By Jennifer Morales Special to OnMilwaukee.com Published Aug 23, 2006 at 9:10 AM

In my first post, I offered a little summary of what I found in my recent tour of the blog universe, some good, and some, um, not so good.

So what do I think makes a good blog? I write this fully aware that whatever I write here will be the criteria by which my own blog will be judged, but here goes:

  • Gossip. Do I need to explain the attraction of this guilty pleasure? I didn't think so.

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  • Political Intrigue. Maybe this is just because I'm in politics, but nothing goes better with coffee in the morning than a little speculation about who might unseat Scott Walker as Milwaukee County Exec. I also like reports of how much particular candidates have in the bank and where it all came from and how those big contributors bought said candidates a speedboat or a trip to the Bahamas.

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  • Orneriness. Again, a guilty pleasure, but what is subjective reporting without a little attitude? I'm not talking hate radio here, but people like it when there's some passion behind a writer's words. The reader gets a better grip on what's being said if there's an emotional edge they can hold on to.

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  • Humor. It's hard to be funny on command, so I won't try. For now I'll just promise to spare you my sons' knock-knock jokes.

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  • Brevity. Did you know that the average American reader's attention span has actually been reduced by the overwhelming amount of information available? Our brains are adapting to our electronically-mediated environment to accommodate the overstimulation of certain regions. Children are especially affected, resulting in new challenges for professionals in educational environments. Anecdotal evidence gathered at teachers' conventions and in forums at schools of education suggested that these cerebral adaptations may have reached sufficient levels as to be detectable in clinical settings, a line of inquiry pursued by researchers in several countries across the globe, including the U.S.A. In fact, a study on just this subject published in the April 2005 issue of Pediatric Medicine (see pp. 105-110) illustrated the physiological changes in juvenile human brain tissue* ... What? No. Don't worry about it. I wasn't saying anything important.

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    *This isn't a real study, but you can pretty much bet someone's studying this phenomenon because I know you didn't read all the way through that "Brevity" paragraph.

    Jennifer Morales Special to OnMilwaukee.com

    Jennifer Morales is an elected member of the Milwaukee Board of School Directors, the first person of Latino descent to hold that position. She was first elected in 2001 and was unopposed for re-election in 2005. In 2004, she ran for a seat in the Wisconsin state senate, earning 43% of the vote against a 12-year incumbent.

    Previously, she served as the editorial assistant at the educational journal Rethinking Schools; as assistant director of two education policy research centers at UW-Milwaukee; and as the development director for 9to5, National Association of Working Women.

    She became the first person in her immediate family to graduate from college, earning a B.A. in Modern Languages and Literatures from Beloit College in 1991.

    In addition to her work on the school board, she is a freelance editorial consultant and a mother.