An Experiment

And now for something completely different...

Now that school’s out for the semester, I’ve decided to tack an assignment onto something I’ve been wanting to try on here for a while. I don’t know if any of you read Worldmagblog.com (the news blog of WORLD Magazine, a fantastic publication that I highly recommend), but it’s very popular for people to use the comments feature to converse about recent news items. Recently they’ve started having an “open thread” every day, where people use the comments to talk about pretty much anything they want rather than having to keep it related to a specific news post. I’ve thought for a while that it might be fun to try having an open thread on here, so now’s your lucky day.

Two more things before I let you loose:

First, for those of you (a majority) who haven’t tried it before, leaving a comment is easy! Simply click on the “_ Comments” link at the bottom of this post, click on the “Post a Comment” link on the following page, then type away in the text box on the right side of the screen. When you’re done, either log in with your Blogger account username (if you have a blog), or select Anonymous and then hit the Publish button. See? That wasn’t hard.

Second, I’m going to tell you what to say in your first comment (the assignment I mentioned). Some of you are shyer than others, so this will help you get started. All I want is three small bits of information from each of you. I want your name (kind of obvious why), what kind of internet connection you have (dialup/DSL/cable/satellite, or if you don’t know just say if it is fast or slow). That’ll help me decide what sort of content (aka file sizes) to have on my blog over the summer when I can’t rely on a majority of people having a nice high speed Purdue ResNet connection. Finally (and most helpful for starting the conversation), I want to know what you’re doing this summer (working, Project, etc). Just give us a little blurb on your plans.

See, that’s not hard. One last thing: this is a required assignment. I really do want to get all of you to make at least one post on here. No exceptions! Even if you just linked over here from Josh's or Tiller's blog and I don't know you, you still have to introduce yourself (don't worry, we're a friendly lot). If the open thread thing doesn’t work, that’s fine, it’s just an experiment, but you’ve still gotta say something. ;)