blog | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

That’s My Boy!

Actually, that’s not my boy. He’s Inkswamp‘s. But my youngest son, John (pictured below) did something this week that made me look for a photo in Flickr representing a boy looking up to and emulating his dad.

John Aase, as long-time SMUG students know, has a blog. He’s 9. On Monday, he told me, “Daddy, I’m going to write a page on my blog.” “A page?” I asked him. “Don’t you mean a post?” “No Daddy, I’m going to write a page.”

John had previously written this page about the bird’s nest on our porch. His posts and pages tend to be much more concise than mine.

I have to say his latest page just completely melts my heart. Not the subject matter, but the thought that he wants to follow in Dad’s didactic footsteps.

I know most SMUGgles won’t be familiar with Pokemon, but John is quite an expert. So if you wouldn’t mind going to his P.G.A. page and leaving a question to prime his pump, you would be providing great encouragement to a blogger who’s just getting started.

Maybe some of the younger SMUGgles who have gone through a childhood Pokemon stage would know better questions to ask. For others, you could ask simple questions like:

How many different kinds of Pokemon are there?
Which ones are the most powerful?
What’s your favorite one?
How do you play Pokemon?

You get the picture.

Beside setting John off on a writing spree, which would be good for his learning about computers and blogging, he would really get a kick out of seeing his daily page views spike.

So if you wouldn’t mind taking a minute to encourage John, I would greatly appreciate it.

WordPress Growth Rocks

TechCrunch calls the growth of the WordPress blogging platform, as announced today at WordCamp, “Awesome.”

It doesn’t surprise me at all that U.S. unique visitors to WordPress.com have roughly tripled in the last year to 20.9 million per month, while Typepad.com has only increased about 20 percent to 7.2 million. The two platforms were roughly equal a year ago.

But what wasn’t equal was the value proposition. WordPress.com offers 3 gigabytes of free storage and unlimited bandwidth, and for $45 a year you can customize the CSS, buy an extra 5 gigs of storage (and the ability to upload mp3 files so you can host podcasts), and map your blog to a domain or subdomain of your choosing.

You’d have to spend at least $299 a year on Typepad.com for anything approaching this functionality. And the cheapest, entry-level package price on Typepad.com is $49.50 a year.

With Typepad you can get a two-week free trial, but with WordPress.com you can blog for free almost indefinitely. And even with upgrades that would give most people as much functionality and capacity as they could possibly need, the cost for WordPress.com is still less that that for the stripped-down version of Typepad.

It all adds up to powerful incentives for new bloggers to start with WordPress.com, because all it costs them is their time to learn.

And that doesn’t even take into account the free, open source WordPress.org software you can download and install on another server for even more functionality.

Ben Martin agrees.

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Blogging 103: Commenting on Blogs

In one sense, a blog is just a Web site.

A Web site that, because of easy-to-use and free software like WordPress, anyone can publish. You could decide to use WordPress.com as your content-management system, to produce your own one-way Web site. All you would have to do is turn off the comments feature, either for the whole site or for individual posts. In this way, you would have an easy Web publishing system.

But what sets blogs apart from traditional Web sites (Can you believe that? I used the word “traditional” to describe something that first started in 1994!) is the ability to invite comments and create conversations.

That’s what makes blogs interesting.

Yet most people who read blogs never participate in the discussion by leaving a comment. Forrester research indicates that about 33 percent of Internet users are “Spectators” who read blogs, listen to podcasts or watch YouTube videos without leaving any comments, and 52 percent of users are “Inactives” who don’t even read blogs. (I think the inactives number is overstated because, as I said earlier, a blog is just a Web site. People are going to blogs without even knowing it.)

In keeping with our SMUG goal of getting people to stretch into new areas of social media, in Blogging 103 I hope to help some of those Inactives and Spectators move up the Forrester Ladder of Participation into the Critics category.

Just complete the assignment below, and you’ll climb a rung or two.

Assignment:

Click the “Comments” link at the bottom of this post. It looks something like this if no one has commented yet:

Or if some people have commented, it will have a number in front of the word “Comments” – like this:

Then you’ll see the full post reload, showing any comments from others, and at the bottom you will have a chance to add yours.

I’ll bet you can figure out how to fill in that comment form.

In a future post, I’ll show you how to participate most effectively, but for now, it’s important to just take that first step and make a comment.

You’ll note that I have set this blog to accept comments without being approved by me. In other words, I’m not “moderating” comments in advance. So you’ll get the immediate gratification of seeing your comment show up right away after you submit it, provided you’re a real human being. I use Akismet to weed out the automated comment spam that unsavory characters use to promote their herbal Viagra alternatives and the like. More on that in a future post, too.

But I also know that one reason why people don’t comment on blogs is because they don’t know exactly what to say. So I’ll set you up with a couple of questions to prime the pump, just to make it easier for you to dive in.

Is this your first time commenting on a blog? If so, what has been the main barrier that keeps you from commenting?
If you do comment sometimes, what are the factors that cause you to join the conversation?
For extra credit, what social media topics are most interesting to you? What questions about social media would you like to see answered and discussed further?

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Blogging 114: Categories vs. Tags

It’s fun to work with people who are new to social media, because they often have good, fresh questions that aren’t colored by familiarity with these tools. And they make me take a minute to think through some basic explanations.

For example, I was helping a colleague get started with a blog yesterday, and he asked me:

What’s the difference between categories and tags when I’m doing a blog post?

Great question! And it gave me a chance to combine two SMUG courses (I had planned to cover these topics separately) into a single post.

Category Coolness

Categories are internally focused for your blog, to help users navigate and find posts on similar topics. Once a user has found your blog, categories provide organizational structure to help them discover what your blog is about and to navigate efficiently.

