Even better, you don't need a blog-specific web host to publish your site. I reviewed Tinderbox for Sitepoint a year-and-a-half ago. For now, it's Mac OS X only, but a Windows version is coming soon. If you need a blog on Windows or don't want to pay for an information swiss-army-knife, I would suggest the free, Open Source tool Thingamablog. With Thingamablog, you can be blogging in minutes.

Happy Blogging!

Of course, if you're interested in my site, I would suggest that you read some of the archives, found at the top of this page, or look at some of the other parts of the site:

• My sculpture/art project, Philadelphia Fullerine. I travel to Austria to exhibit it in September.
• I have designed a number of inspirational posters for my college. View them in my Academic Integrity area (others posted on the blog here).
• I have been taking digital photos for several years. Although you may see some of them on the blog, I'm slowly putting my photo archives on Flickr, thanks to the gift of a Pro account from Ross Karchner.
• Last year, I spoke at a conference marking the 10th Anniversary of the Web, sort of. I arvchived my experiences.
• For another example of web narrative, read this story about my visit to Hersheypark Candylane last Winter.