MIT Courseware - Free Internet Communications

MIT has, for a few years now, opened its courses to the public. Colleges and university's world wide can either use the courseware as a template for their own, or just them as is. Individuals can use them for self training. I love self training. Especially when it's free. I'm cheap. ;-)

Anyway, you can check out the entire list of courses. I guarantee there are at least a few worthy blog entries in there. However, there is one course in particular that is relevant to bloggers. It's getting a little old now but is still worth looking at. The course is Communicating in Cyberspace. Cyberspace is just so yesterday. ;-)

In the related resources section, there is a list of Excellent Websites, Poorly Designed Websites and Useful Resources. There's even a list of useful books, some of which I own already.

This course has less in the way of presentation and lecture notes than many of the courses but it does give a good over in general. There are several writing courses available. I always like the history courses as that is a hobby of mine.

Enjoy,

LewisC

Technorati : college, courses, free, mit, university

AnswerTips Are Enabled

I'm trying an experiment. I have enabled Answers.com's AnswerTips. Do you have a question about a word on this blog? Just double click the word and see what happens.




You should get a pop up like the image to the left. You can click on any word on the blog (any word at all) and get a definition and some information about that word.




Is this something you find useful? The goal of something like this is to keep your readers on your site as long as possible. If someone can get information without ever leaving the site, you meet your goal.




The downside to a tool like this, and it's not really a downside per se, is that if people don't know it's available, they aren't likely to try double clicking on random blogs.




But, if it does become popular, you'll be supporting a neat feature. I call this an experiment because I am seeing if it slows my page down at all. If it doesn't, I would have to call it a winner.

blog blogging

The Ultimate List of Freebies on the Web

If you haven't heard of Mashable, here is the blurb from the site:

With in excess of 5 million monthly pageviews, Mashable is the world's largest blog on social networking.




What does that mean? It means sites like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, hi5, Piczo, Bebo and YouTube.




If you're launching a new social network, or a tool that plugs into MySpace and the rest, Mashable wants to know!




Mashable is written by Pete Cashmore, a new media expert. It ranks among the Top 100 blogs worldwide.

Anyway, beyond that, it is a site that makes lists. The top 40 this, the top 10 that, etc. Today I stopped by for a look and I got the ultimate time waster, 5000+ Resources to Do Just About Anything Online. There goes the rest of the weekend.




This post has just about everything you can imagine. Keeping in the spirit of this blog, here are a few of the topics covered:

• 6 Key Ways to Measure Your Blog's Success


• 30+ AJAX-Powered WordPress Plugins


• 50+ Ways to Track Website Traffic


• 120+ Resources for Bloggers


• 40+ Firefox Add-ons for High Speed Blogging


• 40+ Free Blog Hosts


• 70+ Podcasting Tools and Resources


• 50 Great Widgets For Your Blog


• 120+ RSS Resources


• 30+ Tools For Working With Wordpress Posts


• 30+ 1-Column WordPress Themes


• 30+ WordPress 2-Column Themes


• 30+ WordPress 3-Column Themes


• 50+ Tools For The WordPress Admin


• 50+ WordPress Plugins for Multimedia


• 30+ WordPress Plugins To Get More Blog Readers


• 30+ Tools to Turn WordPress into a Personal Hub


• 17 WordPress Plugins For AdSense


• 30+ WordPress Plugins for Statistics

And that's just the first section. It also has sections for Communications tools, photo & video editing, productivity tools, web browsing and development, search and bookmarking. Come to think of it, this post at mashable has just about put me out of business. I guess I'll have to do some hard thinking to come up with topics that haven't already been covered.




Thanks Mashable.




LewisC

blog blogging