We’ve all seen how blogs can be used to inform and persuade, but another nice use for them is to educate. Educause, a higher ed technology consortium, published an article in their September/October magazine on Educational Blogging. They profile one school in Canada who is encouraging classes to set up their blogs and opening up for the whole world to read. The principal for this school wrote in his own blog, ““The school administration’s objective with this weblog initiative was to offer students and teachers a support tool to promote reflective analysis and the emergence of a learning community that goes beyond the school walls.”

At first glance, I really wasn’t impressed with Apple’s new iMac G5 deisign. As I took a deeper look, I decided that I just had to have one. Unfortunately, that decision comes down to food for my kids or the new iMac and my kids will always win that one.

The New York Times has written a great story about the technical needs of the Democratic National Convention. They even have a wireless SWAT team to lookout for people operating unauthorized wireless devices that may interfere with authorized wireless devices.

I made a big deal of whether bloggers should receive credentials to the political conventions. I was specifically speaking of bloggers who aren’t mainstream journalists. Well there are a lot of mainstream journalists who are blogging the Democratic National Convention this week. Poyter.org has a great list of blogs at the convention including Dave Barry.

After much debate and arguments, some bloggers are receiving credentials to the national political conventions.

I think there are more than a few mainstream journalists who are dismayed at the conventions recognition of the bloggers. Primarily, because of the publics tendency to confuse websites expressing personal opinions, like blogs, and journalistic websites who try to be objective. Tom McPhail, a journalism professor at the University of Missouri agrees with these sentiments. ”They’re certainly not committed to being objective. They thrive on rumor and innuendo,” McPhail says. Bloggers ‘’should be put in a different category, like ‘pretend’ journalists.”

Although, independent bloggers aren’t welcome at the national political conventions this summer, the AP plans to to launch its own blogs at the convention. Although this is a very smart move by AP, I really don’t expect anything out of the ordinary that you wouldn’t later see in a wire summary of the convention happenings.

I wrote a few weeks ago about the appearance of Google’s Gmail offering a gigabyte of email space. Apparently, having a gmail account has become a status symbol among nerds and techies as you can only have a Gmail account if someone who has an account sends you an invitation for one. Now, some gmail accounts are selling on Ebay and there is even a website dedicated to swapping things for a Gmail invite.

CNN reports that Bloggers aretrying to gain the same access to the national political party conventions as journalists. I am torn on the issue, because I am a blogger and was a journalist, but believe that I must side with the conventions on this issue. Journalists are given space and access at these conventions to be the eyes and ears of the public, their mass audience. Most bloggers do not have the same mass audience as network television, cable news or even your local newspaper. That’s just the way the game is played. Blogs are narrowcasting to their niche, while the mass media broadcast to the public.

A photographer for ABC 24 News in Memphis recently had a confrontation with a Memphis police officer (click on the Video link at the top of the story). It seems a Memphis Police officer was involved in an accident and his fellow patrolmen wanted to keep the TV cameras back. Of course, he didn’t apply the same rules to the rest of the public. This goes backs to my post several weeks ago about how most police officers from federal agents down to your local Sheriff’s office need training on how to handle the media (because otherwise they end up looking like pigs).

I finally found someone to send me an invite to participate in the beta test of Google’s gmail (with 1 GB (1000MB) email service) and today Yahoo! announces they will up their email limit to 100MB of free storage. I’m partial to Yahoo since I’ve had a Yahoo email account since around 1997 and I like the user interface on their webmail, plus their spam filter works great. Google’s gmail interface is just as clean as Yahoo mail, plus they have autocomplete on the contact information and a great email search engine based off their popular web search.

Besides my Yahoo mail account (lannie_byrd@yahoo.com) and my Gmail account from Google (narrowcaster@gmail.com), I also have five other email accounts that I check on a semi-regular (hourly to weekly) basis. How many email accounts do you keep up with?