Not all of that is easy and there’s still plenty of room for planning left. If anyone would like to get involved, please let me know. There’s two phases to this whole thing: making sure the content and structure of our presentation is solid, and actually carrying it out. In terms of actual content, we’re looking for people to help with presentation slides on certain netroot topics. Some examples:
-How to create a blog on typepad, step by step
-Ditto blogger.com
-The steps of creating your own website from scratch
-Wordpress and all its tools
-Other platforms like soapblox
-Facebook, it’s uses, it’s pros and cons.
-What the hell is Digg and how do you use it?
-Yahoo and Google groups from scratch
-Other email tools
-RSS feeds: how to use them, how to create them.
-Video podcasting and video editing, freeware
-Podcasting and audio editing, freeware
-Photo editing, freeware
-Technorati
-Other online tools, etc.
If there’s anything I’ve left off, and you know about it, please contact me. Ideally, each of those tools could be kept to just a few slides, but be powerful enough to teach people how to use them. Unfortunately, there’s a high probability that we won’t have internet access, so these guides will have to be very, very good (don’t worry, though, I’ll take rough drafts and make them prettier if all you can do is help make them). All in all, this is a very exciting event and we’re going to need a lot of volunteers to pull off the ambitious agenda, which for now includes not only presentation on things like “what is a blog” but will feature interactive stations, where we can have individual time with those who are attending our workshop. So, as anyone can see, we’re going to need all hands on deck – it can’t just be Lynne, Kate Donoghue, Susan from Below Boston and I. Keep the Grassroots growing and join in on the fun, because this presentation – which I consider to be the big, pilot test run – may become the single most effective means of increasing the size of our progressive, netroots Bay State movement.
~Ryan
between building a blog and contributing to a blog.
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p>Honestly, I don’t think you can teach the former at a workshop like this. It’s a process, and it takes time to play with each step. You’ll be having people drink from a firehose.
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p>Contributing to a blog, however, is something that you could teach, at a 101 and a 201 and a 301 level, so to speak.
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p>101:
* Creating a userid, and what it means
* General good habits and manners, e.g. respecting the privacy of people’s handles, NOT SHOUTING, not feeding trolls, etc. Basically, imagining that both the people you’re communicating with and your mom are all in the room with you.
* Good habits for writing: punctuation matters, using paragraphs, use of bold and italics and bullets, etc.
* Good habits for citing: how to use links, warning of non-worksafe links, etc.
* Where to find blogs.
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p>201:
* General good habits and manners, e.g. respecting the privacy of people’s handles, NOT SHOUTING, not feeding trolls, etc. Basically, imagining that both the people you’re communicating with and your mom are all in the room with you.
* Including images
* Embedding youtube or other videos
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p>301:
* Creating an article
* Creating a poll
* Effectively generating support for your issue/interest
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p>
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p>You get the idea. There are loads of people who don’t blog at all, and just getting them from (a) interested to (b) reading to (c) commenting to (d) making their own articles/posts is a long process. There are loads of people who could stand to be reminded about manners, habits, and other ways to keep this kind of communication pleasant. There are plenty of posters who would be more effective if they learned how to embed an image, include a link with a href, etc.
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p>
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p>I’m not suggesting that more new blogs is a bad thing. I am suggesting, however, that the natural audience is both smaller and that teaching how to create a blog is a much more difficult task. Teaching people to (better) participate on existing blogs has both a wider reach and is much easier methinks.