Topic 4: Question 1

Question 1:

a) How would I manage content in a blog?

A blog needs a purpose. An online community needs a purpose: a shared purpose. The blogs we have established and collaborated on are united in our efforts to understand and broaden our knowledge of social networks.

In this, our blogs could kind of be seen as meta-blogs: Blogging about blogs.

It’s our individual responsibility to make sure the content we include in our blog is accessible to our audience, our audience being each other for the time being.

We provide this accessibility through formatting and language choice.

Using blogger most of the formatting has been resolved for us in the way the entries are archived and the way feedback is provided. We do have control over how we space our content and where, in the swarm of posts, we insert an entry (via a backdating option).

Accessibility is also weighted on language choice appropriate to your audience. Given that this environment that we’re interacting in has been somewhat informal my language choice has been somewhat informal to match. Language choice helps to set the tone of a community and affect the way communication transactions take place.

b) Google’s blogger service is simple and useful for our current ends because of its simplicity. It contains enough versatility to manage a steady stream of blogs. One might argue that it meets its needs, if its needs are to provide a skewed flow of information from a dominant source to a listening, sometimes commenting audience. There isn’t a great deal of room for growth and change at a user level, but as the market evolves and users demand more the site owners will likely renovate the site. Community feedback, like I said, is limited in that comments are about the most that can be returned (although the content of those comments can be quite creative). Allowing members to gradually take more control isn’t something the author of the blog has a lot of say in. They can only do so much within the sites environment. Growth of the community is certainly possible, but will more likely be achieved through networking with other social network sites. (Some friends of mine regularly tout their blog on facebook)

Soooo tired....