Science Blogging 2008: London forum: topic
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How to enhance your blog: call for suggestions for our conference session
Maxine Clarke
Thursday, 03 July 2008 15:37 UTC
Once you have decided to blog, what kind of blog do you choose? Blogging within a network, blogging on a stand-alone platform, group blogging, or microblogging, all have advantages and disadvantages. However you blog, it is all about communication and conversation, and at ScienceBlogging 2008 we’ll be revealing some of the things you can do to increase your internet presence, whether you are just a bit of a magpie (Maxine), a bedroom coder (Euan), or at some point inbetween. There are a range of topics we could include, for example:
- RSS – what it is, how you use it and how it helps manage the information overload;
- how to share your favourite posts with friends and vice versa;
- linking to other sites, such as Digg or Technorati;
- making money out of your blog (Adsense);
- use of media (podcasts, video);
- how to archive (protect) your blog;
- basic template, format and HTML coding.
We can’t cover all these topics in a brief hour, so we are starting this forum entry to ask you:
which of these topics interests you most?
what is your preferred format for the session (talk, Q/A, demo, discussion, other)?
have we missed anything?
Please let us know your opinions now so that we can factor them into the session. Or call for reinforcements.
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I’m not attending, but RSS and sharing posts with friends are both very important these days and you can almost not not talk about them.
If you have to leave something out, I’d drop archiving. -
I’d suggest working out how much you want to publicize your blog. Topics like search engine caches of older pages, how search engines index blogs, the notion that what you write has a long long lifetime on the internet. Those are more negative things for the cautious blogger!
The point about the conversation – talking about the best tips and tricks to build up a readership: link other bloggers in posts, join in the big debates, leave comments elsewhere. Participating in and hosting blog carnivals as a way of finding like minded bloggers.
Monitoring your traffic through statcounter or similar sites. That’s always a great way to find out who links to you.
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I like Katherine’s suggestion. Grrlscientist has some good advice on advertising a blog. Advice I have consistently failed to follow.
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Thanks for these suggestions, please keep them coming.
I did not explicitly write “statistics” in the list above, but another topic we can discuss is web traffic and analytics: how to track who is coming to your blog, featuring visitor stats, using Google Reader trends, etc. -
What about microformats, RDF (GRDDL, RDFa, eRDF, etc)? And, using DOI, InChIs, other identifiers in general, for picking up interesting content? I was hoping that to be part of this session…
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That’s a good suggestion, Egon. With the greatest respect to the conference attendees it might need to be a bit more of a dummies guide, though. Still…
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I think Egon’s idea is good because it means Euan would have to do that bit while I have a cup of tea ;-)
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Eyeballing our registration list, it looks like we have quite a few people coming to the conference who have not blogged before but are thinking about. Of course, there are lots of expert users/bloggers coming too. So I’m hoping, Maxine and Euan, you two will cover a wide range topics and questions, from the very basic to the very advanced (like Egon’s question).
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May I suggest that specifically Technorati, Digg and AdSense are no longer where it’s at in terms of blogging. Technorati has been gamed to death by spammers and the relevance of its ranking is no longer considered relevant(!) by the SEO-savvy blogging community. Digg may have changed recently but the majority of Diggers don’t tend to Digg blogs, StumbleUpon is a much better place to focus promotional efforts (that and twitter, plurk, pownce and micro-blogging aggregators such as FriendFeed), and as to AdSense…it really did have its day around 2005-2006, there are many other more effective monetizers out there for blogs now.
Just my tuppence worth.
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Re: DOI, a mention of researchblogging.org might be worth doing, aggregation with a difference.
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