In my current position as a research intern working with danah boyd under the Berkman Center, I often have to find entries from lots of students blogs online about specific subjects. Additionally, I’m always on the hunt for great student blogs to highlight for prospective students, higher ed marketers, wary admissions officials, etc. I like to try to encourage student bloggers wherever I find them, explaining to them how their efforts can prove to be really worthwhile, so forth.
I was contacted by a Wall Street Journal reporter a few months ago who was looking for blogs and student writing on a particular topic, and I was quickly able to give them some tools to help with their piece: here are some of the tips that can help you too if you’re looking for blogs about student life at any given school. This guide could be handy if you’re looking for students to recruit for an official blogging venture, if you’re a prospective student wanting to learn more about a school, if a school wants to find evidence for random expulsions… all sorts of uses. The blogs you’ll turn up searching this way tend to be unofficial student blogs, rather than school-directed ones.
1. Look for “student blogging networks” like StudentBloggers.org or The College Blog Network (favorite my blog!) and see what they have to offer. College Blogs Network was the first one of these I can think of, but it sold out last year (no new developments yet). You don’t always get much quality control, but few people take the time to enter their blogs into blog networks unless they’re at least a little serious about their efforts.
2. Use Google Blogsearch, Technorati, IceRocket, vanilla search engines, whatever you like: Here skill comes into play. What kind of blog post are you looking for? For certain more reflective kinds of posts, limit your queries to Livejournal; Vox tends to host a different flavor of blogger, and Xanga and MSN Spaces gets you another category altogether. Leave things open if you want to cast a wide net, noting that although there may sometimes be some mild differences between Blogspot or Wordpress.com and Livejournal, you can find great blogs everywhere. The right way to search here is to be exceedingly specific: I randomly decided to try to find a student blog about Pomona, and to find one that was worthwhile I searched for “pomona school class blog.” After a few pages of search engine results, I came to the Claremont Conservative: a nice blog maintained by a few students which talks a lot about what’s going on at the schools from one given perspective. Not so hard to find things, see?
3. Does the school have an official blogging program? Not as many as I would like do, but some highlight student blogs or have students blogging right on the main site. MIT has the gold standard here, with their admissions blogs, but lots of schools have blogs. Sometimes they’re hard to find, so do a quick search on the school’s site to see if they have some that they just want to hide from you somewhere as a test of your diligence. The fact that blogs are official in some way does not necessarily mean that they are biased or worthless or written by tour guides (Even if sometimes they are some or all of those things).
4. Ask someone who knows. If you chance upon a good student blog like Wesleying (which is super awesome, and right now has a custom unicorn cursor which is fantastic) or the Bwog (an excellent Columbia University blog), both of which are blogs compiled by many students, you will find ready links to many other school resources and student blogs. If not, you can ask and people are likely to know. At helpful communities like the one around William College’s EphBlog, links abound. At Yale, it’s hard to name all that many other student bloggers, but I could rattle off at least a few if you asked me. If you can’t ask a website, ask a student! They might know.
(If you’re looking for blogs about the Ivy League, you’re in luck. Without commenting on links between blogging levels and anything else, there sure seems to be a lot of blogging going on in the Ancient Eight. IvyGate remains a strong contender for general Ivy blog, and is a useful portal to other student blogs and provider of gossip. Harvard has a lovely (unofficial) blog aggregator which points those interested in the direction of quite a few blogs. From student Dartmouth blogs to official Cornell ones, there is a lot to see.)
5. Make your own! There really aren’t enough good student blogs out there, so if you’re an applicant, you could make a blog chronicling your admissions process and then keep blogging once you get to school (like me!) or if you’re already at school, it’s never too late to start! I highly, highly recommend getting your own domain–the $10 you pay yearly will be one of your best investments (more on that some other time). You don’t have to get hosting, either–you could just have that domain point to your freely hosted blog at Wordpress.com or somewhere similar. When you’re done (OR when you are starting) let me know and I’ll help spread the word!
Hope these tips are helpful! Comments, results, suggestions all welcome. I didn’t want to make it an exhaustive guide, but just point out a few ways that I find new blogs in the hopes it might inform others out there looking.
