Report for Class - May 5th, 2010
For this week, I have chosen to include a Twitter feed and a blog to enhance interactivity on my website. Both technologies are fantastic for communicating with website visitors and creating conversations about the various topics I write about. Personal finance is a subject that has an endless amount of information and resources and it would be impossible to include all of it on one website. However, incorporating a blog will allow me to consistently write about new topics and issues so that readers will be able to access new content as often as I post. Furthermore, since my blog includes a comment application, all of my posts will be open for discussion and questions, allowing visitors to become more involved with the website.
Although there were likely online diaries on the Internet prior to 1997, the term "weblog" was coined on December 17, 1997 by Jorn Barger and shortened to "blog" a couple of years later (Wortham). The concept really began to take off in 1999 when free and easy platforms for blogging were made available to the public. Open Diary, LiveJournal, and Blogger.com were the first blog hosting websites to be launched and thousands of people took advantage of these free tools to write about their thoughts, ideas and opinions. According to Wortham, blogs gave people a voice and an outlet that they didn't have before. The possibilities were endless and people began blogging about everything from politics to cooking. Ten years later, there are millions of blogs about every topic imaginable and new ones are being created every day.
According to Jill Rettberg, author of Blogging, there are three main styles of blogs, which are personal blogs, filterblogs, and topic-driven blogs. Since I am using my blog to write about personal finance, it would fall under the topic-driven style. However, that does not mean that a blog can only be about one topic or that it never crosses over into one of the other styles. On some occasions, I may choose to write about personal experiences on my blog and while they will likely be finance related, I would be writing in a style resembling personal blogging.
I think a blog will be a great addition to my website for several reasons. Since I will be the sole author of posts, readers will be able to get to know me better through my posts. Many blogs have a very personal tone and it often leads to readers feeling more connected to the author. (I can say this from many years of experience as a blogger and a reader.) While I will never claim to be an expert on personal finance, I will put forth my best effort to only provide honest and good information to people who visit my website. If I consistently post informative and quality information and insights on my blog, I hope that I will eventually gain the trust of my readers so they will feel comfortable asking questions and posting comments to add to the discussion.
The ability to write comments on each post is another reason why I believe a blog will enhance my website. Allowing comments will open up all of my topics to discussion and create a forum where others can share their own insights, experiences, opinions and ideas. Since I am not an expert on financial topics, I think that hearing from other readers will add a lot of good content to my website and be beneficial to myself and everyone who reads the comments. I will try to encourage discussion by posing a question or two at the end of each post.
While my blog will not be updated daily, I will try to post at least three new entries this week. In doing this, visitors to my site will always have access to fairly recent information, which will hopefully keep them coming back. Updating fairly often, in my experience, is a very important part in maintaining a readership. If I never had anything new on my website, there would be no reason for people to come back after the first time. However, if I continue to post new information and generate new conversation, my website will be a more interactive place for individuals to come and learn about personal finance. A great feature of most blogging software is the creation of a permanent link for each blog post. This is a useful feature because it allows others to link directly to a post that they find enjoyable or useful. Readers can also submit a blog post to share sites such as Digg or delicio.us using its permanent link, which is a great way to generate traffic and get new readers.
The final reason for my decision to incorporate a blog into my site is because of the ability to tag each entry. If I post an entry about credit cards, I will tag it accordingly and it will be archived in the credit card category. I will create categories, or tags, for several different topics such as student loans, savings accounts, interest rates, mutual funds, etc. and all of my blog posts will be put in a relevant category. This will be useful for visitors to my site who are looking for information on one particular topic. If they have never been to my website before, then they haven't read my posts as I've posted them. Instead of having to skim over many posts to find a topic they are interested in, they can just click on the "interest rates" tag on the sidebar and the blog will present all of the entries with that tag.
The second technology I'm using on my website is a Twitter feed. The microblogging service, which allows users to post and read short messages, was founded by Jack Dorsey in 2006. Every user has a homepage that displays a feed of the messages that were posted by all of the users that they follow. Each message is called a tweet and is limited to 140 characters, similar to a SMS message. Tweets are posted instantly and can be seen by everyone who follows, or subscribes to, your updates. In addition, a user can put a hash tag in his or her tweets (#topic), which is very similar to tagging a blog post, and anyone who searches for that tag will be able to see the tweet. (If a user chooses to "protect" their tweets, they will only be viewable to their followers.) There is no limit to how many tweets a person can post and as of April 14th, 2010, there are more than 100 million Twitter accounts according to Alexei Oreskovic of Reuters.
