How To Write An Awesome Blog Post [Slides]

Via David Hopkins.

Nice tips on how to write good blog posts by Arun Basil Lal.

How To Write An Awesome Blog Post

View more presentations from Arun Basil Lal.

PLEM for Edublog Ranking

The poll for the Edublog Awards 2009 closed today. While waiting for the outcome of the voting, I tried to use the PLEM ranking algorithm to rank the nominated blogs in the category "Best individual blog" based on the Wisdom of Crowds and different interaction metrics (PLEM saves and ratings, Delicious saves, Friendfeed comments and likes, Yahoo inbound links, Digg votes, Google Trackbacks, and Technorati blog reactions). To see the result, you can visit the PLEM project Website here, hit the "edublog" tag from the "Popular Tags" list, and choose "Most Popular" as the ranking option. Below is a screenshot of the result. Let's see whether the Edublog Awards voting result will be different or not.

How people are using Twitter during conferences

An interesting paper by my dear colleagues Wolfgang Reinhardt, Martin Ebner, Günter Beham and Cristina Costa on "How People are using Twitter during Conferences" (available here on Scribd).

Blogger now supports Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian

The Blogger team announced that Blogger now supports three more languages: Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian. They write:

Blogger is translated into — Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew are written from right to left. As you can see from the above screenshot, we had to flip the whole interface around. Supporting these languages is a huge milestone for us because — unlike the other 37 languages Besides localizing the Blogger interface into these three languages, we have right-to-left templates and have added new toolbar buttons for bi-directional text editing in the post editor.

Blogs in Plain English

Lee and Sachi LeFever on Blogs in Plain English.

Blogs Are the Long Tail of Media

Chris Anderson pointed to a book called Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World's Top Bloggers by Mike Banks. This book is not more than a collection of short interviews with some famous bloggers. One of the interviews was with Chris Anderson who was talking about his "The Long Tail" blog experience. The interview is availabe here (.pdf). The author summarizes the interview as follows:

To better serve the low-demand niche markets (or just to increase the quality of your own blog), consider these points:

• There is no one “blogosphere.” There is an infinite number of blogospheres, each shaped by the tastes and experiences of individuals.
• A blog is a thinking tool, a means of collecting, composing, and amplifying your thoughts—while getting useful feedback. Ideas are enriched by the experiences of blog readers.
• A personal blog presents a better platform for communicating honestly and transparently than a company blog, where a writer is constrained by commercial considerations. However, remember that self-promotion is more effective when it includes a value-added element.
• A blog, especially one with a large community, can function as a distributed research project and become an efficient marketing platform.
• A carefully selected set of feeds can make blogs function as an information filter.
• When blogging, focus on specific interests. You don’t have to appeal to an overly diverse audience. Focused blogs are self-selecting, in that they draw readers who have a legitimate interest in the blogs’ subjects. Such readers are more likely to forgive errors and omissions, and will contribute more than someone just passing through.
• Every blog, and every blogger, can be improved. To maximize your blog’s audience, focus with laser precision on your subject.
  

How To Grow Your Own Blog

Via Robin Good´s Latest News

9 Lessons For Would-Be Bloggers:

1. It´s only an initial fear
2. You have something valuable to say
3. When in doubt, post
4. Use the comments for refining your point
5. Everything is beta
6. Have a schtick
7. Correct english be-damned
8. Show your greatest hits
9. People are listening
   

The State of the Live Web, April 2007

Dave Sifry, Technorati Founder and CEO, has recently published the State of the Blogosphere report for Q4 2006 with different interesting graphs and stats.

In summary:

• 70 million weblogs
• About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or...
• 1.4 new blogs every second
• 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day
• Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December
• 1.5 million posts per day, or...
• 17 posts per second
• Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
• 22 blogs among the top 100 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 - up from 12 in the prior quarter
• Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
• English second at 33%
• Chinese third at 8%
• Italian fourth at 3%
• Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
• English the most even in postings around-the-clock
• Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
• 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
• 2.5 million blogs posted at least one tagged post in February

Edublog Awards 2006 Winners

The list of Edublog Awards 2006 winners is at http://incsub.org/awards/. EdTechTalk webcast the Edublog Awards Ceremony.

Studying blogs at Microsoft

Lilia Efimova has conducted a study on blogs at Microsoft and published the results of the same in her paper Crossing boundaries: A case study of employee blogging together with Jonathan Grudin from Microsoft Research. The goal of this study was to "explore where, how, and why employees blog; how personal the writing is in work-related weblogs; what happens when blogging becomes a formal work objective; perceptions of the personal and business impacts of blogging; and possible steps to make blogging more effective". Well worth a look!

Edublog Awards 2006 - nominations open

Josie Fraser announced the third international Edublog Awards , "the independently run, community-based awards programme which recognizes and promotes excellence in the educational use of social software".

"The main purpose of the awards is to demonstrate the huge variety of excellent practice going on across the world, to provide a showcase site for everyone interested using social software to support informal or formal education, and to have some fun along the way. If you aren't familiar with the awards, check out 2005's amazing roll-call".

This year there are ten categories:

• Best audio and/or visual blog

• Best group blog

• Best individual blog

• Most influential post, resource or presentation

• Best library/librarian blog

• Best newcomer

• Best research paper on social software within learning and teaching

• Best teacher blog

• Best undergraduate blog

• Best wiki use

Nominations are open from 8 November to 30 November and can be emailed to the awards address: 2006awards@googlemail.com. Head over to the awards blog for all the info.

One Day in History

David called my attention to a mega action/project initiated by the British Library. 'One Day in History' is the name of this project. Everyone is asked to take part in the biggest blog in history by writing a blog diary about what s/he has done on 17 October 2006. The diary will then be stored by the British Library as a historical record.
The British Library states "We want to people to reflect how history impacted on them that day – by simply commuting through an historic environment, or how business history influenced their decision-making, or merely that they looked up some old sports statistics or listened to some pop music from the 1960s. We want to record the ordinary lives of citizens. By doing so in vast numbers, everyone should feel that they are contributing something permanent and valuable to the historic record with material that could be used by historians and researchers for centuries to come". Spiegel Online has also pointed to this big project.

Again a sign that blogs are becoming more and more popular every day...

The best English and German e-Learning blogs

In his blog, Gabe Anderson has published a list of 19 best English e-Learning blogs. The most of them I´m also reading on a regular basis and are really quite interesting. A couple of days later Jochen Robes has given a list of German e-Learning blogs. What I can say for the moment is that there are far more English blogs dealing with technology enhanced learning than German ones. Is it because German do not like to blog?