Thing 4

Commenting is an essential part of blogging.  The whole point of blogging is to communicate your thoughts and ideas to others.  Without feedback, you might as well be speaking to a brick wall.  However, in commenting we must be careful in what and how we type.  Voice inflection, facial features, emotions, and all the other non-verbal ways we communicate are lost when all we have are words to read.  We must be careful to make sure our comments are appropriate, meaningful, and build each other up, even when criticism is given.

As the writer of "The Blue Skunk Blog" put it, "writers like knowing they have been read".  People do not put their thoughts and opinions on the internet just because they like to write.  That is what pen and paper are for.

I think it is also important that a blogger be careful in how they reply to comments that they might find rude, offensive, overly critical, etc...  Again we must keep in mind that the only thing we have to go on are typed words.  I have seen back and forth comments that have completely spiraled out of control simply because words were taken out of context and feelings were hurt.

With that said, I think forcing people who tend to be introverts (as I am in some ways) to comment on other's blog posts is just cruel and unusual punishment.  But with that said I randomly decided to read and post on the following folks blogs who had completed at least things 1 -3:

• 1st I commented on Stephanie Freeman's Thing #3 about the use of a blog to reach parents because this is something that I agree with.
• 2nd I commented on Tyler Imhoff's Thing #9 about his image creator of the magazine cover. That was simply a cool find.
• 3rd I commented on Whitney Butt's Thing #12, because I loved her optimism of being over halfway there.
• 4th I commented on Casey Martin's Thing #9, because I felt like there were a number of uses for Image Chef in the classroom, even though he did not in his blog post.
• 5th I commented on Julie Eskew's Thing #11 and the difficulty in finding blogs and other information on the internet, mostly because of the massive amount of information available and learning how to filter the junk out.