POST 2: Thinking about blogs

In week 4 and 5, we continued learning knowledge about social networking. As we go further, I gained more and more in this field.

In week 4, we learned more about social media, and also learned the concept of blogosphere and some other things related to it. Further more, we gained knowledge about information sharing and cases for social marketing-a new concept for me. In week 5, we learned 4 aspects of social multimedia computing: interaction and computing, its applications, research issues about it, and some key challenges.

Before taking this course, I've already known something about blogs. But I've never tried to write one until our teacher Professor Chan asked us to. After these weeks, I've experienced how to post my view on a blog and share with my classmates and I also want to know more about it. As I wished, the lecture of week 4 taught me some knowledge about blog and some other social media. Nowadays, social networks and blogs are the most popular activities online, even including beating personal emails. We can know from Wikipedia that a blog is a personal journal published on the WWW. Blogs are usually the work of a single individual ( occasionally of a small group), and often are themed on a single subject. Even some popular brands and commercial sites also publish blogs written by their employees to provide more information about their products and services. 

With more and more people felt fascinate in writing blogs, I can't help thinking what can we benefit from this activity. After doing some research and ask many friends this question, I have known some and now I want to share with you.

There are 10 benefits we can gain from writing blogs:

Being critical of ideas. Blogging forces an opinion on issues, so we can  make more effort to figure out what is fact, opinion, well researched, worth the cyberspace it's written on, or not.

Making sense of experiences. Writing is a great way to figure out what worked, what didn’t work, and why. Through trying to pass on useful stuff, it becomes even more useful for me.

Getting feedback. We can get feedback from comments, emails and site stats. It’s a wonderful way to connect with a wider community and share knowledge.

Learning. Every post requires some research and fact checking, so we can learn big and little things all the time.

Being accountable. If we blog about something we feel absolutely accountable for it. Accountability is a great way of making changes and learning about oneself.

Being reflective. Reflection is a great way of learning: reinforcing positive things, or changing negative ones, and figuring out which is which. 30 minutes or so each day to think about something that is relevant to performance and productivity is a wonderful habit.

Connecting with like minded people. It’s true that birds of a feather flock together, and those with the same interests find ways of getting in touch, either directly or by being introduced. Blogging is a wonderful way of connecting with people who are working on similar issues or care about similar things.

Refining ideas and practice. I often come back to themes over and over again, refining my ideas all the time. Writing, experience, getting new information and trying different things all get added into the refinement process.

Listening. we may listen to things more carefully, particularly if we want to write about them. It’s amazing how much more active we have to be in getting things correct, and it’s a great discipline.

It’s satisfying. Whatever else is going on at work or at home, Getting to Excellent gets more readers and more interesting all the time, which is a tremendous source of satisfaction. Which I suppose is another way of saying I enjoy it.

So write your blog and enjoy your life!