What’s the point of blogging?

• A portfolio of work
• A two-way method of communication – a conversation
• Comments - allowing you to gain the views and experiences of other people
  Good practice in communicating with the outside world
• An 'active' medium
• A brand-building exercise
• Allows you to demonstrate your expertise and prove your credibility
• Regular updated, attracting visitors and drawing attention to your work
• Providing up-to-date news to your audience
• A thinking ground for ideas
• A space for 'first drafts' and subsequent versions of your work and words
• The storage of posts and, therefore, your history and experiences
• Ability to integrate multimedia – video, audio, images, podcasts, vodcasts, slideshows – and widgets
• An opportunity to write brilliant headlines
• Whatever you want it to be
  

Writing and presenting information for web

• Web users do not sit reading web pages. They scan them
• Therefore, web pages have to employ scannable text
• If people don't like what they see, they bounce right out
• Users often read web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html
• On an average visit, users read half the information only on those pages with 111 words or less (Harald Weinreich, Hartmut Obendorf, Eelco Herder, and Matthias Mayer: "Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use," in the ACM Transactions on the Web, vol. 2, no. 1 (February 2008), article #5)
• The first two paragraphs are very important and need to be attention grabbing
  one idea per paragraph
• Highlighted keywords (hypertext links, typeface variations and colour)
• meaningful sub-headings that provide information that will lead people to read on
  bulleted lists
• the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
• half the word count (or less) than conventional writing – 200-400 words a page/blog entry?
• use of blog summaries with link to full content
• credibility is extremely important for web users
• use of high-quality graphics, video, audio coupled with good writing and the use of outbound links
• no "marketese", which is akin to spam. Regular users of the web – the web literate - have been raised on free content, they do not want to be sold anything. Don't give people a reason to bounce straight out of your site