Today we differentiate between blogging on blogging platforms and sharing on social platforms, but that is just semantics. The essence of blogging is not defined by a platform but by what I learned from Dave and his blogging platform — that media now is raw, collaborative and instantaneous.

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Blogging is communal: In 2008, I wrote that “blogging is not just an act of publishing but also a communal activity. It is more than leaving comments; it is about creating connections.” That is the single biggest lesson learned of these past 10 years. Every connection has lead to a new idea, new thought and a new opportunity.

Being authentic in your thoughts and voice is the only way to survive the test of time.

Being wrong is as important as being right. What’s more important — when wrong, admit that you are wrong and listen to those who are/were right.

Om Malik — My 10 years of blogging: Reflections, Lessons & Some Stats Too

This is a quick post I’ve been meaning to do about the work we did this year on the ONA11 conference website.

Background: last year, I was late on getting a conference pass and ended up volunteering for an entire day in the student newsroom. ONA’s student newsroom produces stories, video, and other coverage related to the conference. I had so much fun that I volunteered to do it again this year. I planned to work on it over the summer, but 90% of the work ended up being done in the last week.

The goals for the website varied depending on the context:

• Before the conference, the focus was convincing journalists to purchase tickets and attend.
• During the conference, there are two audiences: those who are physically at the sessions and those who want to participate virtually. The former probably want a backchannel for conversation and capturing the highlights, whereas the latter probably want to participate in realtime as much as they can.
• After the conference, everyone wants to access a historical archive of the content presented in sessions, either to catch those they missed or find the link they heard referenced.

With this in mind, we worked on making the website dynamically reflect these needs. It was helpful, although somewhat distracting from the experience, that I was working on the website during the entire conference.

What worked this time:

• Session pages as a custom post type. This gave us a structured database of all sessions and allowed us to easily build a session listing, etc.
• Using Posts 2 Posts to associate posts and presenters with session pages. Our realtime curation crew could easily publish content from the WordPress admin, associate it with a session, and have it automatically pulled into the session page. Furthermore, every presenter had a dedicated profile page and their information could automatically be pulled into other contexts on the website.
• Auto-showing the livestream player on an individual session page based on timestamp. Every session was associated with a track and I had a bit of logic to pull in the correct livestream based on current time, session start, and session end.
• Showing the session updates in reverse chronological order during the event (because the user is most likely refreshing the page and wants the most recent updates at the top) and then flipping to chronological order 15 minutes after the event.
• Leveraging the Zoninator on the homepage for featured stories and events. Editorial loved that they could have full control over which stories were highlighted. WordPress normally lists headlines in reverse chronological order, and developers hack this with “featured” categories, etc.
• Post formats presented content exactly as it was intended to be presented. I was particularly proud of my gallery implementation, even if there weren’t the visuals to go with it.

Next time I’d like to:

• Get started earlier so these features are actually fleshed out before the day of.
• Build an interface for posting updates from the session page so it’s brain dead simple to update (no associating with session post, choosing post type, writing a title if you don’t need to, etc.)
• Allow for “featured” session updates a la NY Times Editors’ Picks for commenting.
• Guest session update submissions with a moderation queue.
• Live update the session page so it’s essentially liveblogging with rich media.
• Show the bylines/avatars for people covering the event, so you know how well it’s going to be covered (e.g. one person versus five people participating)
• On the all sessions page, show the number of updates an event has, whether it’s currently live/being livestreamed, etc.
• Order content on the single session page based when it was published (e.g. you can assume everything 30 minutes after the session is coverage of it, whereas during the event is realtime updates on it).

Lastly, I have one more idea I’d like to pitch: a way of indicating who you want to meet at the conference. Every attendee that registers get access to a page on the website listing every other attendee. Then, they can go through and indicate whom they want to meet at the conference. It’s a double win; you get to notify who you want to meet that you want to meet them, and you get to see in advance who wants to meet you.

For archival purposes, I’ve captured a gallery of screengrabs from the website too.

I am the enforcer.

Our readings conversation went well, people were mostly engaged, but it went for a lot longer than I planned. Assigned readings can easily diverge into related topics.

After, when we covered WordPress and other publishing tools, the class progressed into more lecture than conversation. Conversation means the students are generally more engaged whereas lecture means we cover more of the material I think they need to know. Some people took the time to log in to their websites prior to the class while others didn’t take the time at all. There’s an intriguing tension between how much reading I can assign out of class and what students expect to learn within class. What’s the most effective use of physical space?

Covered most of the WordPress admin, but missed activating widgets and configuring settings. Didn’t cover the different types of blogging at all, or the best practices listed at the end of the class notes. That may be a blog post this week.

