Many people blog to share their ideas and points of view on a variety of topics. Since the first week of class we have been learning that blogging should be like developing online relationships and loyalty to the blogs you visit the most. We talked about how bloggers can’t expect people to read and make comments on their blog if they don’t read and comment on other blogs. This shows how blogging is really social and interactive.
In week 12 of our class we learned about “better blogging” and added some enhancements to our blog. Since publishing a blog is publishing a feed that can be searched or subscribed to online, we “burned” an RSS feed for our blog using FeedBurner. This enhancement helps you accomplish the purpose of your blog by publicizing your content, optimizing your content making it accessible and shareable to users, and analyzing who and where your traffic is coming from. We used the “Get Started Now” section, which has QuickStart guides for specific blogging services, like wordpress.
Next we registered our blogs with Site Meter, a counter and statistics tracker. The basic function of this enhancement helps bloggers understand who visits their site and what parts of the site are most popular. Google Analytics does a similar function and is like the “Big Brother “surveillance for: visits-letting you know who searched and when, for searches-letting you know what they were looking for, and content-letting you know what pages they found.
Finally we added Technorati, where people can create their own “Top 10″ blogs. It’s a blog aggregator which helps bloggers collect, gather and keep track of their favorite blogs. This week’s class was about taking blogging to the next level especially for journalists who are active bloggers and are staying abreast what’s going on in the field of journalism.
