As your blogs start getting indexed by search engines and the tags (categories) pulled into various applications, you will start to receive traffic from outside the classroom. In fact, I spy the first “Spam Blog” referral of the semester (Frances– don’t delete that until after class tonight please, I’d like to share it) which also demonstrates the idea of Pingback and Trackback. Also:

Soon I will link all the student blogs in the sidebar. However, to make it easier to keep up, I will show you how to use Google Reader for all your web feed reading needs. Feel free to sign up for a Google account if you don’t already have one. I will also provide an “OPML” file which you can import and sign up to view all the blogs at once.

Plus, your Google account will allow you to access other cool services like the iGoogle customized page and custom search, among other things.