Why Blog?

Why Blog?

Six Useful Reason for Having a Blog

Blogs can create communites of interest

Having a place to publish to your chosen target audience encourages writing and communication skills

Blogs can be a useful tool to support personal development. this can be sespecially useful for students and many universities are exploring ways of developing this aspect of blogging. The University of Warwick comments that:

Warwick, like all UK universities, is required to show ways in which it is working to support its students in their personal development planning (PDP).  Tools which support reflection and discussion as blogs can be a useful part of this.

Work & Careers: Keeping a blog may be useful when job-hunting time comes around.  Blogs that contain reflective material about a course or project or piece of work may be interesting to prospective employers

Research & Professional Research Groups. Blogs aren't just for personal writing.  We expect that they will be useful for research groups wanting to keep a record of their work, for students doing project work on their courses, and for many other purposes we haven't thought of yet.

Everyone who wants a web presence is able to have one, regardless of technical expertise.

See University of Warwick: What would I use a Blog for

Make your Own Way in the Virtual World: Weaning Yourself off Facebook etc & Make some income

It is surprising how swiftly there has been a rise in popularity of social networking sites particularly amongst 'creative' and media type students. Blogging as a form of software has made it easy, cheap and accessible for anybody with a reasonable internet connection to publish what they want to.

Social Networking sites are parasitic and largely rely upon others people's lack of coming to terms with very simple technology. Learning to blog is a lot easier than driving a car!

Social networking sites have their cake and eat it until they become bloated. All they do is provide an easy environment rather like blogs and then use it to push advertising. Facebook has been the least subtle of these companies and towards the end of 2007 tried to impose an advertising technology called Beacon. so many users complained that Facebook had to change its policy rapidly. Media institutions such as MySpace  owned byRupert Murdoch who owns /controls a large amount of the world's Media such as Sky are doing very well out of YOUR work.

These sites rely upon User Generated Content.  This means that My Space for example doesn't need to invest in programmes or commision programmes users do all that work happily. Unlike Sky TV which has to invest in programming and pay sports organisations and film companies for the content the users of social networking sites are providing all the content for nothing. The company just has to pay for the servers and a few administrators and software people.

One advantage of developing your own blog is that you can use it to place advertising on. The income is unlikely to be huge but it can at least contribute to your communications bill which in the UK averages about £92 per month for a typical family. another thing is that companies like Google will automatically send adverts to your blog which relate to the content of the individual postings as well. so there is some level of control about the adverts. If your blog or certain parts of it become popular you might gain a larger income.

It's all pretty easy really. Why let companies like Facebook make the money when you can?

Facebook

Discussion and links on the general development of facebook and social networking can be found on earlier postings:

Facebook and Social Networking

Facebook and its neoconservative (extreme rightwing) ownership

: 11 Sep 2008 14:06 |  Tags: Blogging And PDP Blogs And Writing Skills Why Blog |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem