Thing 4

UPDATE
Getting feedback on your posts is ultimately what a blog is about. Sharing information and opinions in an open forum can be thought provoking and lead to in depth discovery. Through the blogging process the blogger's personality and values emerges. Blogs provide a communication tool valuable in today's world as we all have some many activities including school and work. Building an online community of like minded individuals or even of opposing views is a result and asynchronous communication is becoming the way to stay in touch.

Cool Cat Teacher makes a good point of sharing some about yourself in each comment. It's important for others to know who is making the post and also adds to the community building when bloggers do so. Problogger also adds that asking questions may increase the number of viewers who comment on your blog. If only ten percent of the viewers comment you can also roughly gauge the amount of hits to your blog. I think both of these are important in engaging viewers to comment and build a community. When we can make connections by posting a bit of ourselves in our comments then we can sustain the blogging community of which we are a part.

I commented on the following blogs for this class: Hilary, Angela, Jamie, Mr. P, and Stephen. I started following them the first week of class as part of this Thing. I like that feature because I can check on updates without having to go to each individual website and can see the highlights and choose the ones of interest to me. I chose these because I liked a particular design or idea each of them used. The other two blogs were TeacherPop and a country music blog I found on Technorati's directory. I posted on TeacherPop as an assignment and the country music blog for my interest in music and singing, especially country.

Mainly I commented on the Web 2.0 tools each of my classmates used and responded to the posts. I enjoyed getting to know them better and using new ideas or tools I hadn't used.