Friendly Friday: Organizing the Blog Roll

Wishing for a blog roll? Hoping to compile a list of blogs from friendly colleagues that you want to share with the world?

If you do, you know that it's always a work in progress. Sparking my action here, Amy Palko in Bye Bye Blogroll - Hello Links! explains how it quickly becomes a very long list on your blog page. You can organize them under one link where people can view and explore.

While you're at it, you can even provide a tiny blurb about each blog or website that you include in this link.

Check out my burgeoning Blog Roll.

Simple Subject Sunday: Links and Tags

Doesn't each writer hope that people find their blog interesting and helpful? I believe the answer is yes. Besides writing an interesting article, it helps to make the blog posting accessible through the reader's use of search engines and access to related articles as they read your blog posting.

One way to do that is through the use of links. Links related to other posts pointing the reader to the topic of interest. Since time is of the essence, links need to be accurate.

The link in a posting should take the reader to the exact posting the blogger wants them to access. When reading your posts, a reader should not have to wander through the desert to find your blog posts related to the search topic, because they will often give up....due to lack of time to focus on this effort.

I also discovered, through my own research, that blogs need to have layers of organization for ease of access. Links and appropriate tag clouds can represent a necessary equivalent of an online bibliography.

Opportunity to Comment: Activating Links

Power Law of Participation by Ross Mayfield
Attribution-NonCommercial License

Commenting on a blog post helps the reader/commentator and the blog author. The author of the blog always benefits from the feedback of their colleagues and other readers, while the commentator benefits by sharing their ideas and related links. Even though anyone can write an adequate blog, there are many tips that will boost the efficacy of a blog. You can make the process faster and the writing better. The same could be said for the commentator.

When you take the time to comment and add to the conversation, I think you should include related links, including those that are directed to similar postings of your own. I am not alone in this opinion. There are many blog postings that explain why it's important to add appropriate and active links when commenting. This is a typical point about commentators linking through there comments:

Many bloggers (myself included) believe that good comments should be rewarded with a link back to the commenter's site (if they so choose to include one). However, the way you go about commenting and including a link will clearly demonstrate whether you are there to contribute or merely to take.

David Wallace, of SearchRank.


When commenting and adding to the educational professional development conversation, I hope you will use the .html that will give you an active link here on this blog that refers to the blog or website you are quoting. Here's how to insert the url and name of the link you want to activate:




Why do I hope you will do this? I want to continue the conversation. If your link in your comment is not active, most people will not take the time to copy and paste your link. We all benefit from your investment of time to learn this little bit of code used in Blogger, because your links will be active. Readers will have an opportunity to learn more and continue the professional development conversation. That helps all of us improve our educational practice which directly improves the educational experience of students as well.

The caveat is that many other blogging platforms use a different snippet of code, but you can learn these also. The more you practice adding active links, the more effective you will become in adding value to each conversation. Isn't that one of the reasons why we collaborate in our Professional Learning Network?

Permalinks: Improve the Validity of Your Blog

Have you ever searched for a particular topic, found what seemed like a great resource, only to discover that the link is dead?

Finding dead links is a frustrating experience. There are ways to avoid that happening to your own blog postings. One way is to use the PERMALINK. A permanent link to your blog posting is made through the use of a tiny bit of code that can even a New Bee can cut and paste into their blog postings.

Permalinks stand as one of the more elusive bits of proper standardization in archiving that I will continue to develop. I believe Permalinks are as important as tags, and everyone who reads my work knows the extreme importance I place on tags and the display of tag clouds.

As per my usual course of learning a new skill, I always begin with the Help function of whatever software or web application I am using. Always remember, "Help is my Friend!" One of the first references made to permalinks was the blog post, On Permalinks and Paradigms, and I would recommend it to anyone learning to use Permalinks.

If you have had experiences with permalinks, would you share those experiences with us here in the comments?

