CollegeBlender Blog

As part of our mission to enhance digital college life, we’ve recently kicked off a partner program to help bring some of the web’s most useful and insightful college advice and commentary to you.

Maybe you’re looking for money advice. Or you’re having trouble studying. Perhaps the post-graduation adjustment is a bit hard to handle.

Among the 400+ student-powered blogs on CollegeBlender, you can certainly find some guidance, but how do you find the best of the best? Now, it’s as easy as navigating to CollegeBlender.com and looking at our partner list!

Do you run a college blog and are passionate about helping students? Apply to be a partner today.

While we’re interested in all types of blogs, we’re especially looking for blogs covering the political and fashion worlds from student perspectives. As a partner, you’d be promoted on our homepage, get added to our partners page and become eligible for special benefits and features as we continue to build out the site. All we ask in return is that you place a small badge on your site linking back to us:

Current Partners

We’re proud to announce our partnership program with some of the finest college content providers out there and look forward to growing our partner network with more valuable blogs that help students. All of these blogs are backed by real college students or alumni—a tradition we plan to uphold—you won’t find any syndicated content on these blogs.

• CampusByte
  Helps college students develop study skills by using new technology.
• CollegeThrive
  A site filled with study hacks, productivity tips, freshman advice, and even the occaisional party tip.
• HackCollege
  A student powered life hacking site. Work smarter, not harder.
• NewGradLife
  The only blog solely dedicated to providing free resources to recent college graduates.
• Poorer Than You
  A personal finance blog for college students and twenty-somethings.

The new activity stream is one of the first major social features to be added to CollegeBlender. It helps popular content spread quickly and also allows you to keep up to date with what your friends are doing- both on CollegeBlender and elsewhere.

The filters located at the top of the stream let you quickly sort through the noise and get to exactly what you want.

To get started you’ll need to find some interesting users and/or blogs on CollegeBlender. There are a few good places to look, but the blogs page, blogwire, and search are the fastest ways to find awesome content quickly.

If you find a user you like, you can “follow” them to keep up to date with what they find interesting on CollegeBlender. If they are already following you the button will say “friend”. Friends are people who are mutually following each other on CollegeBlender. Some users choose to keep their information private. These users will have to add you as a friend before you can view their profile or activities.

If you find a blog that’s interesting you can “favorite” it to get its posts delivered right to your stream. Below is a picture that describes how to follow users and favorite blogs from the blog’s profile page, but the user profile page shares similar controls.

Once you have built up a small group of friends and favorites activities will start to appear in your activity stream. These activities appear as they occur, so you’ll know when your friends are right there with you on CollegeBlender or when a new post pops up on your favorite blog. Activity entries are grouped by article and can show a variety of activities from one or more of your friends.

The stream is the first in a long list of new features coming to CollegeBlender. We hope it will help you to share items with friends as well as discover ones you would have otherwise missed. Check your stream often to see what’s new and hot on CollegeBlender!

Thanks to all who participated. Out of all the entries, we picked the 3 winners at random.

Congrats to:

• @nlentine
  
• @FSUfashiongirl
  
• @jacksonj

We’ll contact you via direct message on Twitter for your details.

Keep your eye out for more contests at CollegeBlender coming soon!

If you’re a college student, you’ve no doubt had first-hand experience with (or at least heard of) waking up with obscene sharpie marker drawings on your skin. Or finding yourself in a strange place the next morning with mismatched clothing and people you don’t know. A pounding headache clouds your memory, but your text messages from the night before slowly reveal what actually happened.

Texts from Last Night can help you clear up some of the foggy details. Texts from Last Night is packed with some of the best one-liners and inebriated remarks, sourced from the hugely popular website of the same name started by two Michigan State University undergrads.

CollegeBlender has teamed up with Gotham Books to give away 3 free copies of this awesome book! All you have to do is send a tweet to @CollegeBlender or post on our Facebook wall.

The giveaway officially starts today, Monday, February 1 and runs through Sunday night, February 7. At the end of the contest, we’ll count up all of the tweets and Facebook wall posts we received and select three winners at random. Gotham Books will send the winners their copies directly.

