With Posterous we’ve basically been blogging in three dimensions, which is a lot, but there is more!
1. The narrative dimension
The first dimension is surely your text, pasted from your word processor, which when written well offers a path through your thought and expression. Like all good narratives, the story that you tell is enriched when it appears as a dialogue with your sources and your audience.
To this we bloggers add dimension by our giving and receiving of comments. When done well, these comments offer support, advice, encouragement and thereby give our narratives an affirmative, enriching glow. This is the glow of community, which as Darcy Norman illustrates above is something I look for and find by looking for smart people and engaging in a variety of conversations so I might reach them.
To add community to your posts and websites, give comments and solicit the comments of others, and while you are at it be shameless about it: look for and engage those who want to communicate and connect. Figure out what they are talking about and figure out what you might add to it and add to it.
3. Disintermediation and the Infinite Web
We extend our original text considerably when we add images, links, and videos, etc., which tantalize our visitors with promises of well-recommended paths out into the infinite web — those communities upon communities extending our reach sometimes far beyond the imaginable.
To reach for the infinite, add lots of links. And set up each link to open up in a new window so your reader will not leave and forget you.
Images can help you grasp concepts and methods otherwise presented in words. Those old, highly experienced newspaper editors photographed next to a young blogger are posed in attitudes of wonder, skepticism, and amazement, and they have good reason: while they have risen slowly up the ranks, this young political blogger reaches millions directly through her blog. That image gets at something no words likely do so well.
For example, download Jing, a cost-free application you can install in a minute, and learn how to screenshots and movies of your computer screen and publish to the web.
With this technology, in just minutes you can make video presentations that just a few years ago would have involved cumbersome, expensive, and time-consuming film technologies. That’s simply amazing. Do it!
4. Organize your website using Categories
Just about any topic worth looking at has many sides to it, and in your website design you’ll want to make it easy for your visitors to figure out what you are doing. Posts are arranged in a stack, with one piled onto another, but those exploring your topic may well want to explore more complex relationships. One way to do this is to organize your posts in chronologies and offer your visitors an easy way to find and navigate them.
The Categories solution involves identifying your interest in a limited number of terms, assigning each post to one of them, and implementing a function that allows visitors to see your terms, select among them, then selection among the posts associated with each term, or Category.
Categories reflect your thinking about how best to organize dozens of objects in a limited number of terms: the names you give them are high-level generalizations. In the little illustration to the right you see two of my current categories, “web work” and “advice”, because I distinguish between methods and advice, how to work with the web and how better to think about it. You might best determine your categories by creating a mind map of your topic and finding keywords to identify the 3-4 main sections or divisions — keywords that will become your category names.
To see how this works, click any of the categories in the right-hand column.
Implementing categories involves logging on to your group’s WordPress blog as an administrator, on the “Dashboard” creating a list of Categories, and when posting, putting a check in the box in the category you want to associate with your post.
In addition, you will need to set up your web page itself to display the Categories, which you do by opening up the “Widgets” panel in the “Appearances” section and dragging the “Categories” widget — a widget is a piece of code that you get to manipulate by simply dragging and dropping a box with the name of it — to the “Primary Aside” column, which is the place in the template that will appear as a column, most often on the right-hand side (but could be anywhere). This is easier to understand by watching a demonstration, so I’ve made a short video.
For more about Categories, you might visit one or more of the links below
Remarkablogger explains the general difference between categories and tags: categories let everybody know right up front how you’ve organized your blog (tags are far more promiscuous).
Web site in a weekend says you profit from defining only 3-7 categories and using them “to more effectively focus your writing.
Lorelle explains how to design your blog to better convey its purpose.
Problogger offered the short version of all of this in 2007.
5. Tell us who you are and address your reader
The “address the visitor” dimension is an important one, because with any human or machine encounter we want to know who we are talking to and what they think they are about; such contextual information is vital to putting communication into perspective.
You might start off by explaining that you are students working on a project for school, outline briefly your course of study and career goals, and then add some personal dimensions that will help your reader know and appreciate your being human.
Professional blogs do this all the time, as you will see by visiting one or more of the examples below.
Prakky’s Blog offers a provocative list of short Twitter bios that are to the point and fun!
Guy Kawasaki is straight-forward, humble, and a wonderful role model for business students.
