Jon Jacob of Thoroughly Good has a great summary of last night’s “Pimp My Blog” discussion at City University, where I was on a panel that also included Tim Glanfield of Beehivecity, Karl Schneider of RBI and Patrick Smith of TheMediaBriefing.

In my presentation, which was filmed for this BBC College of Journalism video, I stressed that good blogging is as much about learning to read like a journalist as is about producing and publishing content.

As the word’s etymology suggests, blogging was originally about logging your reading on the web. The best bloggers continue to do this, reading obsessively and curating content systematically, contributing to discussions among the communities of interest in their niches and creating connections between disparate pieces of information.

Editors and journalism educators have occasionally observed that journalism students don’t read printed newspapers enough. That’s fine, if they are, at least, learning to detect and read everything on their patch that is available from online news sources.

Tools like Google Reader and Delicious can be used to simplify the process of monitoring your patch on the web and systematically noting your tracks. A customised WordPress blog can be used to create simple personal hub that showcases your work and how you track your interests around the web.

For journalism students, doing this can mean forming networks of contacts of potential sources and potential employers and developing the discipline to read into a subject like any good reporter – voluminously and systematically.

Some of the sites I referenced were: