New weird blog post layout, National Library NZ Wellington Staff Mini-Conference

Not sure what I've done, or if it just an update, but I'm entering this post in a new layout which is a little disconcerting. You get used to the look of one way and then it changes on you. Oh well, progress I suppose ... and whaddyaknow? I like it!

As I attended the National Library Wellington Staff Mini-Conference yesterday at the Westpac Stadium I thought I would write up about it here as one of the workshops especially had some very relevant information pertaining to blogs.
The workshop was entitled 'Social media and Learning Futures' and was run by Lisa Oldham (Development Specialist School Library Futures) and Dylan Owen (Development Specialist Creating Readers & Collns). They talk about their Create Readers Blog as part of their Services to Schools and some of the online tools they are using to generate traffic to it (exactly what I mentioned as a goal in my last post). Here are some of their suggestions:

• Twitter
• same name as the blog
• use it to advertise new content and develop conversations over time ("it won't happen overnight, but it will happen")
• Scoop.IT
• link to trusted content both yours and others
• Pinterest
• to curate content
• Stitch.it
• Library Thing
• Facebook
• Bit.ly
• good for Tweets when you want to include a URL but you need it shortened so you do not use up too many characters

There were also three important ideas behind these suggestions:

1. The idea is to meet your prospective blog visitors and users where they are online already.
2. Whatever you instigate on your blog has to be sustainable. You as the blooger have to be able to add weekly content updates otherwise people will loose interest.
3. Visitors need to know that if they take the time to write anything on your blog, what they write will be read by others