Blogging pilot extended - start your blog today

I am excited to announce that the Blogs at Penn State
(http://blogs.psu.edu) pilot is now officially open to all ITS
Employees. The Blogs at Penn State toolset is designed to eventually
provide all staff, students, and faculty of the University with an
easy to use web publishing toolkit. During the Fall semester, the
Blogs at Penn State project is in a limited pilot that will reach
about 1500 faculty, staff and students.

I would now like to invite you to join us as we investigate how blogs
can be used effectively across an organization like ITS. Remember,
the single biggest change here is shifting from a culture of
consumption and fighting the information glut to a culture of
contribution and finding discoverable, relevant information. Create
a blog - and start sharing what you know about the art of your work,
working at Penn State, serving faculty and students, collaborating
with colleagues across the the university, the country and the world.

Here are some details:

* If you have not already been provided an account, you can activate
your Blog Account by going to http://blogs.psu.edu/pilotenroll.html
and clicking the "Activate" link at the bottom. You will be asked to
make sure your Personal Web space is active before being allowed into
the Blogs system.

* If you have been provided a Blogs at Penn State Account at
blogs.psu.edu, you do not need to do anything further.

Since this is a pilot, support is currently limited. Additional
Instructions on how to get started using the blogs, podcasting,
controlling comments and how to customize the appearence are
available at the Blogs Community Hub at: http://blogger.psu.edu. I
have personally found this to be a great place to go for help and
insight.

For advanced web users of the years - a note an Access Control Lists
and your personal web space. Blogs at Penn State publishes content
to your www/blogs/ directory. If you have have modified ACL's
permissions within your Personal Web Space, you may need to reset
ACLs to the defaults. See http://blogger.psu.edu/help/advanced/acl
for more details

If you have any questions about the pilot program you can post
questions at the Blogger Forum at http://blogger.psu.edu.

BASIC FEATURES

* Multiple blogs per user
* Customize sidebar and style themes
* Supports tags, categories and monthly archives
* Published in your personal web space (you can blog about whatever
topic you want)
* Comments from anyone
* Generates (RSS) news feeds and podcast feeds
* Ideal for announcements, journaling, portfolios, note taking, and
discussion.
* You can register your blog at http://blogger.psu.edu/directory to help
others find your blog

NOT ENABLED YET

* Multiple authors in one plog - only one editor per blog (but
anyone can comment)
* Private blogs - all blogs are visible to the public

Start sharing and tagging!

Thanks to the folks who have been working so diligently on getting
this new service off the ground.