Week 6: Wiki & Blogging, Cont'd.

Today, in the next leg of our online-community tour, John will show us Last.fm, Veronica will present Online Community Report, and Reid will present Fallen Sword.

We will also spend a nice, big chunk of time on writing mechanics. Par-tay!

We're going to do more with wikis in the next few weeks, but we're going to pause for a moment to revisit your blogs. One of the ways you can help build a readership is to enter blog carnivals, which are events hosted by one blogger who solicits posts on a certain topic and presents a "table of contents" or list of links to those posts. The result is that readers of the host blog get exposed to a range of other bloggers with similar interests — and, hopefully, they subscribe to their new discoveries.

PLEASE NOTE: For those of you who have, so far, kept blogs that mainly of personal/niche interest, you might need to change the way you write your posts in order to participate in a carnival. You don't need to change your topic, but you should be thinking about giving a wider audience a reason to read (and subscribe to) your blog — and this might mean expanding the scope or adjusting the writing a bit.

HOMEWORK:

1. Write a blog post (minimum 300 words, 3 links, 1 image or video) and submit the post to a blog carnival.
2. Submit the same post OR previous posts to 2 more carnivals, so you have submitted to a total of 3 carnivals. It doesn't matter whether you submitted the same post or different posts to the different carnivals, but you need a total of 3 different carnivals.
3. In a sidebar element, list links for host blogs of the 3 carnivals you entered. Be sure to link to the host blog itself, not the blogcarnival.com listing.
4. Grant, Caleb, and Amanda will present online communities that include wikis.