Blog blog blog, what are you even saying??

BLOG or Blog or blog?

In other words, what is this thing?

Hello again!  Today I am going to give a brief outline of what these blog entries are and how you can use them.

In the old days. . .

We will visit the old days periodically.  Getting a really good understanding of  Information Technology often involves understanding how it changed over time.  For example, you get electronic mail and call it email.  But why is it called mail at all?  If you stop and think about it, your understanding of the word "email" is really built from your understanding of postal mail (also called snail mail).  How much sense would it make to get mail on your computer?

It's likely that when you grow up and have kids, they may never see a postal worker or see a mailbox on the street!  Snail mail is very slow and extremely expensive compared to email and it's often debated in congress about getting rid of it altogether.

So back to my story.  In the old days of the internet it was common for people to write daily "letters" or "posts" that everyone could read.  This was called web logging (since the internet even from the earliest days was nicknamed "the web").  You don't even have to say that fast three times to see that "web log" soon become "blog".  So that's what we have here - a daily web log!

What's in the blog?

Our itkid blogs will be short and sweet!  You don't have to read a blog every day, sometimes you don't have time.  When you do read it, our itkid blog will talk about one topic and sometimes give you more internet links to go out and research and do more reading.  It might give you an experiment to try or a video to watch.

Do these things!  The blog is short to just to make a point about some topic.  Sooooo much has already been written about IT that we won't rewrite the same things but just provide a pointer for you to go out and explore.

For example, if you're interested to read more about the history of blogging, check out the wikipedia entry on it.

Some links in the blog posts are only there if you're really interested in learning more about that topic.  Other links might be really important in order to understand the topic.  So we'll make it clear when a link is really important to read!

Read the blogs in order!  They will build on each other so even if you don't have time to read them sometimes, when you do have time read them in the order they are published.

Coming up!

So what is coming up?  Let's first take another crack at defining this thing we're trying to learn: IT.  Then maybe we'll layout out the next few episodes and try to mix it up a bit by sending you out to read other interesting IT tidbits out on the internet.

Keep in touch!