Things students found useful:

• “I found it very useful to go into WordPress and that our account was already set up so we could play around with it and follow Daniel.”
• “Deconstructing HTML, CSS and other jargon that might seem off- putting to non-techies like me.”
• “Blog updating best practices, such as that on average, it’s a good idea, initially, to post three, 700 word posts per week.”
• “The walk through on WordPress plus the conceptual explanation of HTML and CSS”
• “Learned about several new blogs and web tools of interest, and some new tricks in the WordPress backend.”

What students want covered next time:

• “Would prefer longer classes so topics can be more fleshed out and not so rushed, especially less on theory and more hands-on, in- depth, especially with the tech aspects of using WordPress.”
• “After blogging for a month first, how to find and negotiate with a graphic designer to create a header.”
• “Developing WordPress skills”
• “Might be good to do an exercise(s) in blog-building… I am preoccupied about getting started… I seem to be running in place and not getting anywhere. Not sure how to get my idea or concept off the ground. It can be overwhelming and a bit scary. Hands on would be terrific and quell my concerns.”
• “Maybe we could spend some more time on the site if we have time? And possibly go over Google Analytics”

One point I pushed: blogging is publishing on the web. We heavily detoured into bloggers vs. journalists, and I wanted to emphasis that the debate is only relevant for a certain subset of people. Blogging is publishing on the web, and there are billions of people doing it in almost as many styles.

Another point I pushed: Start with free. There are plenty of places to experiment with publishing on the web, and you should get a sense of those spaces before you make significant financial investments. You first investment, a few months after you’ve been publishing, should be your personal domain ($10-$15/year).

Strong call for an assignment between now and next class in lieu of more theoretical readings. I’m thinking one or two things:

• Write a blog post about a given topic
• Write a blog post about an imaginary website you’re going to create and identify all of the things you need to consider
• Make changes to your website and write a blog post about the changes you made and why you made them

Class notes are also in PDF form.

Readings (10 minutes)

Five Keys to Authenticity (Ryan Sholin)

Be Human:
Be Honest: Credibility is crucial and will help you compete in a crowded space
Be Aware: Expertise in a niche will set you apart; be ahead of the curve, don’t be late to the online party in terms of joining the conversation. Offer a unique insight, and part of that is paying attention to what others are saying and identify where missing gaps are (and try to fill them). A negotiation between publishing quickly and getting your fact straight. (Do you have the bandwith and stamina, or publish less frequent but well-thought-out posts). Do what you do best and link to the rest (Jeff Jarvis). Focus on your original analysis, reporting etc.
Be Everywhere: Try an RSS feed (really simple syndication) to stay on top of latest news in your beat. RSS is a protocol for syndicating content across the WEB, an XML-based protocol (much like newspapers use to submit to newswires). More B2C where consumers can subscribe to info from publishes. Also try Google Reader, which allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds from as many sites as you want. Google reader will manage and index all the latest news for you, so you don’t have visit each source. You curate your sources of info.
Show Your Work:

The art of the link roundup (Matt Thompson)

Examples:

• http://fort-greene.thelocal.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/the-day-a-fundraiser-and-good-pizza/
• http://www.pharmalot.com/2010/08/pharmalot-pharmalittle-good-morning-284/
• http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/04/links-on-twitter-a-new-head-for-mits-media-lab-a-kickstarter-magazine-a-tale-of-two-timeses/
• http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/04/popular-on-twitter-news-me-stage-1-measuring-accuracy-in-journalism-and-the-effects-of-amazons-server-problem/

The People Formerly Known as the Audience (Jay Rosen)

Recommendation: http://pressthink.org/2011/03/the-psychology-of-bloggers-vs-journalists-my-talk-at-south-by-southwest/

Term review (10 minutes)

RSS

• Stands for: Really Simple Syndication
• Definition: a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.
• Tools: Google Reader, Instapaper. You can do an rss feed from search.twitter.com, and set up RSS feed from that search. (copy link location, go to google reader, and subscribe)

HTML

• Stands for:  Hyper Text Mark-up Language
• Definition:  A mark-up language with its origins in print; allows you to mark up content and give structure to content on the Web. The real world metaphor, if a building was content, with HTML or CSS, all the materials would be a pile sans structure or form.

CSS

• Stands for: Cascading Style Sheet(s)
• Definition:  site’s stylebook or design element

CMS

• Stands for: content management system
• Definition: your data is stored in a different place

PHP programming language

Question: When starting out, how often should you update your blog ?
Answer (DB): On average, shoot for 700 words three times a week. Plan to spend about two hours on each entry. If your goal is to ultimately attract advertisers, then more content = more traffic = more advertising.

