“What will inspire us to change the world? To create new strategies for change? To join in? Will it be a blog post? A song? An essay? A tweet? A status update?
What will we stand up- or sit down- and blog for?”
This lofty question was posed by Dean Elmore to about 30 student bloggers at the Howard Thurman Center Thursday night during the BU Blog Party
The Blog Party, sponsored by the HTC, was about giving bloggers a chance to network and socialize and also to celebrate the launch for two new blogs- BU Latino and the Howard Thurman Center’s BU Culture Shock.
The power of a blog is not to be underestimated – it is our generation’s testimony about, well, pretty much everything. And as blogs become our new encyclopedias, newspapers, cookbooks and diaries, students have a choice- to jump on the electronic band wagon or get left behind.
Students at last night’s blog party have made that choice or are thinking about making it.
Alyssa Parella, a College of Communication sophomore, uses her blog Like a Boss to discuss anything TV and movie related, as well as providing weekly doses of “hot men like Jake Gyllenhaal or men with scruff”. It can also get personal too, she says. When she botched an interview, she came home and blogged about it and gave tips about what not to do.
Parella’s blogging spark caught fire with two of her friends who live on the same floor, Andrea Hage and Tim Hamamori.
Hage, a COM freshman, said she started her blog about “random things I’m thinking about” three months ago.
“At first, I didn’t really want people to read it,” she said. Now she is more comfortable with it and posts links to it on her Facebook.
Ivellisse Morales, who helped organize the event, is the editor and a writer for BU Latino, which chronicles the Latino college experience. Students post about everything from where to find good food on campus to what it is like being a first generation college student. For Morales, the experience has been a bit harder than what she expected, as she tries to maintain a balance of visual style and content, she said.
Blogging can also lead to other opportunities, maybe even to jobs, like it did for Lauren Allen, a College of Arts and Sciences sophomore. Allen started her blog, Michelle Huxtable in August of 2009. It’s “a little Michelle Obama and a little Clair Huxtable” about issues she finds interesting that often have a black slant, she said. She has received two jobs through her blog, writing for Dr. Jays and the FreshXPress after they commented on her posts.
For BU Cultureshock, blogging is about getting many different voices together but with a somewhat similar message, said Raul Fernandez, assistant director of the Howard Thurman Center.
“You want a similar look and feel,” he said. “You don’t want a mish-mash of collective things that you pick up off the ground and just put up on a website.”
The blog is a mix of serious issues and spot-on humorous analysis, like Ahmed Ahmed’s C’mon BU video about a “snow day fail, suspicious GSU maneuvers and homework consolidation”.
Carly Fleming, a CAS sophomore, is doing a lent series for Cultureshock where each week she looks at a different religion and what sacrifices they make.
Even from the 30 or so bloggers last night, it is clear that their blogs, ideas and inspiration are as varied as the students here. This can, and should be, one of our greatest strengths-to take this opportunity to join in and sit down and blog for something, anything.
Sounds like it was a great event. Sorry I missed it. Thanks BU Quad for linking some of these blogs.