On Blogging and Social Media

A few months back I wrote an article about creating your broadcast network to feed information to your PLN. In the article I included a section on a tool called Slinkset which I used to create my Technogogy news portal, which I use to share information and links to informative articles about education, technology and ELT.


Recently, I have discovered a new feature of Slinkset that automatically creates a widget that other blog or website managers can add to their site to aggregate and share the content of your portal.


I think this is a great feature and one that can really extend the reach of the information you are sharing beyond your immediate network.

The widget is very easy to install. You just need to direct web managers or bloggers to the relevant link on your portal. Here's the link to mine: http://technogogy.slinkset.com/widgets

On the widget page they will see what the widget looks like and and a simple piece of code that they can copy and paste into the side bar of their blog or the html of their site.

The links in the widget go directly to the source, in my case the articles I’m recommending, so you aren’t ‘stealing’ anyone’s traffic and the links are updated whenever you up date the links in your portal.

By all means take the code to my widget and try it out if you have a network that is interested in education, technology and ELT, or create your own Slinkset portal. It’s very simple to do and once you have it set up it takes about 2 mins to add a link to each article as you find it.

How about you?

• What tools do you use to share knowledge?
• Do you keep and share bookmarks?

The Internet has revolutionised the way and amount of information that we can publish and share and being able to contribute your knowledge to the growth and development of others in your profession can be very rewarding, but once you’ve put your information out there, it’s wise to keep track of what happens to it and who is using it.

Here are some tools to protect your copyright

So why is it so important to track where your content is going?

• It’s a much misunderstood and largely false assumption that your content, once published on a free blog or website, belongs to everyone and anyone. This simply isn’t true. If you publish something on your site, then it belongs to you and nobody else, unless you say so.
• Unfortunately, despite the above fact, it is still pretty easy for anyone to take what you produce. If that is someone copying your article to use with students or to share with other people in your profession that may well be fine with you, especially if they acknowledge you as the source and provide a link back to your site, but that isn’t always the case.
• There are companies that set up thousands of websites and just copy in content from other sites in an effort to generate money through advertising. They never actually produce their own content, just rip off other people’s and in many cases without any links back or credit.
• There are also those who set up sites and just copy content they find interesting. This could be well intentioned and they may be crediting you as the source, but if they are doing it on a regular basis this could well start to have a negative impact on your own site.
  

So what harm can it do?

• Well firstly, if someone is viewing your work on another site, then they aren’t visiting your site, so they are reducing your site traffic. If you rely on visitor numbers and page impressions to get funding, then this can start to endanger your site.
• There is also the risk that search engines like Google who try to spot sites that are copying content in multiple places blacklist your site as one of the copies.
• If you ever want to make money from your site (and why shouldn’t you? We all need to eat) by either selling the content for republication or selling the whole site etc whoever pays for it will want to know that what they are getting is original and unique.

• How do you protect your copyright?
• Do you track where your content is going?
• Are you bothered if someone copies your content?

One the most important KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that the success of a website or blog can be judged upon is the time a visitor spends on your site. The longer the time spent on your site the more interested and engaged the visitor is with your content.


You can find out how sticky your site is using GoogleAnalytics. On the 'Dashboard' you should be able to find a section on 'Site usage' and this will give you the average time that each user spends on your site.


If you click on the text it will take you to an average for each day.

Deciding what a 'good' average time on site is will be difficult as it really depends on the type of site you have, but time on site is definitely important and you should try to improve it. As you can see the average time on site over the last month for my Daily English Activities blog has been around two and a half minutes, which I'm reasonably happy with.

‘Sticky’ content is one tools that bloggers and webmasters use to keep people on their site for longer. This usually takes the form of some kind of rich media like an interactive game, video or some form a of widget.

Many blogging platforms and web based services offer a range of widgets that you can add to your site or the side column of your blog to encourage users to stay around on the site for longer. They often look very nice and add a sense of dynamism to your site especially if your site is very text driven BUT..

• This kind of content should be used with care. Before you decide on whether to add this kind of rich content think carefully about your audience and what they come to your site for. Does the content or widget really enhance what you are offering on the site or does it just slow the site down and discourage your users from visiting again?
• I spend a lot of time looking round at various sites and blogs and what I’m really looking for is the main content. I’m much less interested in ‘edges’ of the page. What I want is for the page to load quickly so that I can get the information I’m looking for.
• The kind of ‘sticky’ or rich content that is useful, is usually materials that can be embedded into the actual main page and is relevant to what you are writing about. This could be a video tutorial, an interactive widget, a slide show, or an example of some materials or useful downloadable document. This kind of content can really enhance what you are offering on the site and is more likely to encourage users to return for more.
  

• Does it really enhance what I’m offering?
  

• Do you use sticky content?
• What kind of content keeps users on your site longer?
• How do you try to improve the amount of time users spend on your site?

• How to track your site
• Compare your site using benchmarking