Week Six: This week’s blog post

One of the things our guest speaker from Patch discussed with us this week was how she connects and collaborates with other bloggers. For your post this week, use a post from another blog related to your subject and share your perspective on that blogger’s piece. Add new information, highlight why you agree or disagree, and evolve the conversation. Also be sure to add a blogroll to your blog this week; feature other blogs from your community.

We’ll continue our conversation on crowdsourcing next week. In the meantime, here are some of our notes from the Wikipedia discussion last night.

Considerations for Wikipedia

• How much trust and credibility should we give “anonymous”?
• What sorts of guidelines are needed for a functioning community?
• Is omission as bad as error?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks of collaborative knowledge?

The Basics

• Web-based free content encyclopedia
• Collaborative knowledge
• Largely anonymous: Impact on trust or authority?
• 78 million visitors
• More than 91,000 active contributors
• More than 270 languages
• What goes and what stays? Follow guildelines
• Dominates search: Why?

Important to Know

• Not every page is really important: Look at number of page views using 3rd party tools
• Style matters: Featured Articles and Manual of Syle
• The history of a page: Look at the history tab of a page for details on who has edited, when, and why
  

Notes on Sharing

Influential platforms have led to greater “social sharing,” as many of the most popular sharing networks, like Digg, Pinterest and Reddit, help us organize, manage, and recommend online content. Moving out of last week, be sure to think about how social media and online networks have changed how we recommend news and ideas within our communities.

Key things to remember:

As members of online communities, we’re expected to build equity and credibility by recommending and creating content that is easily sharable and unique.

Social sharing and bookmarking sites are typically highly reliant on tagging and the creation of folksonomy, or a shared vocabulary that emerges online, is self-organizing and converges over time. Users of sites that feature folksonomy-based tagging can enjoy the benefits of content created and recommended by like-minded community members, however this form of organizing often lacks control and can lead to problems like mistagging.

Social sharing isn’t always about content. Geolocation tools like Foursquare and Gowalla also allow us to broadcast, share and recommend locations and services with our networks.

Social sharing fits squarely within not only our discussion on crowd sourcing, but also our conversations on search. Think about how these topics overlap and inform each other!

Some Helpful Links to Remember

Here are some of the tools we’ve talked about last week, as well as a few previous ones that you should continue to use. Start practicing with some of them and let me know which is your favorite!

Use:
AllTop and Technorati for finding blogs and measuring their influence

Quantcast for measuring traffic and demographics of a website or blog

Monitter for real time Twitter searches

Twazzup for building a rich newsfeed out of any Twitter search

Trendistic for measuring trends in Twitter

Trendsmap for identifying Twitter trends by geography

Listorious for finding people and lists on Twitter

Tweetstats to map the stats of any public Twitter account

Tweetmeme for tracking the most popular links on Twitter

Hashtags.org to find out what might be driving a trend or tag on Twitter

Tweetpsych to build a psychological profile of your Twitter account

SocialMention and Twitrratr for measuring sentiment on Twitter and blogs

Week Five: Rise of Niche Networks

Moving from large social networks, like Facebook, to smaller (but growing) networks like Tumblr, G+ and Pinterest helps illustrate that there’s a place for everyone and every interest online; sometimes the collective nature of a small group of sites can have as much impact as one large blog or community. Unique content fuels many of these sites, eventually setting them apart of the competition and ensuring their future success.

In your post this week, include a unique piece of sharable content like a photo or video that will resonate with others in your community. Please leave a link to your post in the comment section! Also, be sure to check back later this week as I plan to post notes and links from our last two classes.

Things to Remember About Blogging

As we move deeper into conversations about social networks and online discussions, here are some things to keep in mind from our conversations about blogging:
1) Blogs and blog readers have unique characteristics that make them distinct from traditional forms of media
2) There are clear trends and tools used across blogs, helping form communities and currency
3) Knowing what you need and who has it can let you identify the community you need (or where you belong)

With the growing importance of social networking and search, blogs are becoming more expert and focused and less personal soapbox or diary:

• Rise in personal and large-scale aggregation, bringing together rich content from multiple places and sites
• Bloggers are typically highly educated, affluent and engaged in current events
• Bloggers are more likely to ask readers to take an action such as sign a petition, call a politician or attend a public meeting.

