For those who want their blogs to be read by more than their friends and family

This will be the last blog post that I write for this class and I thought that after spending a semester writing blog entries, where does that leave us?

I’ve kind of become accustomed to writing one every week, so I thought, how can I transfer the skills that we’ve learned in class into the real world?

I realised that in order to be read by people other than our family or friends, we need to do more than simply produce great content because good content doesn’t necessarily translate into an audience. First we need to determine our audience and then find ways to reach them. I found a great article by Darren Rowse about 9 things that bloggers can do to be read by someone other than their mom and I just thought that I’d share the link.

The blog: its origins

While writing a post I wrote the other week, briefly comparing the origins of the newspaper and blogs, I must admit that it was quite difficult to find anything about the origins of the blog (maybe because most people disagree). This might be because people define ‘blogs‘ in different ways, and because there are different styles and types. For instance there are political blogs like Larvatus Prodeo (in Australia), fashion blogs like Manolo’s Shoe Blog, parenting blogs like Momania, and so on. There are all different kinds and each claim to be a blog, so it’s hard to tell who exactly the first blogger was.

However, I just stumbled across a video on youtube discussing the first blogger, which I found a little useful, so I’d like to share it.

Has the term ‘blogger’ really been rendered meaningless?

Hey guys, I came across an article by Scott Rosenberg the other day, debating Jay Rosen‘s suggestion that the term ‘blogger’ has become such a broad term that it will eventually render the term meaningless. More specifically, Rosen suggests that by referring to both journalists who blog and bloggers who aren’t the professional kind, the term will become too broad to be used.

However, Rosenberg rightly points out that the term ‘journalist’ has never faded away even though there are two ways of understanding the term: as a profession, and as a description of an activity. Thus, he maintains that the term blogger is unlikely to expire any time soon. What do you think?