Over the course of the last three months I have learned a great deal about web2.0 and the online world. Of course I knew about blogs, but I never really thought of having one myself. I always thought of bloggers as people sitting at their computers and whining about their days online. The whole thing seemed pointless and annoying. However, after learning about metrics and the importance of having a web presence my point of view has changed drastically.
From many of my instructors I had heard about the importance of personal branding and the importance of a web presence. I always took this to mean having a professional profile online through something like LinkedIn, or at least having a clean Facebook profile. While some had mentioned a having a blog I thought it was more important for aspiring writers than for someone like me who longs to sit all day long combing through unfinished manuscripts in quiet. The importance of a web presence really didn’t hit me until I became involved with On the Danforth Magazine and was asked to create a web strategy for the magazine with a group of my peers for an assignment.
During our first group meeting my team and I had to come up with a reason why we should have a web component to the print version of the magazine. For those who don’t know, On the Danforth is a free magazine published by the students of Centennial College. One of the major challenges that the magazine faces is that each issue is produced by a different group of students, and because it is a free magazine we do not get any feedback from our readers through circulation reports. It was with this realization that the web component became so important; we need feedback to make the magazine better with each issue.
The web is teeming with information and every day millions of people go online and post their opinions through message boards, blogs, and, of course, through social networking sites like Facebook. If you want an opinion on something all you have to do is type the subject matter into a search engine and you will be overloaded with information. For web professionals, this is very important information.
Learning about metrics taught me that web masters are often looking at their web page’s statistics to see who is visting their site and how often. However, statistics can only give you so much information. Through my course instructor and a couple of very knowledgable guest lecturers I learned how important bloggers really are to web development.
My instructor one day told us about a web conference that she had just come back from. She told us that at this conference a large group of web professionals were having troubles deciding what to do with their websites. From this she asked us a few different questions. As always, our class was pretty quiet and nobody was raising their hands with the answers. We all sat there waiting for the solution to her questions. This is when she told us that there was no solution; we were the ones who had to create the solution. She explained to us that web professionals rely on our opinions in order to do their job more effectively. They know what works technically, but they rely on our feedback to know if what they are doing is actually valuable.
While I am still not sure if I will continue to blog after this course is done I have definitely learned the value of the blogging world. It is the bloggers (at least the ones who blog about real issues, and not about how their coffee tasted burnt that morning) who keep the web going. It is tools like web2.0 and CMS that allow us web users to help mold the internet in our image.
It might seem hypocritical for me to praise bloggers and to preach the importance of a blog when I say that I may not continue to blog, I feel that I have done my duty. I have already convinced three of my friends to start blogs, and I’m happy to say that they have already started posting.
So do the same. Pay it forward…blogger’s style
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