Get a Blog
The city of Bandon Committee for Community involvement had an agenda item about a community blog a month or so ago. It sounded interesting so I attended to contribute my $0.02 worth which amounted to a lot of encouragement. As a result of the meeting city manager Matt Winkel polled his newsletter readers as to whether they would like to get his newsletter in the form of a blog rather than via email. According to Matt, the response was less than overwhelming. I attribute this to peoples lack of understanding of exactly what a blog can do.
A blog is a medium which allows you to publish information to anyone who is interested. With a emailed newsletter, it is up to the publisher to keep track of who wants to receive their news. Often people lose interest in the topic and if you don’t have an easy subscription management system, people who no longer want to read your newsletter end up deleting it along with their spam.
Then there are the people who presume that you want to receive all of their forwards and musings. They have no subscription system. They just blast their emails out to everyone on their mailing list. I usually end up creating a filter to remove all of the sender’s email from my inbox. If they are important enough to me, I will send them to a folder other than trash and may occasionally check the folder for real messages.
If you are not familiar with blogging you may be wondering how people have time to keep up with all of these web sites. The answer is “you don’t have to”. The nicest feature about a blog is, all respectable blogging systems support rss feeds. A feed allows a program (feed reader) on your computer to check all of the blogs you follow and notify you when there are new posts available. All your feeds are consolidated into one place. It’s like a spam free email folder with information you want (if you don’t want it any longer, delete the feed).
I use Thunderbird as my email client. It allows me to add a feed as a folder in my email. I can see at a glance when new posts show up. As time allows, I scan the subject lines and read the summaries of the posts I think may be interesting.
I also use a program called Klipfolio which allows me to watch feeds and other information on my desktop.
Blogs are free. Anyone can set one up in less than 10 minutes at blogger.com. You can have multiple blogs (one personal, one professional), you can have team blogs (multiple people can post) and private blogs (you control who is allowed to read or subscribe).
So … I set up a blog for Matt’s news letter. I told him I would do the posting for him if he would email me the items (another benefit - you can get news items as they happen rather than in a monthly or weekly email). You can read or subscribe at bandonbuzz.blogspot.com.
I’ll follow this up with a list of other organizations and people I know who could benefit by having a blog.