Ning blogging tips. Many of you will be posting at the Ning tonight, Thursday. If you need reminders about images and links in blogs, just check in the Ning FAQs and Tips section on the main page of the Ning, left-hand column, and you should be able to find the information you need. You can also get extra credit for sprucing up your Ning Profile page by adding a YouTube video and/or an RSS feed. (In Week 5, people will start visiting your Profile page to add comments on your Storybook project - those comments will go into the Comment Wall.)
Week 3 blog comment assignment. The Week 3 blog commenting assignment is not available yet; it will be available starting on Friday, September 12. The blog commenting assignment is the only assignment you cannot complete early, because people will still be adding posts to their blog today, Thursday. At midnight tonight, the list of blog assignments will become available and you will have Friday-Saturday-Sunday to complete the blog commenting assignment.
Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. If you turned in an assignment over the weekend, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned something in on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, it is probably still in the stack, waiting for me to get to it (contents of the stack). A couple of people wrote to ask why they had not gotten comments back yet: that is because the stack is first-come, first-served. About 40 or 50 people usually turn in their assignments on the day that it is due, which creates a kind of virtual traffic jam. I always get through the stack by the end of the week, but if you turn in the assignment on the due date or after the due date, you will end up having to wait a bit longer for comments back from me.
September 11. Today is the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the year 2001. Many of you in the Myth-Folklore class may have looked at the Snopes.com Urban Legends website for urban legends to use as a Storybook project. One of the sections at Snopes.com is devoted to rumors and legends about 9/11 - you might be interested to take a look at it, and see what the patterns of legend and rumor tell you about the American experience in those days. One of those legends had to do with the secret codes supposedly contained in Microsoft Wingdings font, shown below - a legend that actually dates all the way back to the year 1992, when people were using Microsoft's "new 3.1 Windows operating system" (that's 16 years ago - ancient history in computer software years).
