Blog Manifesto Assignment

Names: 1. ________________________2. _______________ 3. ___________________ 4. ___________________

You already have the information about the blog assignment, as discussed in class. Today your task is to set up the blog and, more important, to write your first post stating the purpose of the blog—your “blog manifesto.”

Directions:

1. Get together with 2-4 other people you’d like to work with on the blog and talk about these questions. 
2. When you’re ready, write up the first post.
3. Go online and create a blog.  One of you can create it and invite the others as co-authors.  This is easy to do in Wordpress or Blogger.
4. One member of this group needs to hand in this page so that I can see what your blog is about, who the members are, etc.

Questions:

1. Who are the members of this blog?

2. Besides completing the blog as a course option, what do you want to accomplish by keeping this blog?

3. Who might be the audience for it (besides the instructor and class members)?

4. Are you going to focus on a particular subject or topic within 19th-century British and American Anglophone literatures (the topic of our course)?  Or will this be a general blog? You don’t have to do this, of course, but if your group is especially interested in particular themes (social justice, race, ecology, gender, double identities) or other information—biography, technology, historical background—you could focus on those. 

If members of your group have a special expertise (films, for example), that might be another way to talk about the literature we’re reading.

5. What kind of voice or persona do you want to have for this blog?

6. What’s the name of your blog or blog group?  How will you sign your posts so that we all know who writes the posts and comments? (Example: You might think of naming yourselves as you’d name a band or book group, for example.)

7. How have you organized your group for the weekly postings?  For example, will one person be responsible each week for both the post and the comment on another group’s blog?

8. Who’s responsible for maintaining the blog—creating links to other blogs, choosing the template, cleaning up spam, making sure that comments are approved, and so on?

9. Write your blog manifesto here and then post it to your blog.  Be exciting!  Your post should make us all want to read more of your posts.

This grid is just for your records, to help you plan who'll be responsible for posts and comments. You don't have to hand this in to me, and I won't be keeping track of which group members are responsible each week.