2/28/2008

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.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, I'm doing my community on Fallen Sword

Grant said...

For this week, I found an SF Wiki. I'm not quite sure if this is something Marie is looking for.

Anonymous said...

hey classmates,

well i am trying to get a group together to go to the asian film festival on tue at 1 p.m. to see on of the films. i will explain more on thur. but spread the word.

YFJ,
Josie

Claudia said...

I'm having issues trying to find a blog carnival about sports. They have one about running, but I'm not sure if that would really work. HELP ME!

Marie Drennan said...

Hi Claudia,

Can you find a sports/Dodgers blog that accepts contributions? The idea here is to get your blog hooked into a larger community; it's OK if you have to look outside blogcarnival.com. I'll bet there must be lots of sports communities out there that post people's writing. Maybe some other sporty people in class can help you out, too; get in touch with them!

Claudia said...

Is there anything on the blog page I should be looking for?
Any type of program that would let me know it accepts post from other bloggers? Like the RSS Feeds or Wikis?

The only one I thought I found, was asking for a subscription. Any advice anyone?

Marie Drennan said...

One way to start might be to do a Technorati search for Dodgers blogs and just look at a lot of them and see if there's an option for contributing -- probably there would be a link or something pretty visible saying "come on and send a post". I'm afraid I'm not up on sports blogs -- anyone out there who can help?

Claudia said...

I did various searches including through Technorati. I searched words like baseball, Dodgers, and including blog carnival. But most were old blog carnivals.

I also tried to a Google search and nothing really came up, but the MLB Blog which allows you to post on other people's blog, but for a fee. I will keep searching.

Thanks for your help.

Marie Drennan said...

Good persistence, Claudia! : )

Keep digging -- we'll figure something out.

If anyone out there has any ideas, please let Claudia know!

Anonymous said...

Is anyone still awake trying to get this damn carnival stuff done, I'm lost and still have to do homework for Khani's class at 9 a.m.! Looks like I'll be pulling an all nighter!

:/

YFJ,
Josie

Anonymous said...

Figured it out on my own!!
Yeah on to my next homework assignment!

YFJ,
Josie

Bitch, Bitch, Bitch (Amanda Mac) said...

For my presentation I am going to talk about Yelp !