How do you get a bunch of students to attend a lecture on weblogs on a Friday morning? Well, when posters and word-of-mouth isn't enough you can always break out the old bullhorn. Turned out it wasn't really necessary as quite a few people had decided to show up to hear me bang on for 90 minutes in English on weblogs and why they're cool.

I did about 75 minutes on what weblogs are and how you can use them for a variety of different things touching on everything from project management and moblogs to personal and themebased weblogs. Then I took questions for the last 15 minutes where we talked about the research I'd done for my thesis and The Internet Archive and also a bit about the history of Blogger.

The whole thing went really well and the powerpoint presentation was a good idea as it allowed me to give examples and show how you can create your own weblog without having to rely on an internet connection. I had written a fairly thorough script, but the presentation helped me so that I could go off script several times without getting lost. After the presentation I hung around for a bit and talked to several of the teachers, which was fun. It's always interesting to see how people respond when you've presented them with something they didn't know anything about. They all seemed to think it had been very interesting which was cool and hopefully one or two of them will find a way of using some of the things I talked about.

I must admit I was pretty knackered afterwards, though. It's a long time where you have to be at the top of your game and try to make a subject interesting and at the same time make sure you're not just up there cracking jokes. But now that the lecture is out of the way I can focus on getting ready for our trip to London. There are a couple of things I need to get ready, but basically we're not going to plan a lot before we leave. So all I need to do is get my gear in order and make sure I have something clean to wear and Robert's your father's brother. That also means I probably won't post anything here until we get back on Thursday. But I'm bringing my camera, so in about a week this place should be packed with visual goodies and fascinating tales from the fair city of London.