Monthly Archives: October 2009

Tips For Measuring Post Success: Part 1 Bookmarking

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Image of targetAnalyzing blog metrics always gives me a headache!

But as a blogger it’s important to know ‘Is the content you’re providing is fulfilling your readers needs?”

Metrics provide you with insights into how your readers are interacting with your content and the type of content that interests them.

Trouble is there’s numerous metrics you can use,  each provides different insight and its meaning depends on what you’re trying to achieve from your posts.

So lets start by seeing how I use one metric, reader bookmarking, to analyze post performance.

My next post will demonstrate how another metric provides different insights.

Types of Posts

As I said the meaning of a metric really depends on what you’re trying to achieve from your posts.

I think of my posts in terms of three main types:

  1. Informative - ‘how to’ or information packed posts
  2. Conversations – posts that focus on encouraging readers to share their thoughts in comments
  3. Sharing – posts that share helpful links

All three types fulfill different readers needs and are an important part of achieving my goal of helping others using technology.

As a general rule informative posts are longer, more likely to be bookmarked and less likely to have a high comment rate.  While conversations posts are normally shorter with more comments but less likely to bookmarked.

Calculating Reader Bookmarking

Reader bookmarking shows the number of readers bookmarking your posts on social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and Diigo.  It provides an indication of how much they value it as a source of information in terms of storing it for later retrieval and sharing with others.

When using this metric I’m looking to determine:

  1. What type of posts are being bookmarked?
  2. Are specific topics preforming better than others?
  3. Are the informative posts achieving my aim?
  4. What are characteristics of posts that are highly bookmarked compared to those that are less bookmarked?

I use PostRank because it’s an easy method for determining the number of reader bookmarking per post.

Moving your mouse cursor over a PostRank score displays all their metrics associated with that post including bookmarking on Delicious and Diigo.

Check out how easy this is on The Edublogger’s PostRank page.

Image of PostRank Metrics

Read  my Latest Statistics Say My Blogs Are……? post and comments to learn more about how the PostRank score is calculated.

Top Posts Based on Bookmarking

So here’s the top 20 Edublogger posts based on Delicious bookmarking — the numbers after each post is how many times the post has been bookmarked.

  1. 50+ Ways To Create Digital Stories With Students — 117
  2. How I Use RSS To Make My Life Easier — 79
  3. What Everybody Ought To Know About Podcasting: Part I –77
  4. Creating Student Accounts Using One Gmail Account — 73
  5. Here’s My First Five Tips For Writing Better Blog Posts — What Are Yours? –73
  6. Are You Twittering? Here’s How I Use Twitter — 72
  7. Embedding Jing Screencasts Into Blog Posts –71
  8. Quick Start Tips For Student Blogging Part I: Setting Up Your Class Blog –59
  9. Quick Start Tips For New Skype Users — 59
  10. Copyright and Using Images in Blog Posts — 56
  11. What Everybody Ought To Know About Podcasting: Part II — 48
  12. Here’s My Top Five Mistakes Made By New Bloggers — What Are Yours? — 39
  13. Finding and Adding Creative Commons Images To Your Blog Posts — 38
  14. Setting Up iGoogle For Your Personal Learning — 37
  15. Quick Start Tips For New Flickr Users: Part I — 31
  16. Ideas For Student Bloggings From….How Do You Do What You Do! — 29
  17. Adding A Voki Speaking Avatar To A Post or Page of Your Blog — 29
  18. Managing Comments and Posts On Student Blogs Using Google Reader — 28
  19. What Are The Different Roles Of Users? — 27
  20. What’s The Difference Between Tags and Categories, You Ask? — 27

Definitely there are posts in the  list that have ranked considerably higher than I’d expect and others that haven’t done as anticipated.

What does it mean?

Not sure but I know my headache is getting worse :(

So I would love to hear your thoughts on:

  1. What topics are readers finding more valuable in terms of bookmarking?
  2. What are characteristics of posts that are highly bookmarked compared to those that are less bookmarked?

Meanwhile I feel the headache may continue as I ponder which metric we should look at next?

What is your thoughts?  Page views?  Linking? Comments rate?  And what tool(s) should I use to obtain the metrics?

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Managing Students on Blogs…What Role Do You Assign Students?

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I’ve been asked a lot lately about ‘roles of users’ and what role should you assign student users on blogs.

Unfortunately there isn’t a simple answer because it’s a balance between:

  1. How much responsibility you’re comfortable with assigning your students
  2. School and District guidelines
  3. Providing them with an environment that’s motivating

So I’ve decided to explain the different user roles and I’m hoping others explain how they choose what roles they assign students.

Roles of Users

The five roles for users you can give students on class blogs or on their student blogs are: Administrator; Editor; Author; Contributor; and Subscriber.

