Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004 – The author believed that blogs are a passe with the advent of new Web 2.0 tools, at least the personal ones.

Wither Blogging? Not Yet, But Perhaps Soon - The author felt that blogs have fallen out of favour as people have shorter attention span.

Is Blogging Dead - the author says the blogging is very much alive and the best blogs are the ones that are “social”

Is Blogging Dead – the author felt that bloggers and businesses should keep on blogging to maintain their online presence

Blogs are Dead; Long Live the Blog – the author believed that blogs are reinventing themselves to be personal portals

Blogging is Dead Again – the author suggested that blogs and other social networking platform serves different purposes; blogs will continue to stay as they provide valuable longer content

Questions for Educators
Blogging has been around since 2004.  Since then, many blogs have been created and many have died.   What do you think are the attributes of blogs that are successful?  If you were to start a blog today, what type of blog would it be?

http://blog.2createawebsite.com/2008/02/18/how-i-doubled-my-blog-traffic-in-2-months/

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/12/07/11-tips-to-increase-page-views-stats-on-your-blog/

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/06/how_to_get_traf.html

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/21-tactics-to-increase-blog-traffic

Common Ideas

• Choose a good topic for your blog
• Post regularly and frequently
• Have quality content
• Use rich media
• Give out freebies
• Craft your blog post titles carefully
• Link to your other (related) posts
• Use tags
• Interact with your readers through their comments
• Invite guest bloggers

Widgets may include
(1) Pure text (e.g. “About Me”)
(2) Tags/Tag cloud
(3) Categories
(4) List of links (also known as blogroll)
(5) Calendar
(6) Archives
(7) Search box
And many more…

Tags and categories are different ways to organise your blog contents. 

Tags
Tags allow keyword search within your blog and the WordPress community at large.  Tagging is a broad Web 2.0 concept that cut across many Web 2.0 applications.  The idea is to leave the organising of the large multitude of user-generated  contents to the Web 2.0 community themselves.  User-based classification by tagging is also known as folksonomy.

Tag Cloud
This is essentially a list of tags used that appear on Web 2.0 websites.  Often times, the more commonly the tag is used, the larger the font appears hence indicating its popularity.

Categories
Categories are used in WordPress to set the framework of the blog,  such as to divide topics into sub-topics.  Hierarchy can apply to categories e.g.  under the category of  “Camera”,  one can include sub-categories of  “SLR Camera”, “Lightweight Camera” and “Camera Phone”.

Your choice of themes may depend on:
(1) Colour
(2) Number of columns
(3) Degree of customisation
(4) Desired “feel”
(5) Function and other specific requirements

Note:
(1) Media can include images, videos, audios etc.
(2) Basically, there are two ways to upload – from your computer or from the web (either by URL or by an “embed” code found in many Web 2.0 media sharing websites such as Flickr and Youtube).
(3) Once uploaded, you can use a media repeatedly from your Media Library
(4) A free WordPress account allow 3GB of space.  If you need more space, you will need to upgrade to a paid account.  Another alternative is to upload to another website e.g. Flickr for images, Youtube for videos etc and copy the URL over to WordPress.

How you use the tool is more important than the tool itself. Here are some guiding questions before you decide what type of blog to set up.

(1) Why do I want to set up a blog? (i.e. purpose of the blog)

(2) Who would read the blog? (i.e. the primary audience)

(3) When will I find time to update the blog? (Blogs often “die” because they do not get updated)

(4) What type of posts do I want to put up?

(5) How do I want to make my blog interesting? (Questions 4 and 5 define your blogging style)