apcampbell

Continuing to use John as an example, let’s imagine that although he appreciates the small group of people who respond to his postings, he suddenly decides to take an interest in expanding his base of core readers to potentially generate more conversational flow and to add depth to of perspective to the range of possible comments.  One way to do this would be to increase the number of other bloggers with whom he interacts.  This presents a problem: finding the right sources of information.

Several tools have been recently developed that enable the process of locating people who share a common interest and who write about similar things.  The Waypath project offers bloggers a tool to locate other postings of a similar topic matter.  Just paste in the specific URL of any posting on your weblog and the search engine will find and list recent postings on other blogs that share common elements.  Take John’s recent post about Photoshop and then view its waypath post analysis.  If John finds a blogger of interest, like this guy for example, then all he has to do is plug that guy’s RSS feed URL into his aggregator, a piece of software that automatically collects and organizes RSS feeds from as many sources as the user indicates.  Since John scans his aggregator daily, skimming all the postings, he may eventually find that the blogger whose RSS feed he discovered through waypath posts something that makes the sparks in John’s head start flying.  John can then either leave a comment on that guy’s blog or he could simply write about it on his own blog with a link to the posting on the other blogger’s site which sparked his thought process.  If the other blogger uses trackback, he’ll know immediately that John was writing about his posting and he’ll more than likely go check it out.  Either way, the other blogger might very well take an interest in following John’s future postings via John’s RSS feed.  In this manner, John painlessly expands his own personal learning community with minimal investment.   Unfortunately, John, like many bloggers, does not have a link to his RSS feed listed on his page.

Keyword searches can also be done.  For example, John mentions ‘action learning’ in the same post.  Let’s imagine that he’s interested in locating other people who write about ‘action learning’ or may be involved in a similar action learning project.  All he needs to do is type “action learning” in double quotes into a RSS search offered by Waypath or Feedster.  If he notices any relevant or intriging weblogs, he then subcribes to their RSS feeds in his aggregator.

A third option is for John to find out who’s linking to his site.  Quite often, if a blogger has linked to another’s site, it is most likely that he or she finds it relevant in some way and the reverse may indeed be true.  The easiest way for John to find out who is linking to his site is to go to Technorati and enter his weblog’s URL into their cosmos search engine.  If any of the sites that come up are of interest, again, he drops their RSS feed URLs into his aggregator and forgets about it; the aggregator takes care of the work.   Here are John’s Technorati results.

The two key elements of using each of these techniques to cultivate a personal learning community of more breadth are subscribing to RSS feeds and actively responding to postings of interest.  If John’s not using an aggregator, he is handicapping himself by spending too much time surfing from site to site, which directly subtracts from his ability to skim more news and blog postings by having them come to him, not the other way around.  Furthermore, if learners are interested in cultivating their own personal learning community, it is necessary to comment and discuss, both on other blogs and their own.  With a bit of attention, diligence, and consistency; a blogger is sure to succeed.  Now if only I would just start practicing this!

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