In my last post, I talked about blogs and social networking. I would like to continue discussing about the opportunity of these technologies and discuss also the opportunities in website publishing.
Blogging or Online Journals
Blogging is not just for ranting or fielding your opinion. For me, it can be a person's online mindmap (although not graphical in form). Blogging allows one person to give a lesson, a point of view, or update. The real beauty of blogging is that you do not need to learn a lot of codes in order for your ideas to be made available in the Net. For example, this post will soon be available via Google Search because this will be indexed by Google and other search engines.
Blogging also allows you to start the next idea, social networking, because your audience (if you set it up) can contact you by writing you an email or subscribing to your blog. RSS, or Rapid Site Syndication, allows you to push information without getting personal information from your audience. (That is why blogging is an effective marketing tool as well.). Blogging, when used with other available (free!) online services, can be a creative and effective two(!)-way communication tool between you and your subscribers or parters in your ideas.
Social Networking
Social networking may actually have been a redundant term had the Internet not been discovered. Networking, as far as I know, originated from the social sciences, not from computing. Network is another term for relationship (as far as I know). Anyways, social networking is simply making your identity available forr contact with people of mutual interest.
While social networking started with Friendster's advertised goal of making contact with friends and personal relationships, the idea blossomed to professional collaboration, as emphasized by social networking sites as Linked-In.com. What exactly can this do for you?
Social networking allows you to advertise your specialization and your ideas and stay in contact with professional networks so that you can grow professionally. You can also learn new techniques and trends in social networks. It can also allow you to connect and collaborate in light of geographical and temporal differences. Lastly (in my limited experience, of course), social networks allow you to easily get recommendation with people that you may want to be in contact with but you yourself cannot do so simply because you do not know the someone personally.
Social networking should not be seen as a waste of time, but an opportunity that should be properly used for both your and your organization's goal.
Website Publishing
Ten years ago, website publishing is reserved for the people who have the money and the know-how to publish their ideas. Before blogs were made available, website publishing was viewed as a one-way street.
Enter free websites given by internet service providers, such as AOL, MSN, EarthLink and SBC Global. Followed by educational institutions that gave online storage to their instructors. Website publishing became easier to produce than before.
Nowadays, the line of demarcation between website publishing and blogging is blurred. After all, blogs are websites. Perhaps one distinguishing characteristic is their perceived purposes.
Blogs are still perceived to be opinion-based and -oriented, while websites are (at least, theoretically) information- or fact-based online content. Whether the content is reliable or not, however, is another matter.
Websites have a significant flexibility in their content, while blogs have limitations on the layout and the content--particularly due to the provider's terms. Nonetheless, weblogs or online journals are fast keeping up with the demands of the bloggers to be able to communicate content in very creative ways.
Your blogs or personal websites can be redirected to your own domains (for as low as USD 4 per month!) so that your visitors need not to remember your "http://www.domain.net/something/something-again/your-username/blog-folder/index.html". For example, using Google Sites' service, I created an online newsletter, and had our IT unit redirect a folder to that website.
These online opportunities, when used with each other and other available services, can significantly alter the way you implement training, and significantly improve the effectiveness of your training and teaching sessions.
Look out for Part 4, when I discuss the rest of the opportunities.
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