Tagging, Tracking...and what's this structured blogging?: - Charlene Li & Marnie Webb

Why should you care about tagging?

• Collecting and organising your own information on services like del.icio.us
• Makes you discoverable
  
• Find like minded people interested in the same topics on services like Technorati - this encourages serendipity
• Share your posts and links with a community - ongoing dialogue
• Tracking conversations - use RSS, or subscribe to a tag feed

5:22:35 AM    comment []  trackback []

10 Types of Web Writing - Lisa Stone and Lynne D. Johnson.

Words are Power. What does the audience want to learn - open floor - ideas, comments:

Having trouble finding out the rules of blog writing --- what is blog writing? Ans - anything you want it to be - there are no rules. My add - blogs are conversations - about engaging people in dialogues, not just publishing.

10 Tips:

Neat quote -"She shared the delusion of all writers that things written are shared" - Virginia Woolf, ORLANDO

10 types of web writing:

Readers, presentations,, word choice, conversations ..... the first four are a change in mindset as opposed to books and print and TV. Headlines, attribution, link blogging, essay blogging, Q&A, Reviews and how-to's.

A new mindset - the difference is the words we write CAN be found WILL always be found = Google!

Is writing on the web an art or a science? Both ... Words are our identity online, still creating our identity online requires using what we know about how humans experience technology.

1. Readers: How effective a writer are you? Lisa says ask your audience and "Own the fact that you're a writer. A lot of women, and especially bloggers, don't do that" and evolve and learn. Nice.

2. Presentation: Even the best prose can be lost on the internet. How you're connecting with the reader visually is important.

3. Word Choice - clarity, professionalism, voice, punctuation, profanity - , buzz - which can work for or against you. Be careful because your words are 'eternal'

4. Conversations - do you want to have one ... or not? Legal team made one business blogger (a winery) close comments - its an issue facing some business bloggers - I wish they'd let us screen them and post them. She circumvents this by offering up her email for readers to send comments to. A Newspaper columnist who just started a blog says closing comments runs totally against what a blog is about. One lady opens and closes comments off and on - she misses them when closed, but sometimes gets flamed on her parenting patterns. A paid blogger shares with us that she had to educate her employer about what a blog is - she sees herself as a content provider and not a blogger as she sends posts on Word and no comments are allowed. An author who now blogs asks ... does a blog have to be a conversation? Is it not a blog if you don't invite comments?

Here's an old post I had done on comments being closed.

5. Headlines: clarity, professionalism, voice, punctuation, profanity, buzz. Many examples given. Discussion on the use of profanity was interesting - one of the points made was that when you do curse, you get huge loads of traffic from sites you maynot want attention from - the other point of view was that if you do curse, hey if you curse, you do. Amen.

6. Attribution - don't steal!

7. Link blogging - two egs - repeats headlines and does a short excerpt and links them on a link blog. Or

8. Essay Blogging - chris nolan and danah boyd's blogs are examples of great essay blogs.

9. Q&A - good example at Mommy Blogers - three step Q&A - a.Call to action b.Interview c.Op-ed

10. Presentation - the layout of the content - see Elise's Berry and Banana Terrine Recipe in Elise's Simply Recipes for a good eg.

4:09:20 AM    comment []  trackback []

How do you build blog traffic - run by Elisa Bauer

Content - be useful, entertaining and timely. You need to focus on a target. Post frequently but not at the expense of quality. Use images and photographs. Write well and concise. Consider healines - either witty and catchy or boring but search-engine friendly, post size. Polls, Top 10 lists, Contests, How-To's, Interviews, Controversial topics - don't shy away from it, but don't use it just to get links - that's manipulative.

Community - Blog about something you care about a lot. Connect to bloggers who share your interests - show them attention - comment, link, plan and join online events like Blog Carnivals, contribute to the community

Technology - how do people find your blog now -- from someone else's website, google or search engines, repeat visitor who has bookmarked site, newsreaders, tagging or social bookmarking tools, emailed your url. What detracts from pagerank? Links to link-farms, spam sites - be careful about links left in your comments, 404 errors - links that go to pages that don't exist. Site design -- easy to load, easy to read, easy to find stuff on Mac and PCs - image size under 15.5 k, page length and size under 100k, readable font size, reducs clutter, avoid colored backgrounds for main text, focus on upper left corner, search bars, check out in different browsers, RSS and use feedreaders, personalized Google where you can pull in newsfeeds onto your homepage. Check out Feed Blitz, measure site traffic - page views, how many visitors, referrals, where is the traffic coming from.

Questions: if you use Feedburner does it mess up your feeds? - Use redirects. Search on blog? - Google works. Strategic commenting - Amy Gahran shares her thoughts at a post called No Blog is an Island on Writeconversation.com on building blog audiences.

BlogHer06

2:47:09 AM    comment []  trackback []

Its great to be here in San Jose at BlogHer. Weather's nice .. I wish it were a little cooler thoough. Was good to catch up with some old friends and am meeting lots of interesting people. And its amazing to be in this space with almost 400 women and a handful of men! Check the BlogHer site for updates, liveblogging, and Flickr feeds here.

This morning I attended - What's Your Crazy Idea - which was a workshop about blog-based communities. The session started with introductions from the convenors of the workshop - and then we broke away for short discussions around issues on building community.

Some of the discussions around this were on: Tools, Legal Issues and How do you get Communities started. I attended brief sessions on Tools and How to get Communities started.

How do you get communities started: some things that emerged from the discussions:

• what is the purpose --- what benefits/drivers/motivations for the individual and community
• listen well .. communities morph .. norms change over time ... engage the community in way forward
• multimodal - use pictures, develop memes
  

Nancy has more in her notes at the Online Facilitation Wiki and more from Heather Barmore

I like the way this workshop was structured - no PPT's and lots of discussion through sharing stories and experiences.

BlogHer06

2:41:06 AM    comment []  trackback []