So there's been a little blogging here and I continue to blog in other places, but I just wanted to alert everyone to the Koufax Awards. These are blog awards in various categories and one of our highlighted blogs, Barely Legal is up for an award in the category "Most Deserving of Wider Recognition." And, um, yours truly, is nominated in that same category.

Kara Borden and David Ludwig were just two typical teenagers who had blogging accounts. What led them to kill? No one may ever know, but the blogging community immediately got involved when the murder of Kara's parents occurred.

When Kara and her boyfriend David went missing immediately after the murder of her parents, bloggers took action. They left hundreds of messages on the two teenagers' blogs and even looked up the kids' friends' blogs to leave messages there. All in hope of finding out where Kara and David were hiding and what, if anything, they had to do with the murders. Police soon shut down the blogs, but are using their content to learn more about these two teenagers and what may have made them kill.

The annual Weblog Awards are now open. Maybe you would like to vote for the Best Parenting Blog?

We've written here a few times about students whose blogs have been banned or censored in some way (sorry, I can't find the links). I just ran across the EFF's faq on blogging as a student. They outline what a student's rights are both in a public and private setting. They also offer tips for blogging--what you might not want to blog about, when you might want to blog anonymously, etc.

In an artilce, I read that at the University of Kansas, a new course is being offered titled "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies." This is an amazing step of a class that I find as a brave venture in a world that is so uninviting. There will definitely be complaints. The man that created the class, Paul Mirecki, has already been called a laughingstock.

After reading Glamourous' new post about the Borden murders and how the murderer(s)? conversed their plans over sites like myspace and xanga, I felt that the poll needed to be counted. Check out Glam's post: Myspace, The Small World Phenomenon, and Kara Beth Borden

Anyway, I thank everyone who voted. This issue is near and dear to my heart (since my own old high school is trying to figure this dilemma out)High School on the Forefront of the Blogging Dilemma

Yesterday, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) issued an advisory opinion that finds that Fired Up America should qualify for 'press exemption status' to federal campaign finance laws. Congress defined the press exemption status to ensure that "the unfettered right of the newspapers, TV networks, and other media to cover and comment on political campaigns."

I always wanted to be a mother and I love babies so much. They are adorable, cute, innocent and just lovable. Still, I always thought I will have babies after finishing the school and achieving parts of goals that I looked up to.

So when do you think is an ideal time for someone to be a mother? Or when do you think of yourself as a mother giving a birth to a baby?
Recently, I discovered that the youngest mother in the history was only 5 years and 7 months old when she gave a birth to a healthy boy. Peruvian girl Lina Melinda gave a birth to her son Gerardo by going through a caesarian section performed by three doctors.

Recently, acts that had been considered protected by "free speech" laws are now seen as illegal. For example, there is currently a case in court regarding a Florida professor (who has been fired). The crime: the professor donated money. Well, he donated money to Palestinians. You can read about the story here and here. Depending on how you think of it, he either is "funding terrorism" or he is "making a choice to support his beliefs". Either way, his involvement with any crime is indirect.

First there were junk mails then spam emails, now there are spam blogs or splogs. A lot of people might have already encountered this phenomenon. You look for a certain blog, for example, tobacco hazards, and you end up on a web site that has a few words about hazards. They try to get you to click on a different web site full of advertisements about something else like insurance pitch or exotic dancers.

According to Pew Internet & American Life Project more then half of teenagers (57%) that are using internet have created some kind of online content. It is either they created a webblog, a web page,posted a story,or ceated online video or downloaded music from the Internet.

Joe Loong in his article Teens Like Blogs says that 19% of teenagers have created blogs as opposed to only 7% of adults. A lot of teens as he says are “engaged in risky business (embedded video)” and are “revealing too much information”.

So I was up yesterday until I guess what is the wee hours of the morning. While I was up I was watching TV (of course) and Conan O' Brien

The question on the minds of many people is who is going to lead the way of the future for software? Google or Microsoft . While I personally never knew until recently that google is much more powerful and much bigger than I had ever imagined. The idea of another software company being more powerful that Microsoft is almost unreal to me. However, there may already be companies paving the way ahead of Microsoft. But I personally have always known Microsoft for leading the way as well as many other people I'm sure. I think it will be interesting to see who is more powerful and influential...Microsoft or Google?

So you're a freshman in college. You've been exposed to tons of things by now including drugs, drinks, and the like. You spend evenings with your friends having fun, the kind you don't want your parents to find out about. You just so happen to have a blog, one with which you post your deepest darkest secrets. No one will ever know about this except the people you tell about it, right?

Well, let's say your parents find your blog one night. They won't tell you how or why. They just call you up and start hinting about things they have no business knowing about. And then it hits you - you're in BIG trouble.

Until recently, I believed, like most people probably do, that all journalists were more beholden to higher standards than regular people. I believed that "bloggers" were less credible, just because they were regular people. Journalists have special protection under the law, and I thought that they deserved it. They got paid to be the best that they can be, right? I don't believe any of that anymore. It's not that I trust average people more. But I have seen bad journalists try to wield their influence over average people and it makes me sick. The democracy of blogging seems to be the lesser of two evils and I choose it over so-called "professional" journalists. Below I provide some evidence for these conclusions.

Jon Kleinberg recently won one of the so-called MacArthur Genius Awards from the MacArthur Foundation. The award was announced in September, but I didn't notice that Kleinberg was a winner until just now.

