Benefits of blogs:

Blogging is helping many people to learn and achieve different goals. It is used by social computing activists to share their ideas about specific topics and to promote their blogging platforms. Blogs are becoming a place for readers to learn and be updated with what is going on in the world. Blogging is also serving Education, business and many other purposes.

Using blogs for the first time:

This unit helped me start using and understanding blogs and how it can be used as a communication platform between writers and readers. It made me realize the big community using blogs and how blogging is helping them to get closer to each other. Searching about different topics to be shared in blogs and study about these topics increased my knowledge and ability to phrase the content of the topic in a well-written blog to deliver the best possible experience to readers.

Experience using blogs:

Learning about blogs and blogging was very useful and a great experience for me. Being responsible for information being shared in my blogs made me aware of the importance of checking this information to make these blogs more reliable. Reading readers’ opinions about my blogs through comments raised some concerns and points about the blog. Replying to these comments and building a conversation between writers and readers is a chance for both to interact with each other and an effective way to improve the blog. On the other hand, reading other classmates’ blogs helped me gather more ideas about blogging and different topics which helped me improve my future blogs. This experience improved building a small community between us which used blogging as a medium to discuss different topics. Class discussions were another way to create useful discussions about using blogging as a way to serve communities and how to create possible solutions to improve the world.

Conclusion:

Reflecting on the experience using blogs, I learned the importance of blogs and how people are able to interact with each other and build communities and connections using these blogs. Blogs are a medium and a platform used by many writers to experience their ideas and thoughts. This platform is available for everyone and as an author learning the fundamentals of writing a blog was very beneficial to start using these blogging platforms. Finally, blogging is a great experience to gain knowledge and ideas in different aspects.

Social computing:

To start with this blog, I wanted to explain more what social computing is and how it is affecting our lives. Social computing is the interaction between people using computers and social media in specific. People and communities communicate and share relevant content using social media to create social groups over the internet. Social computing has a big impact on communities and it is helping to solve common problems. Posts on social media may positively or negatively affect people depending on popular social computing activists and their content. Different social computing activists in social media support causes and aims and their content accuracy may be affected by the goals they want to achieve.

Reliability in social computing:

Social computing is evolving and taking control of people’s actions and decisions. News on social media is generated by different bloggers and activists who may not check the credibility of their posts. News spreads fast and readers are the only judge on the truthfulness of topics they read. Awareness must be raised to give followers more understanding on how to evaluate news as some can be fake, and help publishers on social media to be more aware of fake news and the importance of checking their posts and their reliability before posting them to the public. As those social computing publishers are normal users and do not have any previous experience creating and checking the news and considering the consequences of their posts. They first need to understand that these posts published by them can deliver Misleading information which may have a massive influence on society. On the other hand, learning how to put relevant and useful content in a post can give more power to social computing and its role in publishing news to readers.

Sharing reliable information:

When news and information become reliable and trusted on social media, social computing turns into an effective way of sharing information which is nowadays very useful to many people for education, business, and other purposes. Social computing is one of the fastest ways to reach readers and put communities together. It is helping in deferent aspects of life and solving common community problems. Educating publishers and admins of popular social computing platforms will give these platforms more value to followers. Making researches is a good way of creating more accurate and reliable information. These changes made to enhance the reliability of social computing will make social computing a trusted and preferable platform to share and read information.

Blogs became a positive path to share information with people and for variety of other uses. There are many advantages of using blogs to share stories and information as it is a professional platform for writers. Bloggers need to learn and understand the fundamentals of writing a blog before posting them. According to (cpcommunications) the writing style of a blog needs to suit online readers to make it more interesting by using number of tips such as: keeping the blog short, using dot points, checking spelling and grammar and using hyperlinks. Following these steps will help bloggers and writers to create a good blog to attract readers. Moreover, choosing the best blogging platform has an effect on delivering content of blogs to the target audience. (creative blog) is sharing the best sites to build a blog sharing website. These blogging platforms are: Wix, Joomla, Yola, WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr. All these blogging platforms have the same goal with similar users and different interest. WordPress will be used as the blogging platform to continue sharing blogs of the Social Computing unit.

Recently, social computing is changing and helping people to achieve different goals. Blogs are being used for educational, business and information sharing purposes. Engdahl (2008) affirmed the major role of blogs in serving and impacting the community. This increases the importance and responsibility public bloggers have towards their followers. On the other hand, blogs are used as tutorials to offer a big number of online students to learn new skills. Nowadays, online centred education is very popular as more people are seeking to compete online courses, watch educational videos and read blogs. Myers (2010) showed that blogs in a small period of time is becoming one of the best sources for many readers to gather information.

One more advantage of using blogs is comments. Readers can comment on a blog sharing their ideas, asking questions and arguing a topic. Bolander, Brook, and Ebooks Corporation (2013) explain the feature of comments in blogs when readers ask questions, agree or disagree with a blogger’s post and how a blogger can use this section to answer readers. This feature is very helpful and can give readers the opportunity to understand the propose of the blog. Finally, learning how to create blogs is a positive skill everyone has to obtain to help sharing and teaching other people different lessons in many aspects.

References:
Bolander, Brook, and Ebooks Corporation. Language and Power in Blogs: Interaction, Disagreements and Agreements. 2013. Pragmatics & beyond; 237. Web.

Engdahl, Sylvia. Blogs. Detroit: Greenhaven/Gale, 2008. Print. Current Controversies.

Myers, Greg. Discourse of Blogs and Wikis. London; New York: Continuum, 2010. Continuum Discourse Ser. Web.

https://publicrelationssydney.com.au/how-to-write-a-blog-post/

https://www.creativebloq.com/web-design/best-blogging-platforms-121413634

This blog is created for a university unit.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.