j’s scratchpad

Click more for the outline for the second week of the blogging class I taught in December at the Boston Center for Adult Education.

Building a Blog: Week 2
Jessica Baumgart
Boston Center for Adult Education
December 8, 2007

Any questions from last week?

This Week

• We’ll cover how to find and select content, tagging, copyright law, cyberbullying, Web 2.0, tools, marketing the weblog, and search engine optimization
• Break
• Look at other software
• Hands-on with the class weblog

Did you think of something to blog?

Finding things to blog

• Let real life influence you
• Let blogging be natural
• If you’re stretching to find inspiration, you might want to rethink your weblog
• You need input to have output

What not to blog

• What kinds of things would you want your grandmother to know about you and your life?
• What kinds of things would you want your employer to know?
• What kinds of things might jeopardize your chances at a future job?

Privacy

• You never know who might read your blog
• What do you want people to know about you?
• What do you want people to know about your family?
• What do you want people to know about your friends?
• What’s their comfort level?

Developing voice and tone

• How formal would you like to be?
• Who’s your audience?
• What makes you comfortable?
• Start writing and see what comes out

How to cite

• Links are an important part of a weblog
• How to annotate is your choice
  • Link within text is the norm
  • Some people want to use formal citations

Cyberbullying

• People using tools online to be mean toward other people
• More common among younger people
• Don’t do it

Who reads your blog?

• Comments
• Statistics
  • Some blog software offers statistics
  • Google Analytics: http://www.google.com/analytics/
• Feed readers

Copyright as creator

• You own the copyright of your weblog and its XML feed
• Your decision to license it
  • Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/
  • GNU Free Document License (GFDL): http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html

Copyright as Consumer

• People take ownership seriously
• Respect other people’s rights
• Abusing copyright is illegal
• What constitutes Fair Use for bloggers?

Protecting Copyright

• Cease and desist notice
• Then legal action
• What’s it worth?
• Copyright is not universal

Libel

• Be careful what you write
• People and organizations can take legal action if someone says something bad online

Marketing your weblog

• Tell people
• E-mail
• Link from Web site
• Professional associations
• Publications

Organizing the weblog

• Entries are usually in reverse chronological order
• Many platforms have categories, departments, keywords, etc.
• Some have search engines

Organizing the layout

• One column for the margin
• One column for the posts
• Important & popular things near the top
• Eye focus moves from left to right

Choosing colors

• Choose nice colors
• Consider people who have sight impairments
• Bright colors draw attention

Tagging

• People can assign their own keywords to things–not just their content, but other people’s content as well
• Assists with finding material and linking material together
• Blogs have built-in tags
• Possible to add tags in the body of the post

Search Engine Optimization

• Blog title
• Description
• Keywords
• Enable search engine indexing
• Not all search engines handle all types of content

What is Web 2.0?

• Name derives from software version trends
• Web 2.0 is a more participatory Web
• Pre-participatory Web is sometimes called Web 1.0

Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0

• One to one
• Information flow: creator –> consumer
• Medium: not many other options besides text
• One to many, many to many
• Information flow: creator <–> consumer
• Media: often written text, but now there’s far more audio, video, other formats

Why Web 2.0 Now?

• Technological advances
• Importance of other people’s voices, thoughts, perspectives, etc.
• Value of community

Nifty Tools

• Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/
• Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/
• Del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/
• Social networking

Advertising

• Google’s AdSense: https://www.google.com/adsense/
• Soliciting Donations
• Pay for blogging
• Obligations to advertisers

Thank you!

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Professional Development, Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.