Blogging platforms: WordPress and other tools (10 minutes)

Advantages to WordPress

• Open source – Run the software on your own server. 10% of sites are on WP (NYT blogs are wordpress; neiman lab; jschool; hacks & hackers; chris dixon.org etc)
• User friendly
• Strong community: many people contribute themes and plug-ins (Themes allow you to change the styling, changing a theme is as easy as clicking a button.
• Personalization with themes (design of your blog) – another
  • see wordpress.org/extend/themes
  • http://www.woothemes.com/themes/free/
• One investment you may make in month 3 or 4 is a premium theme, such as Woo Themes (although they offer FREE themes, you can also buy a membership, and have access to all Woo Themes’ premium websites.) Elegant Themes is another good source of premium themes. (CR)
• Regularly updated with new features
• Extend functionality with plugins

Question: What is a masthead?
Answer (DB): Your blog’s “header.” Masthead is more of a print term. The digital version is called a “header.”

If you want a blog video, use a service like Vimeo or Youtube. Vimeo has a free version, but the pro version ($60 a year) is better. DB prefers Vimeo to Youtube.

Wysiwyg = What you see is what you get.

Disadvantages to WordPress

• If you’re self-hosting, you’re responsible for making sure your site is up. With great power comes great responsibility.
• Amount of design flexibility often depends on the theme.

What you should think about when you’re looking at tools

• Custom domain (e.g. danielbachhuber.com)
• Ease of use
• Writing interface
• Data portability
• Publishing from mobile if you need
• Extensibility
• Support
• Performance/reliability

WordPress hosts to consider

• wordpress.com
• Page.ly
• WebFaction

Other tools you might consider

• Tumblr
• Posterous
• Movable Type

Orientation to WordPress core concepts and the admin (40 minutes)

Creating a post or a page

Why you should double-check your slug: http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/04/how-url-spoofing-can-put-libelous-words-into-news-orgs-mouths/

Themes

WordPress.org themes
WooThemes free themes

Plugins

Plugins for Publishers, April 2011 edition

Users

Settings

Types of blogging (40 minutes)

Personal

• Why:
  • Personal, permanent space on the internet
  • Share content with friends and family
  • Influence others within your industry
• Examples:
  • Chris Dixon -
  • Dave Winer -
  • Andrew Spittle
• Characteristics:

One-person publication

• Why:
• Examples:
  • Daring Fireball -
  • Kottke.org -
• Characteristics:

Multi-person “new media” publication

• Why:
• Examples:
  • Gawker -
  • TechCrunch -
  • The Awl -
• Characteristics:

Multi-person “old media” publication

• Why:
• Examples:
  • Babbage (The Economist)
  • Lens (The New York Times)
• Characteristics:

Corporate blogs

• Why:
• Examples:
  • Mint.com – good example of a company blog; they produce original content to drive traffic, not just promotional (promotional content is only about 10 percent of what they publish. Build trust to convince readers to try your product.
  • Signal vs. Noise by 37signals -
• Characteristics:
• Question for next week: In Corporate blogs, can we address characteristics for fields that are not so “corporate” such as fashion blog for an e-commerce site?

Team blogs

• Why:
• Examples:
• Characteristics:

Legal, copyright and community best practices (10 minutes)

Daniel’s best practices

1. Link as you would want to be linked
2. Be nice
3. Use formatting properly
4. Do use the standard font from your website
5. Don’t copy and paste from Microsoft Word without using the special tool

From Interactive 2’s syllabus:

Photo policy: Do not “lift” or “borrow” images from other web sites for use on your web site or blog without credit or “courtesy of” text. Permission must be provided by creator of the content for any image to be used, unless it is being used for “fair use,” purposes such as to comment on the image or because the image itself is part of the news you are reporting. Since such permission is often difficult to obtain, especially on deadline, and “fair use” difficulty to define, we strongly recommend that instead you use only those images you have created yourself, or which you have obtained via the AP Photo Bank, or other photo service for which the school has obtained licensing, or which are explicitly labelled as “creative commons” and available for your use. IMPORTANT: This matters, not just as a plagiarism issue, but as a legal copyright issue that could create problems for you in the school or beyond, in the workplace. Apply the old journalism adage: “If in doubt, leave it out!”

