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Working with blogs
WBI Social Reporting Apprenticeship Program
October 2012
Intro/Definition
“A blog (or web log) is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.”
Source: Wikipedia
Key functions it supports
Sharing ‘news’, stories and opinions
Communicate quickly
Document /share lessons learnt in projects and programmes
Share results from meetings & events
Transparency International Blog“Showing how you what people are doing to stop corruption around the world”
Key features
RSS and syndication
Audience’s engagement & interaction
Combination of text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other related media
How to blog
Decide on type of content and what topics you want to post about
Think about who you want to write for Assign time and responsibilities for creating quality
content Create linkrolls (lists of your favorite links) and tagrolls
(links of your most commonly used keywords). Make sure your blog is on local or thematic blog
directories Use RSS feeds Create a readership
Source: iMark - Web 2.0 and Social Media for Development
M&E
Most common platforms (Blogger; Wordpress) have own analytics tools
– Blogger can be easily integrated with Google Analytics
Third party applications (ShareThis; AddThis) will allow to monitor when content is shared
Comments as proxy for user engagement
Feedburner to monitor feed circulation and email subscribers
Finding blogs
Google blog search – http://blogsearch.google.com/
Technorati - http://technorati.com/
Blog aggregators– Global Voices - http://globalvoicesonline.org/– Afrigator - http://afrigator.com/
Hands on exercise
Logon onto http://www.pro-act.org/
OR
Set up a blog with one of the following services
– http://blogger.com– http://wordpress.com
Post a new item, with title, text, links and pictures
Blogging on Pro-Act
Sign in on Pro-Act – http://pro-act.org/ – Create a new account if you don’t have one
yet
Blogging on Pro-Act
From the top navigation, click on ‘Share’ then “Blogs”
Blogging on Pro-Act
Click on “Add”
Blogging on Pro-Act
Add – Title– Text (also
embedding images and videos)
– Tags
Blogging on Pro-Act
Define– Date– Privacy– Comments
Blogging on Pro-Act
Decide if you want to save the post as draft, preview or publish it
Blogging on Pro-Act
Your blog will appear on the “All Blog Posts” list and in the different network activity streams
Working with blogs
WBI Social Reporting Apprenticeship Program
October 2012