The roles of users in decreasing level of responsibility are:

  1. Administrator:  This is the highest level of blog access.  An Administrator has full access to all blog functionality including changing themes, adding widgets, editing/deleting Posts/Pages, changing other user roles and deleting the blog.
  2. Editor:  An editor has similar access as an Administrator but can’t change themes, add widgets or manage plugins
  3. Author: An Author can’t write pages but can write posts, upload media files to their posts and publish posts but can’t edit or approve other Author’s posts.  Authors can view comments but can’t edit, delete or approve the comments.
  4. Contributor: When a contributor writes a post it is saved as a pending to await approval by an administrator or editor.  They can’t upload  media files to posts and like authors, contributors can view comments but can’t edit, delete or approve the comments.
  5. Subscriber: A subscriber is the lowest level of access on a blog.  This role is normally assigned on private blogs where access is restricted to either logged in users or logged in registered users.

Here is a summary of their differences based on User Capability:

userroles3

Here is a summary of their differences based on access to features in the dashboard:

For more information on working with usernames refer to:

  1. Creating and Adding Users To A Blog
  2. User Roles and Changing a User’s role

Please note:

  • The blog owner is automatically added as an adminstrator when new blogs are created
  • When student blogs are created using the Blog & User Creator the student is the blog owners and they are added to the blog as administrators
  • On an Edublogs Campus site there is an extra role of user; the Site Admin User.
  • The Site Admin user has a higher level of access than an administrator; they can access all blogs across the entire Campus site in their entity without being added as a user to the blogs.
  • Site Admin users can create large numbers of blogs and users, set privacy options for the entire site (and/or individual blogs), go into and edit any blog and monitor what any user is posting across the entire site.

FINAL THOUGHTS

So now we need your thoughts.

  1. Educators -  What role(s) do you assign your students and why?
  2. Students – What role(s) do your teachers assign you on your blogs?  What role do you think students should be assigned?

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Announcing The Winners Of The “Share your tips–and win BIG!” Competition!

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It’s time to announce the winners of “Share your tips–and win BIG!” and a big thanks to everyone who entered.

Here’s the winners with a brief summary of why they won:

Gail Desler has extensive experience in both student blogging and supporting others educators in the use of blogs with their students.  She submitted three posts for the competition that all are ‘must read’ posts packed full of advice on blogging with students which is why I’ve decided all three posts are winning posts:

  1. Five Tips for Teachers New to Blogging
  2. Five Tips for Helping Students Become Better Bloggers
  3. Five Borrowed Tips for Helping Students Become Better Bloggers

Lauren and Abbey are two truly amazing student bloggers who consistently astound me with the posts they write.  Joining them with an incredible post is Dominique, another student blogger.

The posts they submitted are so ‘must read’ that it would be an honor if they guest posted their posts here on The Edublogger

Considering their ages and the fact I’ve never approached anyone ever to guest post on The Edublogger gives you an indication of how incredible the posts by these student bloggers are:

  1. Starting Out Blogging (Abbey’s post)
  2. Edublogs Advice (Lauren’s post)
  3. Le blogging défi de Sue Waters…. (Dominique’s post)

Carla Arena is a Brazilian EFL teacher who supports other educators learning how to blog through programs like “Blogging For Educators“.  Her Blogging with Students in 5 Tips post highlights the importance of connecting your student bloggers to a global multicultural audience.

Dave Mendall’s 5 Important Tips for Blogging with Students post provides  a timely reminder of need to keep it simple, remain focused, lower your expectations, embrace the unexpected and don’t give up!

Danielle Maley wrote a clever poem explaining early childhood educators can use blogs with their students while providing student blogging tips.  And Mrs Harvey shows us how she explains to her different classes what they can post on their blogs.

While Sheri Edwards and Peter Vogel both shared the challenges, and what worked, with student blogging:

  1. Blogging in Writing Class post (Sheri’s post)
  2. Blogging in ICT Class (Peter’s post)

Gregory Stringer has helped us by providing a few of his “secrets” for blogging and joining social networking sites.

Sarah Korlaki and Karen Barnstable challenge us by asking their ’5 most important questions they would like to answered by experienced bloggers.’  I love these types of questions (and the answers) because they give you lots of post ideas.

Check out their posts and share your thoughts:

  1. What I really want to know about blogging (Sarah’s post)
  2. Five Questions I would like to ask Experienced Bloggers (Karen’s post)

And most importantly Jess tells us why as a student she loves blogging!

Winners Badge

Congratulations to all winners!

Here’s a badge if you would like to add to your sidebar.

edubloggerwinner1

All you need to do is add a text widget to your sidebar and write a link to the image here on this blog using HTML code.

Here is an example of how you need to write the code:

wincode

Please send an email to tell me if you want to use the free 12 months Edublogs supporters subscription on your own blog or to give away to a reader.

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