Bloggers are more likely to focus on specific issues or causes than traditional media. In the past year, bloggers gravitated toward stories that elicited emotion, concerned individual or group rights or triggered ideological passion. On blogs, 17% of the top five linked-to stories in a given week were about U.S. government or politics, often accompanied by emphatic personal analysis or evaluations.

Blogs rely on the traditional press — and primarily just a few outlets — for their information. More than 99% of the stories linked to in blogs came from print and broadcast. According to Pew, just four — the BBC, CNN, The New York Times and he Washington Post accounted for fully 80% of all links. Bloggers also move quickly from topic to topic: On blogs, 53% of the lead stories in a given week stay on the list no more than three days.

And don’t forget about RSS!
Really Simple Syndication: RSS is the U.S. Postal Service for the Web, but without all the junk mail

• Web feed that checks for updates to publications/blogs where you subscribe
• Content comes to you from multiple sites without searching, just look for the icon
• You’re subscribing to the feed, not the site

Think of RSS as an effective (and easy) way to distribute your site or blog’s content to your audience (be a mini Justin Hall).

Week Four: Exploring Social Networks

Tonight we looked at the basis of social networks and then looked at how some brands are using platforms like Facebook to share content and information to connect with their audiences. Some of the best brands, like Red Bull, Nike and Kohls are leveraging videos, applications and user generated content to customize their online presences and make their pages collaborative and engaging.

Given that we now spend one of every six minutes online participating in social networking activities, users have high expectations for their experiences and they tend to resist change. We discussed many of the changes to Facebook, which were announced at last week’s f8 conference. Do these new changes now make Facebook easier for you to use and customize as a personal user, or is there simply too much noise for you to enjoy your experience. If you want to learn more about Facebook’s recent changes, I highly recommend GigaOm’s recent piece on the update, which includes a variety of links to other resources.

For your post this week, explore some of the alternative social networks like Gather or Hi5 and think about how you’re integrating social media into your blog and how you’ll be using tools like Twitter and Facebook to enhance your site. Tell your readers where else they can connect with you online and add one of the social networking widgets to your blog. Leave a link to your post in the comments below!

Week Four: Personality

Last night Claudia from Brunch in the City shared with us how she has been able to maintain her blog and show her personality on her website and Twitter, while also keeping her blog focused on a single topic. One of the themes of the book we’re reading, Say Everything, is that letting your personality shine through is key to success online.

This week, please write a post about how your blog is related to your personal interests and how you plan to show your personality in your blog while also maintaining a focus on your blog’s topic. Link to your post here before class next week!

Helpful links from last night:
Social Media Policy Samples

Week Two: Blogging for You

Now that we’ve learned the basics of blogging, we can begin to think about how we listen to conversation and identify the online sites and communities most important to us and the issues we care about.

For your blog posts this week, think about how you can use other bloggers and online conversation to inform your content. Which blogs are you reading to help you shape opinions or learn information? Why are these sites important to you and what sort of “blog currency” do that have that you’d like to emulate? Remember that being a positive contribution to a blogging community means participating in conversation, linking to other blogs, sharing comments and content, and engaging in social dialogue.

Don’t forget to share a link to your post for this week’s blog entry prior to next week’s class in the comment thread below.

Week one: You’re a Blogger

Please create your first blog post. All you have to do is share your blog name and a bit of info about your blog in the prior to next week’s class. Post your blog’s URL in the comments below!

Fall Syllabus for Introduction to Social Media

Welcome to Introduction to Social Media. Here’s everything you need to know to start the semester. See you Tuesday night!

Fall 2011 Social Media Syllabus