My little company runs a blogging course which is very popular with those who take it. The problem is, not enough people do take it. I can think of two ways to broaden the course's appeal.
1. Get more serious about educating people who want to blog for a purpose such as supporting a business, a non-profit, a cause, or to make money. The blogging course was conceived of us a writing course. The idea is that creative writing courses for adults have traditionally been very popular and now it's time for creative writing to take a new form. No longer poetry or short stories or novels are the hot creative force. It's now blogging. That's where we started. But, it appears that another approach would be to do more for these more purposeful, less creative, type bloggers. We could expose them to blogs of these sorts for starter such as:
- business blogs:
- non-profit blogs: One blog, Making Waves,
- blogs for a cause:
- journalistic blogs http://www.pbs.org/engage/
- blogging for profit:
2. Shift the course from being a how-to-blog to being an introduction to web 2.0 in which each week, we get people started and involved in:
a. A blog - which they keep through the course as a way of keeping notes
b. A forum
c. Facebook
d. Twitter
e. Wikis - wikipedia & a more modest one
f. Youtube
g. Linkedin, Flikr, Myspace, Friendster, Livejournal
h. Technorati, stumble upon, diggit,
Now that would be a very cool eight week course!
3rd Variation on the course - Include much more on concepts of how blogs integrated with twitter, facebook, and blog communities.
4th - Focus on wordpress and it's amazing capabilities to create a variety of websites with no programming.
Of course, we could accomplish most of both of these by slightly changing the course focus and curriculum and positioning. For instance, blogs seem to work well when supported by a facebook and twitter accounts
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