BLOGSAVVY

This is part of a larger, ongoing series which examines how - in 2005 / 2006 - you can give people blogs. Visit the contents page to see the lot or grab the feed to keep up with new stuff!

Following on from the review of different multi user blogging tools I’m keen for this section to examine the ways in which different multi-user blogging platforms work. The plan is that this will provoke discussion and inform people who are giving blogs through multi user tools and it’s broken down into several different parts.

First up it’s going to consider exactly why you might want become a ‘blog provider’ and the implications that this has on what you do and how you do it. For example, how the commercial interests of Xanga differ from March of Dimes’ Share and how this impacts on what they provide and where they’re going.

Then, I’m going to run over the ways in which these blogging platforms work, from invite only sites like WordPress.com to the classic quick and easy ones like Blogger to the social networking of LiveJournal. This part is going to try to give a good overview of how and why these blogging providers do what they do and how it might affect you as a blog provider yourself.

Finally, to sum this up I’m going to examine the ways in which these blogging sites go about achieving their goals. I’m going to look at effective advertising, community creation, public service, educational uses and more to put forward some suggestions as to how you might learn from what these companies and individuals are doing.

With any luck after I’ve finished this section you’ll be well on your way to selecting a tool and getting down to business with a project, at least that’s the plan ;)

Find expert WordPress and WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) development and consulting at Incsub.

Well, it has taken a while but Blogsavvy seems to finally have been let out of the Google sandpit and is now no.1 result for ‘blog consultant’ also no. 1 for ‘professional blog‘ and up there as no. 1 for ‘blogging consultant‘ as well.

Which means that in this month so far I have received a staggering 7, yes 7, referrals for ‘professional blog’, 3 for ‘blog consulting’ and a square 0 (zero) for ‘blog consultant’! Perhaps my forecast for business through search results might be a little, um, off whack ;D

Find expert WordPress and WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) development and consulting at Incsub.

Well in an official-esque announcement sense I now pronounce learnerblogs.org and uniblogs.org open for business.

Basically these are sites in a similar vein to edublogs.org in that they are seeking to provide free blogs, but this time for K12 school students and university / college students.

learnerblogs.org is basically born of demand. So many teachers wanted to use edublogs.org as a place for their students to set up blogs that it basically seems to be needed and let’s face it, if you’re not tech savvy then Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga etc. don’t really cut the mustard for what you want for your school kids doing blogging. So, my aim for this is to make it work as well as possible -specifically- for school students in educational contexts…. feedback / requests / comments / thoughts very welcome here!

uniblogs.org seems like a natural complement (and also a pretty funky name) and I have to admit that I’m a bit excited by the potential with this one. Things like global categories could do amazing things in terms of getting people blogging about particular disciplines together, and then there’s the social aspect… huge I reckon. So again, a slightly different focus to learnerblogs or edublogs (which both have a kinda ‘independence’ about them) and one that I’m looking forward to toying with.

Now, what I need [read: am begging down on my knees] people to do is to share these with other teachers, university student groups and the ol’ listservs, you know it makes sense ;)

Find expert WordPress and WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) development and consulting at Incsub.