Media yanR

Well here it is. My last blog post for the unit. First of all I would like to say that I am finally glad this blog is over. For the past fifteen weeks I’ve been struggling to bring myself to write this every week. I just don’t think that blogging is really for me. Typing about myself and what I have been doing because it was an assessment was a hard thing to do. I needed to try and find my own writing style and make it interesting so that people would want to read my blog. I think that it would be a hard task to write about something of my choice and make it interesting, let alone write about something that I was required to write about.

That being said this blog has been a big learning experience for me. I am not going to say that I will never blog again, but it might be awhile before I get back onto the blogging scene. One thing I do know is that when I blog again I have picked up many different skills in which to make it more interesting and accessible for the reader. If you could see a timeline of how my blog progressed over the course of the semester you would see a variety of changes. From the layout, to the content and even changes in my style. The best example of change was my template that I started using after many weeks of having this blog. I was looking at other people’s blogs and seeing that they had really cool backgrounds and mine was just a simple blogger background. So I eventually changed it in to what it is now, which looks much nicer. I also played around with the little tabs that my blog could have such as links and RSS etc.

Now I will get onto the big topic of traffic or rather I should say a lack of traffic generated from my blog. The first thing that I did when I started my blog was got a list of everyone in the class and linked to them on my blog roll. At the start I was going to keep up to date with everyone and read what they were doing. I also got myself an RSS reader and kept up to date with some other blogs that I enjoyed. However I found myself visiting everyone’s blog less and less until I finally had about three on my reader which I read but rarely visited the others. This was because these three people managed to make their blogs good and interesting while talking about the unit. Unfortunately this meant that the other people’s blogs just got shunned to the side. Now if I use this theory in relation to my blog I think the same thing would apply. There are many links of my in peoples blog roll but unfortunately I did not know how to set up any thing to check traffic (ill get more into this later). As for followers I had a whole two of them, which turned out to be two guys from my tutorial. When I linked into people on my blog roll I automatically assumed that it meant I was becoming a follower but apparently you have to do this another way. That being known know I’m actually happy that I even have two followers.

When sitting down to write this final blog post I was unsure what to do about traffic. I had no way to know just how much traffic that my blog was getting. I seen a class member post up on moodle that they were having the same problem as me and the post eventually got an answer. I was still unsure of how I was meant to talk about this so I looked at the class member’s blog and seen how they tackled the answer. I then looked it up on online and found that in order to monitor traffic you needed to set up a counter or use some software such as Google analytics to keep a record of how often your blog is visited. This is very important because if you can keep track of how many people are coming to your blog you can keep it going the same or change it around to suit more people. Google analytics also keeps track of how people interact with your blog, such as which links they click on and how they get there. This could also be very useful data because you can see what people like and do not like. Knowing where people link off to from your blog can give you better ideas of content to put on there. That way you could increase traffic by making it more specific to their interests. The best way to increase traffic is by doing little things like this. Looking at how they interact with the blog, looking at their interests and disinterests, and trying to provide content for them and when that isn’t possible to link them to the content they want. I have found that the best thing about network media is that you don’t always need to be the guy who knows everything. When you don’t quite understand something or don’t know much about on a particular topic you can just link off to somewhere that does. That way you can keep your readers happy and still provide them with the information that they want.

In my blog roll I only had blogs of people that were in my class. I subscribed to many other blogs using my newsreader but did not put them on my blog roll. If any outside people looked in on my blog they would be linked to people who were talking about the same things week in and week out that I was. Also if any one from another tute looked at my blog they would be linked to all the people in my tute. I also directed traffic to the uni home page and just random sites that had to do with the information we were learning about. For example when I started I directed people to a BlogSpot template site.

If I was to do this blog again I think that I would change a lot of things. First of all I would probably post more regularly about any thing. Just to try and keep it interesting to a wide variety of people. I got stuck in the habit of writing the required one post a week about lecture material or assignments that I was working on at the time. I would also do more in the area of setting up a traffic counter and putting more interesting links in my blog. Overall I think that through doing this blog I learnt a lot about network media practices. In terms of how to monitor traffic, linking to other people and how to make a good blog. I think that if I started a blog about a topic I enjoy I would be able to make an interesting informative blog and who knows, I might even make some money off it one day.

Three Nominated Blog Posts

Week 1, A Bit of Content
http://mediayanr.blogspot.com/2010/02/bit-of-content.html

Week 10, Pimping The Ol’ City
http://mediayanr.blogspot.com/2010/04/week-10-pimping-ol-city.html

Week 12, The Business End
http://mediayanr.blogspot.com/2010/04/week-12-business-end.html

Labels: metablog , week 15