You may remember Kleinberg from Six Degrees or from David Liben-Nowell's recent talk. I see that the Wikipedia has a nice entry on the Six degrees of separation.

This is somewhat related to Whimsical Monkey's post just below. I swear I didn't know!

Anyway, Will Richardson, an educational blogger I have a lot of respect for, wrote about a question he got from a teacher during one of presentations. She was saying that the students at her school were posting the answers to tests in their blogs. And she said, "What do we do about that?" Will's response was, creative use of blogging.

The principal of Pope John XXIII Regional High School in Sparta, NJ has told the students there to quit blogging or face suspension (note that the "real" journalist got the name of the school wrong, but this "just a" blogger checks the facts). He claims that he is doing it for their own protection ("please, think of the children!") but looks more like a freedom of speech issue to me.

Has anyone else ever noticed that sometimes, if you smile at the people on campus they don't smile back? I grew up in a community where you could smile at anyone and recieve at least a smile, head nod, or hello back. So coming to Bryn Mawr with my best friendly smile, I've been somewhat disappointed. My dorm (Pem West) got together last night for a "Diversi-tea" in the spirit of Diversity Week and sharing. We discussed how other people felt the same way, that one smile is all you need to brighten your day. Yet, when I smile at someone I don't know, I get this look of "who ARE you?!" It's a look of horror, and I know I'm not that scary. So we as a dorm decided that everyone should just start smiling at people.

I've been a member of several fandoms, or groups of fans interested in a certain aspect of pop culture, for about 7-8 years now--pretty much ever since I've had access to the Internet. Recently, there has been an insurgence in the studying of fandoms on the part of academics and quasi-academics across the world. My question is: Are these studies legit, or are they just ridiculous and not worthy of any attention?

Wow! The number of blogs is escalating rapidly. David Sifry, CEO of Technorati.com, has analyzed trends in the blogosphere. It's really qutie amazing.

I was also playing around with BlogPulse, a blog analysis tool that lets you see who's linking where. I like the conversation tracker myself. You can see who else is writing about a particular article. Just put the url of the article in and then you can see who else is writing about it.

It's about 3:30 AM right now, and we have 1751 guests online! 1751!!! Where are these people coming from? And why does the number increase so dramatically in the middle of the night? I'm just curious.

I was just on the Sparknote's Site, yes Sparknotes, I know, but they can be really useful to review for tests. So, during my procrastination, I clicked on a link to Spark Life to see what it was all about, and it took me to a sort of blogroll of sorts.

On it, there was an article about getting into college. You all thought you'd heard all you were going to about getting into college, but the article stated that many Ivies like Harvard and Yale are still discriminating against some college applicants. It's not because of race or religion though; its on looks. Yes, if you are not what they perceive to be the college "Look," you're not getting in.

Jakob Nielson, a bigwig in the web usability arena, has published a list of top ten mistakes in designing a blog. Here's the thing: I don't agree with most of them, at least not for personal/political blogs. Here are the things I disagree with and why:

1. No Author Biographies. Okay, if you have a business-oriented blog, or you're trying to make a name for yourself in some way, it makes sense to have a good biography. But a lot of personal blogs are anonymous. Obviously, you can't have a biography then!

Reading the Barely Legal Blog this afternoon made me realize that there are some aspects of college that are totally an improvement on high school, and others that still haven't changed.

In his post entitled "Random Rant," of which I feel our blog contains many, Russ talks of the students in his Monday/Wednesday class who constantly fly into a panic when the teacher says, "We will pick up there tomorrow." I agree with his rant. Everyone should be mature enough to know that the teacher means, "At the next class," but no; everyone has to snicker or say, "You mean Wednesday?"

Would Jesus Blog? Perhaps not considering the lack of such technology during his time, but many people are doing the blogging for him. That is why 135 Christians meet in Southern California this weekend for a national conference concerning “a growing community of online writers who exchange information and analyze current events from a Christian perspective.”

I have some great blogs from other colleges that have a special class that is designed to teach students how to blog. I was excited to come across these blogs during my weekly search for new and interesting blogs on which to leave a trackback.

First of all, This blog mentions our Bryn Mawr blog in a U. Penn newspaper article on blogging at Penn.

These past few days at home have been interesting, to say the least, but certainly worthwhile after a trip to the movie theater yesterday.

In an unprecedented ruling that could help set national legal standards for free speech on the Internet, the Delaware Supreme Court rejected a Smyrna Town councilman’s attempt to unmask an anonymous Internet blogger.

In 2004, councilman Patrick J. Cahill and his wife Julia filed a lawsuit against “John Doe No 1” and three other individuals, who posted anonymous comments on the weblog operated by Independent Newspaper Inc. of Dover, for defaming him by claiming he had an "obvious mental deterioration" and implying that he was homosexual. Cahill wanted Internet service provider Comcast Cable Communications to release the identity of “John Doe No. 1” so he could sue for defamatory comments.

Although everyone is caught up in the new Supreme Court nominee, we've overlooked something that generally affects us as bloggers. Though it's not September anymore, this is still very pertinent to our class as well as the blogging community.

Recently the FEC (Federal Election Committee)attempted to regulate the internet in relation to campaign ads and political spam mails. Interestingly, the many in congress backed free-speech on the internet, and turned down the weak FEC regulation. This was also because the of large amount of outspoken bloggers against the regulation. This initial legislation was a collection of weak proposals as an attempt to stray from political blogging scrutiny.