Day 1 – Ok, so I’ve joined the 31 day blog challenge. At the moment 31 days seems like a long time but here goes. Our first activity is to answer three questions.
- How often do you comment on other blogs during a typical week?
- Typically I haven’t been doing my fair share of commenting at all. I comment when something catches my eye but that is not regular at all.
- Do you track your blog comments? How? What do you do with your tracking?
- By tracing my blog comments I’m not sure if this refers to comments that get posted on my blog or somehow keeping a link to the comments I post on other peoples sites, honestly something I hadn’t thought about before. For my own site I have the moderation features turned on. I have included a widget to track recent comments. When I do get posts I always follow up with checking out who it is that is responding, usually by visiting their site. Actually I blog a lot for my own clarity in thinking and so comments and tracking comments hasn’t been a huge interest. More recently I think I’m struck by the power of this medium and the potential to connect and share ideas. I’m much more interested which is why I’ve decided to participate in the 31 day blog challenge.
- As for tracking the comments I post elsewhere, this is new idea for me and now I’m going to look into that. I haven’t used or investigated cocomment at all yet. Watch for an update as I go off exploring.
- Do you tend to comment at the same blogs or do you try to comment on at least one new blog per week?
- No pattern as yet.
Now off to visit Gina Trapini’s guide to commenting. It is actually pretty common sense but a good reminder. This would actually be a good resource for students when setting up blogging with a group. The idea of always needing to add new information to a blog comment can be daunting though. I might rephrase that as a new perspective or a good question. That would be worthwhile too. Interesting that there is no way to comment on her article.
And finally, I’ve just added a “comment08” tag to this blog entry. I know a little about tag, but now I’m going to go and search out the ramifications of where that puts my entry.
Day 1 and already I’ve got new questions!
Well the good news is it has placed your entry into the Technorati feed so your post title is appearing on the wiki (and tagging it comment08 using Edublogs is working).
The tracking question relates to comments on other people’s blogs. By using comment tracking tools like cocoment you know if someone responds to your comment and you can choose to respond back.
Now I’ve read quite a few reflections on this activity but two aspects you have pointed out others haven’t mentioned. That is an excellent idea to use Gina’s or a modified version with students so that they are taught how to comment properly. Also the only person to point out that you couldn’t add your own comments — which I would have liked as I didn’t agree with every point.
Thanks for letting me know that. Now I need to understand how/why that all works to make better use of the info and be able to set up a similar thing myself. My Global Perspectives class has a wiki and I’d like to be able to have them start blogs that somehow get tracked on the wiki.