Mahalo and Persona Branding Blog offer models for when you’ve accomplished something and are ready for the big time — just so you see where you might being going with this and why it makes sense to start now: you’ll be writing such things for much of the rest of your professional life!
6. Introduce your blog and what you are doing with it
Create a Page (not a post, a page) that explains what your blog is about, including how your group has approached your topic, organized your authoring and posts, and where you think you will be going with it. For models, you might look at the self-presentation page of these professional websites.
7. Make every author an Author, so we know who is talking
Create additional author accounts so that when each of you adds a post we visitors can see who is doing the writing. Don’t be afraid to link to your own individual web sites, either: your visitors need to know who is speaking so they might better evaluate your arguments.
Multi-Dimensional WordPress
With Posterous we’ve basically been blogging in three dimensions, which is a lot, but there is more!
1. The narrative dimension
The first dimension is surely your text, pasted from your word processor, which when written well offers a path through your thought and expression. Like all good narratives, the story that you tell is enriched when it appears as a dialogue with your sources and your audience.
To add dimension to your story, find and engage relevant conversations in your field (Searching, Target Language & Professional Community), report on what they have to say (Reporting), and use “They Say, I Say” rhetoric (They Say / I Say).
2. The community dimension
To this we bloggers add dimension by our giving and receiving of comments. When done well, these comments offer support, advice, encouragement and thereby give our narratives an affirmative, enriching glow. This is the glow of community, which as Darcy Norman illustrates above is something I look for and find by looking for smart people and engaging in a variety of conversations so I might reach them.
To add community to your posts and websites, give comments and solicit the comments of others, and while you are at it be shameless about it: look for and engage those who want to communicate and connect. Figure out what they are talking about and figure out what you might add to it and add to it.
3. Disintermediation and the Infinite Web
We extend our original text considerably when we add images, links, and videos, etc., which tantalize our visitors with promises of well-recommended paths out into the infinite web — those communities upon communities extending our reach sometimes far beyond the imaginable.
To reach for the infinite, add lots of links. And set up each link to open up in a new window so your reader will not leave and forget you.
Images can help you grasp concepts and methods otherwise presented in words. Those old, highly experienced newspaper editors photographed next to a young blogger are posed in attitudes of wonder, skepticism, and amazement, and they have good reason: while they have risen slowly up the ranks, this young political blogger reaches millions directly through her blog. That image gets at something no words likely do so well.
For example, download Jing, a cost-free application you can install in a minute, and learn how to screenshots and movies of your computer screen and publish to the web.
With this technology, in just minutes you can make video presentations that just a few years ago would have involved cumbersome, expensive, and time-consuming film technologies. That’s simply amazing. Do it!
4. Organize your website using Categories
Just about any topic worth looking at has many sides to it, and in your website design you’ll want to make it easy for your visitors to figure out what you are doing. Posts are arranged in a stack, with one piled onto another, but those exploring your topic may well want to explore more complex relationships. One way to do this is to organize your posts in chronologies and offer your visitors an easy way to find and navigate them.
The Categories solution involves identifying your interest in a limited number of terms, assigning each post to one of them, and implementing a function that allows visitors to see your terms, select among them, then selection among the posts associated with each term, or Category.
To see how this works, click any of the categories in the right-hand column.
Implementing categories involves logging on to your group’s WordPress blog as an administrator, on the “Dashboard” creating a list of Categories, and when posting, putting a check in the box in the category you want to associate with your post.
For more about Categories, you might visit one or more of the links below
5. Tell us who you are and address your reader
The “address the visitor” dimension is an important one, because with any human or machine encounter we want to know who we are talking to and what they think they are about; such contextual information is vital to putting communication into perspective.
You might start off by explaining that you are students working on a project for school, outline briefly your course of study and career goals, and then add some personal dimensions that will help your reader know and appreciate your being human.
Professional blogs do this all the time, as you will see by visiting one or more of the examples below.
6. Introduce your blog and what you are doing with it
Create a Page (not a post, a page) that explains what your blog is about, including how your group has approached your topic, organized your authoring and posts, and where you think you will be going with it. For models, you might look at the self-presentation page of these professional websites.
7. Make every author an Author, so we know who is talking
Create additional author accounts so that when each of you adds a post we visitors can see who is doing the writing. Don’t be afraid to link to your own individual web sites, either: your visitors need to know who is speaking so they might better evaluate your arguments.