Blogging

Unit 2: Blog Management

BLOG MANAGEMENT HANDOUT

Trainers'Notes: blogging trainer notes.doc

Purpose of the Unit

Once you’ve created a blog - using any of several services such as Blogger, Civicblogs, or..? - and have begun to post messages, you have joined the blogosphere. You’ve become an online publisher!

However, since your blog is one of at least 47 million blogs listed by Technorati (June 2006), it is essential that you write and structure the blog to best achieve your objectives – and to attract readers. You also want it to be easily found by the people you write for.

This unit helps you to better understand the blogosphere and how your development blog can be sustained and maintained and customised to serve your purposes.

Deciding Your Aims

Blogs originated as individual ‘diaries’ recording events and reflections in the lives of different people. Nowadays, many development workers and organisations – people like you - are setting up blogs as a convenient and accessible way to publish their news, information and opinions; they also see them as potential vehicles to increase interaction with target audiences and opinion formers.

There is thus often a difference in style and approach between the blogs of individuals – that tend to be very informal, quirky and often opinionated – and the blogs of organisations that are more informational. Frequently we see these organisational blogs embedded in a corporate web site where they may be indistinguishable from the rest of the web site and simply serve as a content publishing tool.

ExerciseOne

Publishing Your Content

Despite the trend to mainstream blogs into development organisations and institutions, it is useful to keep in mind some of the attributes and characteristics that make blogs different and special.

‘Frequent and often’ could be considered as a motto for blogs. Messages posted on a blog are usually short and use an informal style. Active bloggers aim to post to their sites frequently, often several postings each day. Postings usually though not necessarily point to another resource on the Internet; they are often ‘tagged’ to index their content and to make their retrieval on the Internet easier.

Blogs that aim to be more informational – or which are simple web publishing tools for an organisation or individual - may follow another approach where messages are longer, less frequent, and where they together may result in the blog appearing more like a web site or magazine.

Blogs were initially set up as individual efforts in which the authors (publishers) compile or write the postings themselves. This is still the most common approach to blogging. Several development organisations and initiatives have adopted a team approach where different people contribute related postings over time. This may be a way to gain more diverse views; it also spreads the responsibility and load to produce content.

Another way to get content is to introduce it from outside the blog. This can be done via ‘comments’ on postings provided by readers – typically also other bloggers. Such comments are important aspects of the ‘social’ and ‘network’ effect of blogs and also help to build the perceived value of the blog – more comments equates to more influential or valuable.

‘Automatic’ content can also be presented through blogrolls and feeds from other web services. Several such feeds can be included to showcase related blogs and services and to keep your blog automatically updated and dynamic.

Quality of content …? low bandwidth – images - / linking

It is important to be aware of blog ‘etiquette’ and the nature of the medium.

Frequent postings

Never leave a comment unanswered

Link back to linkers

Comment etiquette

You are publishing to a world audience. Be prepared for the consequences - and accept the responsibility - for each thing you choose to publish. Always be accurate. A blog's reputation is built on how well it can be trusted. The more easy you can make your content for people to read, the more readers you will have.

Ethics and trust ….

Design changes and templates – basic tips; link to specialist sites to help with design etc

Translation services – eg babel fish that allows your content to be approximately translated into several other languages

ExerciseTwo

Making Your Blog Visible

When they first started, blogs were seen as rather peripheral to the web and rather ‘underground’. Bloggers searched each other out and developed a rich web of links and relations with each other. The inter-linking of blogs with one another is one of the aspects used by ???? service to assess the value of blogs. It reflects the high value that blog managers traditionally gave to connections with other bloggers. As blogging has gone more mainstream with major blog search engines and indexing services like google blogs, technorati, and ???, the value of inter-blog linking may be less than it was before.

Beyond making your blog visible to other bloggers, several tools are available to raise the visibility of your blog. An important one is to use tags on each posting. These help to describe the content; more important they can be configured to be picked up by specialist services like Technorati. Services like Google have also recognized the value of blogs and, just as for other web sites, blogs can be submitted for indexing in these engines.

Pinging – search sites; other major content sites

Comment on others blogs

Trackback

Blog Carnivals

Email out

Feed out (Rss 2 pdf) come and sub; or proactively syndicate in the right places

Tagging

Provide tag clouds / navigation

Precisely the inter-linking/integrating – design/skin/

Why is linking so important?

A link from one weblog to another helps provide context around an argument or point, and it is essentially a "vote of attention" from one blogger to another. By linking to another site or blog, the weblog author is saying, "I find what you are saying important enough to link to it." Linking also helps create the conversation of the Web, the critical mass of connected thought that is not available in static text.

What is Technorati?

Technorati is the leading monitor of the world of weblogs. Technorati is a real-time search engine that is the largest source of fresh information about the global and local conversations going on all across the Web. Technorati allows you to find out what people are saying about you, your company, your products, your competitors, your politics and, other areas of interest, on the Internet in real time.

From http://www.technorati.com/help/blogging101.html

Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere. Web search was revolutionized by a simple but profound idea — that the relevance of a site can be determined by the number of other sites that link to it, and thus consider it 'important.' In the world of blogs, hyperlinks are even more significant, since bloggers frequently link to and comment on other blogs, which creates the sense of timeliness and connectedness one would have in a conversation. So Technorati tracks the number of links, and the perceived relevance of blogs, as well as the real-time nature of blogging. Because Technorati automatically receives notification from weblogs as soon as they are updated, it can track the thousands of updates per hour that occur in the blogosphere, and monitor the communities (who's linking to whom) underlying these conversations.

Monitoring Your Blog

Many in the blogosphere say that traffic is not a good measure of what blogs are but that conversation, as represented by links and indexes like Technorati, represent a more accurate view of the value of a blog.

http://www.business-opportunities.biz/projects/how-much-is-your-blog-worth/

Stats – to give you a picture of your audience and most popular postings

Value your blog based on links in/hits? Where to check this

Different services different ranks

Exercise on stats and value – see what others do .. how you increase your rank

Integrating with other Services

Flickr – photos.

Firefox plugin / bookmarklet

Feeds out to newsreaders

Feeds out to web sites

Social bookmarking to index your content in, eg delicious, where it can be re-used in other ways

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