Hello everyone,
Tomorrow is our last day of ESD.942 class and we are trying to summarize what we have learn during this week.
I would like to make several comments regarding building your blog. Especially if you do not have your personal mit.edu or .com domain.
As I was saying in the first class, blogging is addictive and sometimes painful process. As a social media pessimist I would like to share ten simple rules you may chose to follow.
1. Take your time and think about the goal of your blog. You may choose to have specific field, language, etc. Or you may just start sharing your thoughts without constraining yourself into specific tags and topics.
2. Ask yourself if you want to go public from day one? In my personal experience, I just started to write and generate different content first. Moreover, for the first four months, my blog was private. Only when I felt comfortable I opened it for public to read.
3. Think about your audience. Who are these people - your friends, classmates, potential employees, potential business partners. Why do they care?
4. Most important advise is focus on your content. You can spend as much time on the design. But design is an iterative and time consuming process.
After your fourth and fifth posts you will get a better idea how your blog should look like. But please do not waste your time on that. Most dissatisfaction with the design and absence/necessity of specific plug ins may disappear as you start writing. Very often your blog may require simplicity and different design features are just fancy distractions for your and your readers.
5. Take a minute to review your old notes on creative writing. Most of them are applicable to your new blog (Clearly I did not follow this rule myself).
6. After several week review the name of your blog and ask yourself - "Does your name actually reflect its content". At an early stage do not constrain yourself with consistency in topics. These will allow you to re-shape your blog as you become more comfortable in this environment.
7. Combine blog writing with some other activities in your life - writing reflection paper for your classes, general emails to your friends, book reviews, op-ed, announcements on upcoming events or short reports on these events.
8. If you are more visual person and do not have time to write long posts - there are micro-blogging platform such as http://www.tumblr.com . It has simple and intuitive user interface that can save you from pain of writing "original" ideas. If you have 10 minutes to integrate your platforms, I would spend them on setting your Blognetworks http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/ interface. This will let your blogpost appear on your Facebook page.
9. If you decide to get your own domain - ask yourself how much money are you ready to spend ANNUALLY on maintaining this domain. If you start using mit.edu domain - ask yourself what would be the eventual transition cost from mit.edu domain to some other domain when you leave MIT.
10. If you remember one thing from this post remember this - platforms will come and go. Last year it was LifeJournal, yesterday it was Wordpress and Facebook, today it is Twitter and Tumblr. Tomorrow it will be something else. You can be everywhere or you can be just in one place. That is not important. What matters is your name. Your name should be connected to correct information about you, as well as content created by you or about you.
Best,
Azamat Abdymomunov
KnowledgeMap: http://www.abdimom.com/blog/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/abdimom
http://socialmedia.mit.edu/
Tomorrow is our last day of ESD.942 class and we are trying to summarize what we have learn during this week.
I would like to make several comments regarding building your blog. Especially if you do not have your personal mit.edu or .com domain.
As I was saying in the first class, blogging is addictive and sometimes painful process. As a social media pessimist I would like to share ten simple rules you may chose to follow.
1. Take your time and think about the goal of your blog. You may choose to have specific field, language, etc. Or you may just start sharing your thoughts without constraining yourself into specific tags and topics.
2. Ask yourself if you want to go public from day one? In my personal experience, I just started to write and generate different content first. Moreover, for the first four months, my blog was private. Only when I felt comfortable I opened it for public to read.
3. Think about your audience. Who are these people - your friends, classmates, potential employees, potential business partners. Why do they care?
4. Most important advise is focus on your content. You can spend as much time on the design. But design is an iterative and time consuming process.
After your fourth and fifth posts you will get a better idea how your blog should look like. But please do not waste your time on that. Most dissatisfaction with the design and absence/necessity of specific plug ins may disappear as you start writing. Very often your blog may require simplicity and different design features are just fancy distractions for your and your readers.
5. Take a minute to review your old notes on creative writing. Most of them are applicable to your new blog (Clearly I did not follow this rule myself).
6. After several week review the name of your blog and ask yourself - "Does your name actually reflect its content". At an early stage do not constrain yourself with consistency in topics. These will allow you to re-shape your blog as you become more comfortable in this environment.
7. Combine blog writing with some other activities in your life - writing reflection paper for your classes, general emails to your friends, book reviews, op-ed, announcements on upcoming events or short reports on these events.
8. If you are more visual person and do not have time to write long posts - there are micro-blogging platform such as http://www.tumblr.com . It has simple and intuitive user interface that can save you from pain of writing "original" ideas. If you have 10 minutes to integrate your platforms, I would spend them on setting your Blognetworks http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/ interface. This will let your blogpost appear on your Facebook page.
9. If you decide to get your own domain - ask yourself how much money are you ready to spend ANNUALLY on maintaining this domain. If you start using mit.edu domain - ask yourself what would be the eventual transition cost from mit.edu domain to some other domain when you leave MIT.
10. If you remember one thing from this post remember this - platforms will come and go. Last year it was LifeJournal, yesterday it was Wordpress and Facebook, today it is Twitter and Tumblr. Tomorrow it will be something else. You can be everywhere or you can be just in one place. That is not important. What matters is your name. Your name should be connected to correct information about you, as well as content created by you or about you.
Best,
Azamat Abdymomunov
KnowledgeMap: http://www.abdimom.com/blog/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/abdimom
http://socialmedia.mit.edu/