I decided to create a Twitter account (@funwithfinance) and put a feed on my website because it will allow me to post quick, short updates more often than I am able to blog. I have subscribed to several feeds about personal finance and will "retweet" messages that I find interesting or useful. I will also tweet out links to good articles or blog posts that I come across. Visitors to my website will be able to see all of my tweets on my homepage and can subscribe to my updates if they are also on Twitter. Once my readers and others interested in personal finance begin to follow my updates, we can have conversations through Twitter outside of my blog comments. I can send a message to someone directly by putting @ before their username, and it will create a link to their Twitter profile. They can then reply by typing @funwithfinance within their tweet. If I post an interesting article or tweet, others can retweet it by reposting for their followers and giving me credit. Twitter will be most useful for my website once I get quite a few followers that I can have a dialogue with. In my experience, the best way to have a decent following is to be active by replying to others' tweets, retweeting interesting tweets, following new people, and post quality tweets that are likely to be retweeted by others. If one of my followers retweets something that I write, all of their followers will see that tweet along with my username. If any of their followers liked my tweet, they can decide to follow me as well.
According to Cliff Atkinson, author of The Backchannel, Twitter is all about starting a bigger conversation. While he focuses more on using the platform as a backchannel for presentations, the idea remains the same. By using hash tags and retweeting others' tweets, Twitter allows you to communicate with a much larger audience that all wants to talk about the same topic. I could subscribe to and actively comment on two dozen different finance blogs, but there is no easy way to communicate with all of those bloggers at the same time just within blog comments. However, if I follow all of those bloggers on Twitter and they follow me back, we can all discuss finance topics together in real time. And the disussion is not limited to the twenty-five of us. Anyone that searches our topic can start participating too.
Both technologies have different functions and features and I am excited to incorporate them both into my website. The Internet is a very social medium and I want my website to exemplify and take advantage of that. The more people that participate in a conversation, the more unique perspectives we will get. And since I'm not an expert on personal finance, I'm very interested in hearing what others have to say.
SOURCES
Atkinson, Cliff. The Backchannel: How Audiences Are Using Twitter and Social Media and Changing
Presentations Forever. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2010. Print. Pg 94.
Oreskovic, Alexei. "Twitter Snags over 100 Million Users, Eyes Money-making." Reuters.com. 15 Apr. 2010. Web. 05 May 2010. <http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63D46P20100415>.
Rettberg, Jill Walker. Blogging. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008. Print.
Wortham, Jenna. "After 10 Years of Blogs, the Future's Brighter Than Ever." Wired News. 17 Dec. 2007. Web. 05 May 2010. <http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/news/2007/12/blog_anniversary>.
Although there were likely online diaries on the Internet prior to 1997, the term "weblog" was coined on December 17, 1997 by Jorn Barger and shortened to "blog" a couple of years later (Wortham). The concept really began to take off in 1999 when free and easy platforms for blogging were made available to the public. Open Diary, LiveJournal, and Blogger.com were the first blog hosting websites to be launched and thousands of people took advantage of these free tools to write about their thoughts, ideas and opinions. According to Wortham, blogs gave people a voice and an outlet that they didn't have before. The possibilities were endless and people began blogging about everything from politics to cooking. Ten years later, there are millions of blogs about every topic imaginable and new ones are being created every day.
According to Jill Rettberg, author of Blogging, there are three main styles of blogs, which are personal blogs, filterblogs, and topic-driven blogs. Since I am using my blog to write about personal finance, it would fall under the topic-driven style. However, that does not mean that a blog can only be about one topic or that it never crosses over into one of the other styles. On some occasions, I may choose to write about personal experiences on my blog and while they will likely be finance related, I would be writing in a style resembling personal blogging.
I think a blog will be a great addition to my website for several reasons. Since I will be the sole author of posts, readers will be able to get to know me better through my posts. Many blogs have a very personal tone and it often leads to readers feeling more connected to the author. (I can say this from many years of experience as a blogger and a reader.) While I will never claim to be an expert on personal finance, I will put forth my best effort to only provide honest and good information to people who visit my website. If I consistently post informative and quality information and insights on my blog, I hope that I will eventually gain the trust of my readers so they will feel comfortable asking questions and posting comments to add to the discussion.
The ability to write comments on each post is another reason why I believe a blog will enhance my website. Allowing comments will open up all of my topics to discussion and create a forum where others can share their own insights, experiences, opinions and ideas. Since I am not an expert on financial topics, I think that hearing from other readers will add a lot of good content to my website and be beneficial to myself and everyone who reads the comments. I will try to encourage discussion by posing a question or two at the end of each post.
