Blogging and Business: Spring 2007

You have each created a blog, using one of the four tools I suggested. (Most of you chose Blogger.) There are many complements to such tools, some of which we’ll discuss in class today.

Update: “today” was Feb 10, our second meeting. I’m coming back to this post a few days later to update with links and with a few more sites.

Here are some of the sites visited during the class meeting: Technorati, Feedburner, MyBlogLog, OpenID.
Something I meant to mention, but didn’t, is that you can tell Google about the URL of a new blog in order to encourage it to include the blog in search results. You shouldn’t have to do this, but it might speed things up.

A service I might have mentioned is CoComment, which enables you to keep track of the comments you’ve left on other people’s blogs.

The main “deliverable” due before the second meeting of the Business and Blogging course is… blogging. So far, five of the ~30 students have told us about their blogs.  I’ve added each of these blogs to the Blogroll in the sidebar. I’ve also changed the link to my main blog, since the host I’ve been using for the last couple of years is having persistent (un)availability problems.

It’s likely that some of you are perplexed by my statement that you can blog about whatever you want. So here are some more ideas: Boston; a firm you’re particularly interested in; your encounters with technologies (e.g., cellphones, wireless, Tivo,…). My apologies to those for whom extra suggestions make life more difficult…

We’ll start off our second meeting by discussing your blogging activity. Which blogging tool did you use? Why? How easy, or otherwise, was it to set up your blog? To post?

Research the business/organizational aspects of the blogging tool you used. Who provides it? Why?

Read the following. The questions are to aid your preparation for class. You don’t need to hand anything in (although I may pass round an attendance sheet and ask you to identify the two issues you followed). But you are of course more than welcome to blog about them, or to use them to help you decide on a final assignment.

The Web feed page at Wikipedia. How clear is this this account of feeds? To what extent do you assume it to be accurate?

About Feeds at Six Apart. How would you compare this account of feeds with the Wikipedia account?

How your own blog invites readers to subscribe to your feed. Could it do so better? If you were writing a web page or other explanation of this topic, what would you call it? (Feeds? Subscription? Syndication?)

Product Decision Information from Six Apart. The firm makes blogging tools: four of them. How helpful is this page (which I found by following a link from the About Feeds page) in choosing among the four?

More about Six Apart. This firm is interesting, because it is an independent provider of blogging tools.

Follow one issue that’s getting a lot of coverage at the moment. Suggestions: Mooninites in Boston; Superbowl ads. How does coverage differ within and between: the blogosphere; and mainstream media (MSM)?

Follow one issue that’s getter narrower coverage. To put it another way: choose an issue unlikely to be chosen by any other student. Again, compare blog and MSM coverage.

How did you search for data for the three previous bullet points?

Based on your exploration of the blogosphere so far, which organizations seem to you to represent best corporate blogging practices?

What do you have in mind for your final assignment for this course?

Is there anything else you think we really should discuss in a blogging and business course? If so, what materials do you suggest we read before class? (You can of course add your suggestions as a comment to this post. Or you can email them to me if you don’t want to be seen by your colleagues as adding to their workload.)

Before the second of our two meetings, you should blog, and tell the rest of us where you blog, and why. You can start a blog on any topic: blogging itself, international business, online music, snowboarding,…

The choice of blogging tool is up to you. I offer the following suggestions:

• Blogger
• Uniblogs
• Vox
• WordPress.com

Once you’ve started your blog, leave a comment on this post with a link to it. Before the second meeting, you should have made at least two posts to your blog, and have left at least one comment on the blog of a fellow student.

The purpose of this post is to tell you how to prepare for our January 27 meeting.

Read chapter 1 of The Corporate Blogging Book, by Debbie Weil. You don’t need to get the book in order to do this, since the chapter is available for free download at the book’s web site. First, what are your comments on the chapter itself? Second, what is the author trying to achieve with her web site(s)? To what extent is she succeeding?

Skim the Business Week article, Blogs Will Change Your Business. This was the cover story almost two years ago. How does it read now?

Read the recent posts from at least two business-related blogs. At least one of them should be a corporate blog (by Debbie Weil’s definition). Each of the sites to which I’ve already sent you provides many links. Come to class prepared to describe and evaluate the blogs you read.

Subscribe to these blogs, and to this (course) blog, using a service such as BlogLines or Google Reader. How important are such services to readers and writers of blogs?

You are Time magazine’s person of the year! Or if you aren’t already, you will be once you start blogging. The article to which I’ve linked describes blogging as part of Web 2.0. How does it describe Web 2.0? How is Web 2.0 described elsewhere? In what ways, and to what extent, is the term useful?

How important blogging is for business? We’ll discuss this question at some point in the first class meeting, probably toward the start. Think of arguments on as many sides of this question as you can.

What would you like to do for a final assignment for this course? I have some ideas, and am interested to hear yours.

Finally, who are you, and why are you taking this course? Or, if you’re not taking this course, why have you read this far down? Please let us know with a comment on this post.

What I mainly mean is, hello to the students in my Spring 2007 Blogging and Business class. This is a one-credit MBA elective. We’ll meet in person twice, on January 27 and on February 10. On each of these Saturdays, we’ll meet from 1pm to 5pm, in Dodge 370.

Hello also to anyone else dropping by to read. Feel free to comment on this or other posts.