Due Friday March 27 at midnight:

Read Chapter 3 in the Huffington Post Guide to Blogging: “Getting Noticed.”

The discussion is divided into two parts: how to tell who’s reading your blog and how to attract more visitors. You’ve already read some of this chapter.

I want you to become acquainted with the range of tools for mechanically assessing community participation and creating community. Notice the epigraph about “attention.” Note too that the authors want to make things seem easy—by providing to-do lists, tips, devices, and so forth. It’s not that these tips are not good; they are. But if you then go to page 191 on the “Best of Huffpost Blogs,” you’ll see that it’s verbal style these authors applaud, and verbal style is elusive. The HuffPost authors do talk about “voice” in the next chapter (which you’ve read)—but advice is limited to blog often, write short, know your topic, and be spontaneous and conversational—very general pieces of advice. We might ask whether verbal style is really truly the key attention getter, relying on your self-examination and critical acumen as a reader and writer. Why is the visual element left untouched by the HuffPost?  

That said, we will be looking soon at verbal style on your blogs. And I will be asking you to work on gaining community through your blogrolls—that is, by becoming good commenters on an admired blog, you may then be able to “friend” this blogger and get him or her to begin reading and linking to (citing) your stuff. So you’ll need to find some amateur blogs to add to your blogrolls, as the high end ones that you legitimately like are less likely to bite. Still, you can learn much from the high end bloggers.

For Friday midnight, please do some planning outloud. Read the chapter. Choose 3 or 4 strategies for attracting more visitors—those you’d actually be willing to try—and say why these strategies are within reach.

Due Tuesday March 31:

Post once or twice to your own blog.

Comment on your new group-mates blogs. Enter the Burkean Parlor.

Add some blogs to your blogroll--aiming for “amateur” (which may not be the right word).

Try locating on your new group’s blogs one or more “best posts” (see grading rubric—this is something you’ll need to be doing before the end of the semester). Come prepared with an analysis: Why is this a “good post.” The idea is to locate attention devices and verbal or visual style and other features that might make a given post stand out in the economies of attention.