Here’s How You Win:

- Tweet “@collegeblender I want to win a free copy of the TFLN book! RT to win! #college” or visit our Facebook page, become a fan, and post “I want to win a free copy of the TFLN book”

- You can tweet and/or post to our Facebook wall no more than once per day, each post or tweet counts as 1 entry (max 2 entries per day between Facebook and Twitter)

- We’ll direct message you on Twitter or send you a message on Facebook if you are selected as a winner.

- The more days you vote, the higher your chances of winning.

Good Luck!

The Small Print - Terms and Conditions:
Participants may submit one entry per day via Twitter and one entry per day via Facebook for the duration of the contest. CollegeBlender reserves the right to request additional information to validate winners. Winners will be contacted via direct message on Twitter or via Facebook within 15 days of the contest’s end. If users are found submitting more than one entry per day or otherwise manipulating the contest, CollegeBlender reserves the right to disqualify them from the contest. Submissions made past 11:59PM EST on February 7, 2010 will not be counted. Winners must provide name and mailing address to receive their book. For additional information, email contact@collegeblender.com.

Do you follow us on twitter? You should! We tweet out all kinds of juicy college gossip, news and info using our twitter account.

Recently we were nominated for a Shorty Award. Shorty Awards recognize twitter users that help share valuable and useful information on a category by category basis. We have been nominated for the #education category.

If you enjoy CollegeBlender, either via the site directly, via our facebook page, or via our twitter feed, we encourage you to vote for us on Shorty Awards. It’s quick and easy, all it takes is a tweet!

Thanks for the help, and stay tuned, we have some cool new features slated to roll out soon!

Now you can get the real dirt on college and a host of other topics in the new “Talk” section.

In the talk section, you can post your most candid thoughts on college life, professors, day to day rants, and anything else you can imagine. The community decides which talk is the juiciest by “confirming” or “denying” them. Members can also tag and comment on talk as well to stir the pot.

All talk posts are organized by school and a variety of categories to make finding what you want a snap. You can choose to view the latest and most popular talk across the whole site at once, or filter by school or category to go right for what interests you most. Also, because people can only post talk to the school they joined with, you can be sure the posts are really from your school.

Got something you want to post but afraid of how some people may react? That’s ok. Just check the anonymous box and post as candidly as you like.

Don’t worry about outsiders reading your talk posts, because the talk section is members only. If you aren’t a CollegeBlender member you can’t add new talk, or view talk posts.

Got something to say? Get to it! Join now to start posting! If you’re already a member head to the talk section!

Because a large portion of CollegeBlender members are active bloggers I just wanted to pop onto the blog and share a new FTC regulation that will go into effect starting today. Basically it states bloggers must disclose when they accept cash or freebies for posts.

Not really a big deal but definitely something good to know about if you are an active blogger and want to stay out of [potentially] hot water!

Read the full FTC release here.

We are happy to announce that CollegeBlender is officially open to the public today! This is technically the continuation of The College Blog Network - we’re still the same team from TCBN, just with a new name and look, and quite a few new features.

CollegeBlender is a place where you can connect with people on your campus and from other colleges around the world. Discover what’s happening on campus and read and share experiences with other people who are stuck on the same tiny island as you for the rest of their academic lives.

We’ll let you discover the cool little things you can do with CollegeBlender, but here are a few of the big new additions:

- All users now have profiles!

- There is a new Talk section that allows you to discuss whatever is on your mind, and see what other people on campus are talking about.

- Blogwire and the Blogs pages are now powered by more complex algorithms to help surface the best and most highly discussed content.

- We have a new url shortener for easier sharing: http://cblend.it - using this to spread your content will help it move up the ranks.

There’s lots more cool stuff to come, but for now check out everything you can do on the new CollegeBlender, Invite your friends, and keep an eye out for what’s next!

Hi friends!

You may have noticed that The College Blog Network is now officially CollegeBlender!

The site is in “soft launch” state right now, which means we are still running around behind the scenes fixing bugs, improving performance and other things of that nature. The site is basically ready-to-roll but we are just making sure everything is tip-top before we start making public announcements.

If you’re already using blender, keep it up! Make sure to checkout our new talk section for questions, news and gossip around your campus! Stay tuned, the “public launch” is coming up soon, so you should see alot more of your friends popping up on blender once we publicly announce the new site!

In the meantime, enjoy! Tell your friends! And keep up the awesome posting!