While my blog will not be updated daily, I will try to post at least three new entries this week. In doing this, visitors to my site will always have access to fairly recent information, which will hopefully keep them coming back. Updating fairly often, in my experience, is a very important part in maintaining a readership. If I never had anything new on my website, there would be no reason for people to come back after the first time. However, if I continue to post new information and generate new conversation, my website will be a more interactive place for individuals to come and learn about personal finance. A great feature of most blogging software is the creation of a permanent link for each blog post. This is a useful feature because it allows others to link directly to a post that they find enjoyable or useful. Readers can also submit a blog post to share sites such as Digg or delicio.us using its permanent link, which is a great way to generate traffic and get new readers.
The final reason for my decision to incorporate a blog into my site is because of the ability to tag each entry. If I post an entry about credit cards, I will tag it accordingly and it will be archived in the credit card category. I will create categories, or tags, for several different topics such as student loans, savings accounts, interest rates, mutual funds, etc. and all of my blog posts will be put in a relevant category. This will be useful for visitors to my site who are looking for information on one particular topic. If they have never been to my website before, then they haven't read my posts as I've posted them. Instead of having to skim over many posts to find a topic they are interested in, they can just click on the "interest rates" tag on the sidebar and the blog will present all of the entries with that tag.
The second technology I'm using on my website is a Twitter feed. The microblogging service, which allows users to post and read short messages, was founded by Jack Dorsey in 2006. Every user has a homepage that displays a feed of the messages that were posted by all of the users that they follow. Each message is called a tweet and is limited to 140 characters, similar to a SMS message. Tweets are posted instantly and can be seen by everyone who follows, or subscribes to, your updates. In addition, a user can put a hash tag in his or her tweets (#topic), which is very similar to tagging a blog post, and anyone who searches for that tag will be able to see the tweet. (If a user chooses to "protect" their tweets, they will only be viewable to their followers.) There is no limit to how many tweets a person can post and as of April 14th, 2010, there are more than 100 million Twitter accounts according to Alexei Oreskovic of Reuters.
I decided to create a Twitter account (@funwithfinance) and put a feed on my website because it will allow me to post quick, short updates more often than I am able to blog. I have subscribed to several feeds about personal finance and will "retweet" messages that I find interesting or useful. I will also tweet out links to good articles or blog posts that I come across. Visitors to my website will be able to see all of my tweets on my homepage and can subscribe to my updates if they are also on Twitter. Once my readers and others interested in personal finance begin to follow my updates, we can have conversations through Twitter outside of my blog comments. I can send a message to someone directly by putting @ before their username, and it will create a link to their Twitter profile. They can then reply by typing @funwithfinance within their tweet. If I post an interesting article or tweet, others can retweet it by reposting for their followers and giving me credit. Twitter will be most useful for my website once I get quite a few followers that I can have a dialogue with. In my experience, the best way to have a decent following is to be active by replying to others' tweets, retweeting interesting tweets, following new people, and post quality tweets that are likely to be retweeted by others. If one of my followers retweets something that I write, all of their followers will see that tweet along with my username. If any of their followers liked my tweet, they can decide to follow me as well.
According to Cliff Atkinson, author of The Backchannel, Twitter is all about starting a bigger conversation. While he focuses more on using the platform as a backchannel for presentations, the idea remains the same. By using hash tags and retweeting others' tweets, Twitter allows you to communicate with a much larger audience that all wants to talk about the same topic. I could subscribe to and actively comment on two dozen different finance blogs, but there is no easy way to communicate with all of those bloggers at the same time just within blog comments. However, if I follow all of those bloggers on Twitter and they follow me back, we can all discuss finance topics together in real time. And the disussion is not limited to the twenty-five of us. Anyone that searches our topic can start participating too.
Both technologies have different functions and features and I am excited to incorporate them both into my website. The Internet is a very social medium and I want my website to exemplify and take advantage of that. The more people that participate in a conversation, the more unique perspectives we will get. And since I'm not an expert on personal finance, I'm very interested in hearing what others have to say.
SOURCES
Atkinson, Cliff. The Backchannel: How Audiences Are Using Twitter and Social Media and Changing
Presentations Forever. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2010. Print. Pg 94.
Oreskovic, Alexei. "Twitter Snags over 100 Million Users, Eyes Money-making." Reuters.com. 15 Apr. 2010. Web. 05 May 2010. <http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63D46P20100415>.
Rettberg, Jill Walker. Blogging. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008. Print.
Wortham, Jenna. "After 10 Years of Blogs, the Future's Brighter Than Ever." Wired News. 17 Dec. 2007. Web. 05 May 2010. <http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/news/2007/12/blog_anniversary>.
