Managing your Blog

These are many reasons for creating a blog, including that your instructor requires it.  A common perspective is that blogs are for journaling and the writer does it strictly for his own satisfaction. However, most blogger hope that someone will read the blog.  Managing the blog is an administrative task to maximize the readership.  Hopefully the readers will link to the blog from their blogs or setup feeds from the blog.  However, there's more.

I discovered from Chinese students the idea that if what I want to write has already been written by someone else, why not just copy and paste it.  But that's another blog!  However, I did locate several websites/blogs that discuss how to manage your blog.  This gives you an opportunity to consider these points, discuss their merits and incorporate some of these processes and tools in your blog.

One of the links is http://www.downes.ca/post/38550 - Eleven tips for managing your blog by Stephen Downes.  In short:

• ·      A blog entry is a stub for conversation
  
• ·      Think about the perspectives of your audience

  
• ·      Write tight headlines that encourage interest

  
• ·      Make points or lists and make then scan-friendly
  
• ·      Link to the context

  
• ·      Quote indirectly and link

  
• ·      Format long documents for print

  
• ·      Never delete anything
 tell you what you can't do.
  
• ·      Troll the blogosphere for secondary conversation
  
• ·      Be active in your own conversations

  
• ·      Create buzz everywhere
 people to other sites.