Tools for Publicizing your Blog
Online social bookmarking tools
These are tools that allow you to save blog or web pages
that you feel will be useful to you at a later date and which you want
to share with others
A way for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.
Aggregators
Aggreagators are sites that automatically check for
new posts from blogs and list these in real time as they are posted.
Some are topic related, others regional or country or issue based.
- Afrigator, an all African aggregator. Essential if you blog about Africa
- Kenya Unlimited, a Kenyan aggregator that includes East Africa
- Nigerian Bloggers, an aggregator of Nigerian blogs
- African Women’s Blogs, an aggregator of blogs by African women and women’s groups.
- Blog Africa, an aggreator by the news site AllAfrica
- Global Voices provides lists of blogs and topics from across the world.
- Technorati
- MyBlogLog
Online Communities
Online Communities such as Kabissa allow you to publicise your blog and become part of a community with other bloggers.
Online media storage
These sites allow you to store, share and
view a range of media such as digital photographs, audio files like
podcasts, videos
Online storage of audio, video, photos and text. All of these sites are also social networking sites as well as spaces for storage.
- Flickr, digital photo storage and sharing site
- You Tube, video storage and sharing site
- Our Media, storage of text, video, audio files
Social / Community News sites
These are newsites that you can
submit your blog posts or other organisations / people’s blog posts if
you wish to publicise something they have posted. A mixture of news and blogs sites that are interactive.
Spam and Comment Moderation
Spam (unsolicited, unwanted,
irrelevant, or inappropriate comments, especially commercial ones).
Wordpress.com has an inbuilt Spam protector. It allows you to enter
specific words which will filter out spam. Wordpress also allows you to
used comment moderation.
Any comments which are deemed offensive can
then be deleted. Note: Comment moderation should really only be used if
someone is using offensive language and not because you don’t agree
with the comment.
Syndication
Blogs can be “syndicated” by using something called
RSS feeds. This is done automatically if you create your blog using
Wordpress or Blogger.com. Syndication means that anyone can subscribe
to your blog and receive automatic notification that your blog has been
updated. You in turn can subscribe to other blogs via their syndication
(RSS feeds) and receive automatic updates.