So, for example, I have categories for Blogging, Facebook, Book Reviews, Marketing, Advertising, News Media, Conferences, Personal and a few more. So if people want to see all the posts I’ve live-blogged from conferences, they can click “Conferences” under the Category heading. Or they can click the Book Reviews category to read about all the books I’ve highlighted on SMUG.

A post can belong to more than category, but generally you would want to limit the number of categories you have and how many categories are selected for each post. One category I don’t use much any more is Social Media. Ever since I renamed this blog “Social Media University, Global” it hasn’t made much sense to put posts in the Social Media category; almost every post would belong there, and if the whole blog is about a topic it doesn’t makes sense to use that as a category.

This particular post, as you can see below, is in the Blogging category.

Categories are like the Dewey Decimal System for your blog: they’re your way of organizing content in a way that makes sense to you and hopefully your users. Except you don’t have the funky numbers like 330.94 for European economics. And while there’s no limit on the number of categories you can have, I would advise you to limit them. If you can’t see yourself doing several posts that would fit a category, use a broader one instead. So, for example, I have a News Media category instead of having separate categories for Radio, Print, and TV. That’s because the major division in this blog is between traditional, mainstream media (what I categorize as News Media) and Social Media. (But again, since most of the posts are about social media, I don’t use that category very often.)

After you’ve done a few posts, you might discover some themes emerging. Then you can go back and apply whatever category labels seem to make sense, like the apocryphal college that didn’t lay down its sidewalks until it saw where students had worn paths through the grass.

Tremendous Tags

Tags, by contrast, are externally focused. They’re aimed at the people who haven’t yet found your blog (and the search engines that guide them.) So instead of trying to find the one or two labels that best describe your post (as you do with categories) you can and should apply multiple tags to a post, based on words others might use to describe your post…or words they might be searching on to find relevant content.

So for this post I used not only the tags blog, blogs and blogging, but also social media, socialmedia, tags, tagging, categories, vlog, vlogging and others. While social media isn’t a particularly useful category for this blog, it is a good tag (and so is socialmedia, because some users doing a Technorati, Google, Blogpulse or WordPress.com search might leave out the space between social and media.)

If you click on any of the tags at the bottom of this post, you will find a list of blog posts on WordPress.com that used that tag. This is really helpful to users exploring a topic, because they can easily find a group of relevant posts. And if you use several related word variations, you’re not requiring users to choose your exact tag (e.g. blogs vs. blogging) in order to find your post.

So, within reason, with Tags it’s a case of “the more, the merrier.” If you add tags like Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Barack Obama, John McCain, Justin Timberlake or other famous names to your posts in hopes of attracting more visitors, it won’t do you any good. Unless, of course, you happen to be doing a post about one of those people. If you “trick” people into visiting your blog by using irrelevant tags, they won’t stay long.

Another benefit of Tags is that you can use a “tag cloud” (see example above or in the sidebar at right) to graphically show visitors to your blog the main topics you cover. The most frequently used tags are bigger, and if people click in your tag cloud (at least on WordPress.com), they get a list of all your posts that included that tag.

Assignment:

Write a post on your own blog, and assign it to one or two categories and add multiple tags.
Include a sentence at the end (with a link to this post) that says something like, “I sure am learning a lot from Social Media University, Global…including how to add tags and categories for my blog posts.”
Following those two steps will create a comment on this post (via Trackback, to be discussed in a future course), so that your fellow SMUGglers (the phrase Jim Streed coined) can follow it back and see how you’re doing in applying what you’re learning about categories and tags.

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Blogging 121: Time Travel through Blog Posts

I just noticed a feature in WordPress.com‘s blogging platform that I had seen in other platforms such as TypePad: the ability to schedule posts for a future date and time. Even without this feature, I still thought WordPress.com was a far superior service and offered many benefits either free or at ridiculously low prices, but one of its drawbacks was the inability to delay publication of a post, and have it then publish automatically.

Maybe I had just missed it earlier, or maybe it’s a recent addition, but it’s a really important new feature, particularly for businesses and other organizations.

Why?

Because it enables WordPress to serve a a full-blown content management system for a Web site, of which a blog is just one subset. Many organizations have news announcements that they want to make public at a certain time, perhaps even on a weekend. With the ability to schedule automatic publishing at a future time, they don’t need someone to log in and manually convert a draft post to “Published” status. And by setting a time up front when writing the post, it reduces the likelihood of a post being inadvertently published by someone who accidentally hits “Publish” instead of “Save.”

So I’m giving it a try, with this post.

I’m writing this post on the bus on the way to work, but I’m going to schedule it for publication at 8:15 a.m. CDT on August 12, 2008, when I’m going to be in the middle of a meeting.

To do this I will click the Edit link next to “Publish immediately” in the right sidebar:

Then I will adjust the time as below:

When the post is finished, then you just hit Publish as usual.

I think that’s all there is to it. I’ll update this post later to tell how it worked.

But then again, if it didn’t work, you won’t see it in the first place.

Update: This is an update before the scheduled publish time, but here’s how my “Manage Posts” dashboard
currently appears:

It shows that the post is scheduled but not yet public. Looks like it’s working.

The other nice thing is I could update the Blogging Curriculum page with a link to the new post, even in advance of publication. I’m not sure what the user experience would be, though, from following a link that is scheduled but not published. Maybe I will Tweet the link to find out.

Further Update: A couple of my Twitterbuds told me the result from having a link to a scheduled but not yet published post is less than satisfactory. So I had a friend capture a screenshot. Here’s what it looked like:

Take-away: Wait until the post goes live before including links from already-published pages. If, however, you had a page (or several posts) scheduled to publish simultaneously, you could put in those reciprocal links and have a good outcome.

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