Top 15 Blogging Best Practices (Laura Lee Walker)
1. Use a catchy title. Make the title unique, consider using questions and lists.
2. Use interesting visuals. Include an image or video in your blog. This will get people’s attention and help them better understand the content of your blog.
3. Include links. Links add depth and credibility to your articles and allow you to show a little ‘link love’.
4. Use bullets, italics, and bold font. This makes for an easier read. Using bold font allows the reader to quickly scan your post.
5. Let your personality come through. This is what makes your blog unique.
7. Reference your articles. If you use other people’s work, include a reference or link to their article.
10. Be bold. This might take the form of being outrageous or controversial.
12. Respond to comments as soon as possible. Treat your reader like a friend. If your friend calls you and leaves a message, do you wait days to respond?
13. Make your blog post easy to share. This may include adding widgets such as Tweet, Reddit, Delicious, Stumble Upon, etc.
14. Post frequently. This helps keep your blog fresh and entices search engines to index you more often.

Finding free images to use (Tech@CUNYJ)

Topics for next week

How to install themes from woothemes to wordpress?

Maybe go through google analytics

Where to put metatags and descriptions for SEO and alt text for photos?

In Corporate blogs, can we address characteristics for fields that are not so “corporate” such as fashion blog for an e-commerce site?

Please post a couple educational tools on the web for developing the basics of HTML

Also, please post, if you know any, a link or two that walks you through wordpress, i.e. an easy-to-use manual or instructions

First, it’s a diverse class in many measurements. As a practicing playwright, one student wants to start a theatre and movie review blog. I had to help her log into the computer. Another is working for a startup and needs to develop a product marketing strategy that involves producing high-quality, relevant content. The best way to address this diversity is to make the class as dynamic as possible. Leverage the strengths of each student, and make their curiosities everyone’s curiosities. We did this by making the period highly conversational and using a collaborative Google Doc as a reference point.

One post-class survey:

I liked the open approach, the attendees have several interesting questions and the fact that we all have different backgrounds and level of knowledge makes it better.

Another post-class survey:

I found it useful using shared google doc and the prepared questions and notes that were were able all link to. I also found it useful that we had open discussions with Daniel and was very helpful that he gave us examples of sites.

To improve the approach for next time, I think I should prepare more links and examples for the Google Doc. If a student gets bored of what we’re talking about because they already know it, I’d much rather have them learn onward than switch their brains completely off topic.

We have a class website for the time between physical classes. My hope is they take to posting questions there and answering one another. I’ve also created individual websites for each person to practice publishing for the duration of the course.

The challenging thing for me at this point: satisfaction with a course could but doesn’t necessarily correlate with the quality of the course. I wish I knew how to test for and evolve the latter.

Introductions (12 minutes)

Blogging Best Practices, the course

• Three Monday nights: April 11th, 25th and May 2nd
• 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm in room 440
• Largely free-form, ask questions whenever you have them
• Fan of collaborative notes on a Google Doc; please add to them
• Course website: http://bbp2011.danielbachhuber.com/

Who I am

• Daniel Bachhuber
• digital media manager at the CUNY
• Blogging since 2007; variety of content
• danielbachhuber.com
• d@danielbachhuber.com

Who are you? (Name, Where you work, and favorite web tool)

• Erika Suban, freelance writer for Italian magazines, social media tools
• Christopher Boland, Associate Editor, ONE magazine/Catholic Near East Welfare Association
• Christina Ruggieri, Marketing Consultant / Blogger, WordPress.org
• Emily Theil, iboutiques.com marketing PR, blogger, google, twitter, facebook
• Chantal McLaughlin, EVP/Editorial Director, iboutiques.com, Google Alerts/Google Docs/Google Images/Tweetdeck
• Evelin Maciel Brisolla, journalist, TV Câmara (Congress’ TV in Brasil); social media and google
• Nancy Blazquez, formerly of Bloomberg News (Radio Producer/Reporter)… No favorite web tool that I can think of.

Reading discussion (20 minutes)

Stock and Flow

Stock is content, similar to money in the bank; content that is relevant right now, this minute, as well as 3 months from now (ie. good stuff with longevity). Flow is more in the moment, fleeting news updates perhaps with less substance. Flow is the latest rumor about Twitter, or lessoriginal. Stock is like a commodity. It has less of a news peg and if it does it’s only because it’s some sort of deep analysis.

Check out blog by John Gruber; Daring Fireball, is very “flow”; he has anywhere between 2 and 8 posts a day that are short pieces. The title actually links to the original article and the star icon links to the post. He’ll pull a quote from the piece that he’s linking to. He’ll also for example, see his piece on Bloomberg iPad App; brief nugget of analysis, kind of snarky. Short updates that are reactionary, talking about corporate announcements for example. He also has long pieces too that tend to be picked up by other people. His beat is Apple and technology beat, a premier blogger around Apple news. He uses The Deck ad network.

http://daringfireball.net/2011/03/pricing_should_be_simple

How the Web and Weblog have changed Writing

There are no rules: you can write as long as you want.

