blogshop

BlogActing (blogging is a social process)

You may get focused on the creation and the writing of your own weblogs. This is of course, your primary area of interest, and the reason you are even bothering to wade through this blogShop.

However, we want to alert you that blogs are by nature public, and there is an important role you can play by visiting other weblogs that are related to your own (or you just find interesting), by posting comments at other weblogs (maintaining the conversational/exchange aspect of blogs, and by providing links back to blogs that you mention in your own work.

Whether you know it or not, when you start writing a blog, you enter into a virtual community with other bloggers.

Chances are yours is not the only blog out there covering the topic you have chosen. It is very collegial to provide links from your own weblog to others that are related. It will help readers of your blog find relevant interest. And by creating your list of related blogs (sometimes called a "blogroll"), you are in essence saying. "these are other writers that are important to me."

After all, wouldn't you be pleased to have your blog listed elsewhere? So find the blogs you like, that you return to read, and keep them in mind. Im a later section we will show you how to add them to your own blog.

The other key feature of blogs is the feature that allows you to add comments to what the person has written. This is a key feature that allows people to exchange ideas, to aggree, to disagree. As you are looking at blogs, and you have reactions, ideas, suggestions, share them with the writer via the comments feature (hey you can try it on this entry below!). Typically, the blog owner gets an email notice when there has been a comment added to the weblog.

Again, as you write, wouldn't it feel great if people visit your blog and leave comments? This is an important role you can play in the blog community.

And lastly, if you decide to write in your blog about something written in someone else's blog, be sure to provide a proper hypertext link as a credit to that person. As we will see later, there are ways for MovableType to do this automatically as a "TrackBack ping" but it never hurts to provide a good old fashioned web link to relevant content.

update nov 8, 2003
Matthew Kirschenbaum, English professor at University of Maryland, blogs about comment blogging, a different mode of effective participation in the blog world simply by using the comment space of other weblog, citing how François Lachance effective is part of the world of blogging without his having his own blog.