Blogging: Sharing My Personal Faith Story

transcript

Presenter: Kristine Neumayer Jenkins

We praise You, Lord, for all Your digital world, especially for Brother Blog, who is the gift through whom You give us conversation. And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor, of You Most High, he bears your likeness.

We praise You, Lord, for Twitter, in the heavens you have made the tweet short, quick, and easy.

We praise You, Lord, for Brothers LinkedIn and Flickr, professional and a sea of networks, by which You cherish the photos of what you have gifted us with.

We praise You, Lord, for Sister Facebook, filled with family and friends, news, and connections all across the globe.

We praise You, Lord, for Sister Earth, who sustains us with her fruits, colored flowers, and herbs. Caroline Cerveny, SSJ-TOSF created this contemporary take on St. Francis' well known prayer, Canticle of the Creatures. See - http://bit.ly/itbJnr for the original prayer.

Blogs are usually (but not always) written by one person and are updated pretty regularly. Blogs are often (but not always) written on a particular topic - there are blogs on virtually any topic you can think of. -Mark James Normand

• Online Diary: diarists, journalists, or journalers

• Justin Hall (1994) one of the earliest bloggers

• Term “weblog” coined by Jorn Barger on

17 December 1997 – Short term “blog” coined by Peter Merholz in a

sidebar used “we blog” which became “weblog”

• In 2004 it moved mainstream: political, news…

• Liveblogging is commenting on live events –

quickly!

Corporate blogs have become much more acceptable – and are far more read than individual’s blogs. Why?

Basics of

Building a Blog

Considerations

Cost of Blog

Ease of Use

Modification

1. Domain Name = unique part of the blog’s

Uniform Resource Location (URL).

http://www.acyberpilgrim.org

http://www.catholicwebsolutions.com

http://spiritualpopcorn.blogspot.com

2. Types of domain extensions

http://www.acyberpilgrim.org

What other extensions are you aware of? There are at least 14!

3. Buying a domain name

www.bluehost.com

www.godaddy.com

www.hostgator.com

Note: Check all the pricing and check again before

you commit to purchasing a domain name.

• Home Page

• About or Profile Page

• Posts

• Comments

• Categories or labels

• Sidebar

• Archives

• Header

• Footer

• Blogroll or links

• Trackbacks or

backlinks

• Pings

• Tags

• Template or theme

Go to: http://bit.ly/iLuXYw

What are the issues that you would like covered here?

• Don’t plagiarize (Get permission first)

• Don’t commit libel against someone or

something

• Don’t spam through comments

• Don’t publish spammy posts

• Don’t be a “troll”

• Don’t hide affiliate relationships (sales)

Various types of attribution: – Great article

– Blog Post

– Sources within your blog (photo’s)

– Quotes

– Images

The rules of copyright are a bit blurred in the online world, but the safest path to follow is one that errs on the side of being more conservative.

- Susan Gunelius, Blogging for Dummies

http://www.delicious.com/ccerveny/copyright

Teaching Copyright - http://www.teachingcopyright.org/curriculum/hs

CC licenses are designed to give the owners of

original work a way to share that work more

freely (and allow other people to build on that

work) by protecting the owner of the original

licensed work without applying a full and highly

restrictive copyright to it.

http://www.delicious.com/ccerveny/creativecommons

1. Attribution

2. Attribution Noncommercial

3. Attribution No Derivatives

4. Attribution No Derivatives Noncommercial

5. Attribution Share Alike

6. Attribution Share Alike Noncommercial

Four most common policies published on blogs:

• Comment policy: Describes what comments

are inappropriate and how they’re moderated.

• Privacy Policy: Describes what information is

collected about visitors and how that information

be used.

• Terms and Conditions of Site Use page:

Describes legal info about your blog, such as

copyrights, availability, and warnings.

• Affiliations: If you get paid for any link or review

There’s actually a lot more to SEO than using

targeted keywords that match people's

search engine queries. Although keywords

are the starting point for your blog’s SEO

strategy, they can take your blog only so far.

You also need to focus on other SEO

techniques to truly grow your blog’s search

engine traffic. - Susan Gunelius, Blogging for Dummies

FREE TRIAL

• pay for text links.

• publish links that have been paid for.

• keyword stuff.

• hide keywords.

• scrape content.

• publish content that is only links.

• What does “RSS”

stand for?

• Is a web feed format.

• Feed Reader = a tool

that ingests feeds

from multiple sources

(such as blogs) and

makes it easy to view

in one place.

Feed Reader Email

• Subscribers – most loyal audience

• Great content will attract readers

• Make subscribing easy

• Ask people to subscribe

• Offer something in return to subscribers

• Use the FeedCount chicklet from Feedburner

9 Points To Remember

• Writing Well

• Writing Often

• Building Links

• Committing the Time

• Having Passion

• Socializing

• Reading More than Writing

• Being Comfortable With Technology

• Having Patience

How would you go about building an online community?

• Leave comments on other blogs.

• Use the same link phrase everywhere.

• Link to content you enjoy from your own posts.

• Share content you like through social bookmarking, social networking, and Twitter.

• Respond to comments left on your blog.

• Participate in ‘link ups’

• Commenting on other blogs.

• Responding to comments.

• Moderating comments

• Linking and tracking back

For additional info: http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/what-why-and-how-tos-of-trackbacks-and-pingbacks-in-wordpress/

• Inviting guest bloggers

• Searching beyond the blogosphere.

Class Process

F2F or Webinar

Wiki Assignments

• Remember to go to our class blog to continue

our conversation about this topic.

• Please complete assignments for this module

posted on the class wiki before the next webinar

• If you’re behind on assignments, start fresh with

this week’s Blogging topic and “catch up” later.

University of Dayton

Institute for

Pastoral Initiatives

INTERACTIVE CONNECTIONS

Blogging: Sharing My Personal Faith Story

Education