Maybe It's Your Tags and Links! or lack thereof

A colleague on Classroom 2.0 mentioned that he was not getting any feedback, on his blog, when he started a conversation about international educational technology groups. Since many teachers have provided information about these groups, I thought I will help him add to his list.

Doesn't each writer hope that people find their blog interesting and helpful? I thought the answer was yes, so I was curious to discover why he wasn't receiving feedback on this blog posting. I began to investigate the situation so that I could learn from it. Learning from others is a common goal among teachers involved in professional development. Find an interesting question and learn about it.

What started out as a short bypass to help out a colleague, turned into another, excellent learning opportunity for me. I discovered that links need to be accurate, the link in a posting should take you to the exact posting the blogger wants you the reader to access. I also discovered that blogs need to have layers of organization for ease of access, and tag clouds can represent a necessary equivalent of an online bibliography.

At first glance, I looked at my colleague's CR2.0 discussion tags, and I selected a "lack of significant tags" thesis that may be keeping people from his blog post. I know that many of our international edtech friends watch our blogs, just as we watch theirs. I thought maybe his intended audience, international education technology advocates, didn't scope out any relevant tags. To figure out if this might be the case, I looked at the tags he used in his CR2.0 discussion.

The CR2.0 tags for his discussion, Non-US Ed Tech Organizations, were: ed, organizations, tim, blogging, tech, intended, consequences, holt. I believe that the tags: organizations, tech, and ed, were helpful and quite appropriate. The other tags seemed fine for people looking for my colleague's blogs, but didn't relate to the topic at hand, international organizations for educational technology. Therefore, I noted that adding the tags, international, educational, technology, provided in his CR2.0 discussion title might allow improved access to the relevant blog posting, therefore helping him get more comments relevant to his request for names of organizations.

Next, I went to my CR2.0 colleagues' blog link to find the posting he was referencing, so I could reference the tags he used there. The blog link provided did not take me to the relevant blog posting. The link given took me to the front page of his website/blog, so I had to click on it to get to his blog postings. That was alright because I felt confident that I would find the relevant blog posting soon.

After I clicked into his blog postings, I began to look through his current postings and the archives for a title that related to International Educational Technology Organizations. There were two postings that "kinda sorta" looked like a title that related to his CR2.0 discussion topic. I clicked on one of them and read it. This blog posting was not about international educational technology organizations, per se.

Since I always keep a time record for my professional development journal, I looked up to discover that I already spent an hour trying to find the relevant blog posting, so I stopped there. While I was happy to spend this time to help a colleague, it appears that I was not successful. I did not find his original blog, so I could not add to his database he was hoping to build.

While the intended consequence of my initial adventure did not occur, the unintended consequence was more valuable. I received an extremely important aha moment and discovered that some key organizational tools, such as tag clouds or titles with ALL relevant key tags, can make or break the viability of our blog posts. This is knowledge that any of us might use to enhance our own blogs.

Belatedly, I discovered that while my "lack of tags" thesis may be partially correct, the larger concern was appropriate access to the content of his blog. I found a table of contents in the archives, and so I had to click on Archives to access the list of postings. None of the blog postings that I could see mentioned the key words: international educational technology organizations. I looked around for some other way to easily refine my search, for instance a tag cloud for his blog postings. I didn't find one.

It seems that my colleagues' blog is set up to increase click statistics, but accessibility is a more critical concern because it brings people back to your blog. Quick access has special relevance for those bloggers who direct you to read a particular blog posting.

Why do we use links in our postings? I think we use links to improve ease of access to relevant data and keep the reader interested in the topic we are discussing.

In the end, my colleague gave me the opportunity to increase his Technorati rating and include an excellent topic for my own blog posting. BTW, I discovered that the missing tag was world. I did finally find the appropriate blog posting on developing a database for international educational technology organizations....I think;D

What started as a journey to provide a list of international educational technology organizations became a constructivist search for relevance. As a result, I learned some valuable lessons that I will use.