I’m fairly familiar with blogs, I read blogs on entertainment, celebrity gossip, news and sports all the time. Dan Cohen and Roy Rozenweig’s book however made me think about blogs in a new way. In Digital History the authors discuss the use of blogs as a collecting tool as well as a discussion forum. An organization I work with, a crisis hotline, is looking for ways to enhance their website in the hopes of recruiting volunteers and raising money. They currently have a blog, but all the posts are anonymous and vague, mostly just with links to articles about mental health, the organization’s area of focus. If volunteers posted about their experiences with the organization the site would definitely have more emotion and thus be more gripping. I am about to undertake creating a history of the organization so the blog could also be used as a tool to collect current memories, along with the older ones that will be received via oral histories.
One issue I could foresee being a problem is that of anonymity, the callers and volunteers of the hotline both want to protect their identities. Cohen and Rozenweig offer solutions and ways to get around forcing posters to use their names. The largest benefit I can see of blogs as a whole is their flexibility, I am a novice but I can still figure out a blog without too much panic.
We were lucky enough to have Dan Cohen speak to us in our class last week and I will end this post, my first of many, with the two most comforting comments he made. First, the best way to learn to use technology is by doing, which means I don’t have to try and decipher books full of technological terms. Secondly he told us to figure out what we need to know and learn that. If all I need to know for the time being is how to use a blog I’m in pretty good shape.
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