Community Snapshot

Write a 4-6 page paper exploring your community, using the tools and tactics we’ve talked about in class– such as Quantcast, Technorati, AllTop, blog rolls, etc– to explore which bloggers and topics have prominence.

Provide an overview of the space your blog falls into, as well as the top bloggers and the subjects they write about. Which issues do they cover? What type of bloggers are they? Do they manage a personal diary or are they aggregators, or something else? Are they popular, trusted, engaging or influential? Where else do they have a presence and how do they connect that to their blog?

Papers are due Thursday, October 27 at 8 p.m. in my Gmail account. Please see the syllabus for other paper requirements and let me know if you have questions.

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
  

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.