Tuesday, June 20, 2006

When posting citizen's community news

Shelina is right "…depending on… subject matter of your blog."
ON THE WEB... Yesterday Shelina had some good words in her comments on June 3rd's post "Writing good posts is not hard".

Thanks Shelina
She said, "These are great ideas. I think these guidelines are too much work though, depending on the subject matter of your blog. A blog made just to inform friends of your goings on doesn't have to be so time consuming, and friends should forgive your errors."

'Course you're right Shelina
Personal blogs don't need all that stuff. Personal blogs are just that—personal, friendly, and fun.

It's when one gets into citizen or community blogs then it becomes more important. Then blogs become a bit closer to journalism blogs.

Reporting blogs by reporters, editors, even publishers are a basic blog type. And these types of blogs are really exploding. Then there are topical blogs, science blogs, technical, and on and on.

CAT, BOSS, and VIRAL
In "Double minded blogging" this blogger refers to a free e-book by Seth Godin in which Seth defines three basic types of blogs..
CAT BLOGS are blogs for and by and about the person blogging. A cat blog is about your cat and your dating travails and your boss and whatever you feel like sharing in your public diary....

BOSS BLOGS are blogs used to communicate to a defined circle of people....

The third kind of blog is the kind most people imagine when they talk about blogs. These are blogs like instapundit and Scoblelizer and Joi Ito’s. Some of these blogs are for individuals (call them citizen journalists or op-ed pages) and others are for organizations trying to share their ideas and agendas. These are the blogs that are changing the face of marketing, journalism and the spread of ideas. I want to call these VIRAL BLOGS....
5 basic blogs
Librari*s & 'Blogs' "How Blogs are moving into the Library World" gets it up to five basic blogs.
As different people blog for different reasons, they also create different types of blogs. The type of blog they create will depend on whether they are blogging for business or pleasure, to inform a specific group on a particular topic, or to talk about what they had for breakfast. Different types of blogs are aimed at different audiences, or different parts of an audience's interest.
That's personal (CAT), news, campaign, tech (VIRAL), and organizational (BOSS).

So maybe 3 basic blog types? Maybe 5? Whatever.

When posting citizen's community news
Since your blogs are often part of citizen or community journalism, use some of these ideas when your posts have items community news.
This is my goal in "Writing good posts…" It was directed to personal bloggers who occasionally do community news on such sites like YourHub.com, NorthwestVoice.com, or Delta News Web.

Use "Great ideas"
• Be direct
• Write good headlines
• Keep sentences, paragraphs short and simple
• Use bulleted points, subheads, bold text and italics
• Don't take yourself too seriously and never lose your sense of humor

Use some of these, as Shelina said, "great ideas" when you write community news blog items.

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