Why we link: #J361 presentation on curation

Importance of transparency and authenticity on the Web. Be the authoritative source for whatever your beat is.

Examples: Google, The Drudge Report.

What is blogging? (30 minutes)

Blogging is:

• publishing on the web
• timestamps displaying certain date and time of publication
• has many different forms including short, Twitter-like status updates an John Gruber-esque posts as we’ve seen where he pulls choice graph from a piece he’s linking to, and blogging is also really long blog posts. Check out Felix Salmon, a blogger for Reuters who does really long analysis pieces.
• blogging is conversational
• blogging is interactive and can be different mediums (audio; video; photos). Check out Big Picture blog. Creative commons. website. allows for you to copyright your work/photos easily and legally
• The Web is built on good will so you should contribute to that.
• http://www.niemanlab.org/

How is blogging different than X?

Terms you might’ve heard

• Post:
• Tags and categories: keywords to enhance searchability and to organize your content; a type of taxonomy (defines a collection of terms.) A way to organize your content and make it easier for others to find that content.
• SEO: Search Engine Optimization
  • http://powazek.com/posts/2090
  • http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/digital-strategies/123396/how-to-improve-website-rankings-advice-from-google-and-bing-at-sxsw/
• Blogger:
• CMS:
• HTML/CSS:
• WordPress:
• Structured Data (see Yelp entry on Etsy labs with multiple pieces of data so it’s more of a reference tool)

@todo Cover this section next time: Types of blogging

Important things to consider when starting a blog

• Who your audience is; identify what needs you want to be serving; figure out who your competitors are (branding)
• Who’s your audience? (Average age? Sex? Income? How to find out – The Pew Research Center.)
• How often you publish
• Find a niche (the market you are going after)
• Take small steps
• Copyright Laws (licensing photos, trademark issues, etc. How to stipulate whether or not others can use content from your site: www.creativecommons.org- allows you to choose types of use of your work – whether others can use for free, or they have to pay for a license)

Between now and next class

• Daniel: Send three links to read tomorrow and at the beginning of next week
• Daniel: Create test websites for everyone in the class
• Daniel: Prepare WordPress reference material

Topics for next class

• More review of terms
• What you should consider when you’re setting up WordPress
• Legal considerations for bloggers
• Overview of genres of the most common types of blog posts
• Cover the types of blogging mentioned in first class agenda that wasn’t covered
• Overview of “protocol” or etiquette of the blogosphere in terms of Blog Rolls, seeking and pitching guest bloggers/blog posts
• Which tool is better to post video?

Topic for last class

Basic HTML

It might be more effective to have slots for students to sign up for if I can find an easy tool for this. Also, the whiteboard idea was a dud. I get the sense they only want answers from the instructor (or someone who appears knowledgeable) instead of each other. Making those connections in meat space realtime seems awkward. Next week, I’ll require students to take the pre-workshop survey to save their spot and make connections proactively if I see overlap.

One of the Entrepreneurial Journalism students came by with a whole series of questions about blogging during my office hours this evening. We talked for a few minutes, but I thought they’d be better answered by existing documentation and possibly attending the Blogging Best Practices course. Here are the questions:

• How do you increase engagement?
• How to create great traffic on the blog? – tips & tricks
• How much blogging is too much (overblogging)?
• How much information is too much on one blog?
• What do people typically want to read in a blog?
• What types of blog designs bring readers in?
• Why do people like certain blogs vs. others?
• How to create and maintain a loyal blog fanbase as you grow without “selling out” from your original base?
• How to engage readers into blogs?
• How to increase participation (ie blog comments, repost, share)
• Blogging etiquette when using other people’s content
• Your top 3 personal preferred blogging sites

Another student came by my office hours this evening with more work to be done on her WordPress theme. She has someone else helping her now too, so she’s made progress since last time we met. Tonight, we registered a custom navigation menu for her header. We also tried to port CSS from her Posterous website to her WordPress one with limited success. Posterous’ lack of support for custom taxonomies is why she’s making the switch.

The last student stopped by my office hours this evening for the last 10 minutes. She’s looking for the proper WordPress theme to use for her publication. She has detailed wireframes that will be hard to match exactly without paying for customization, but we found a theme likely close enough to launch with. I opened the door for her to ask the web team for feedback on the themes she’s looking at.