As many of you know that follow me and my WordPress exploits, I can honestly say that I have not found any website/blogging platform that is easier to use and yet offers, nearly, endless flexibility for creation and implementation. I have recently finished the framework and template for a wonderful non-profit music honorary known as Phi Beta Mu, the Nu Chapter (PBM-Nu). Phi Beta Mu is the International Bandmasters’ Honary and I’m proud to be an inducted member of the organization.
Anyone who has “mad computer skills” can relate to my plight… I’m constantly asked to perform magic with regard to anything electronic, whether computers, telephones, televisions, websites, building wiring, and just about everything and everything related. So and thus… I found my leading the “team” to create a website for PBM-Nu.
In my quest for everyone to develop these “mad technological skills”, I may be often found pontificating to my college students the benefits of learning how to become faster typers. Let me type you a picture…
I’m in class telling my students the obvious: We are in a computer dominated world…You are the generation that is expected to utilize these technologies from before graduation throughout the end of your careers…The importance of gaining speed in your typing/keyboarding skills cannot be underestimated…Mr. Internet is your friend…Really the proxy DOES work…etc.
Six Eight brave, fearless, and expert music bloggers have joined the ME Blogger Campaign and are off and running with their new blogs. If you haven’t noticed the really COOL java graphic in the upper corner of the mustech.net site that says “click me”, click it and you will see an awesome JAVA effect that entices people to join our campaign.
If you’re a current ME blogger, I encourage you to check out the new ME bloggers and add them and anyone else in the ME blogger campaign (don’t forget us!) to your blogrolls. It’s a great way to give others your support and build our growing network of music education experts!
For this post, I’m going to only list the site author and their new blog site. I plan on posting the official list of ME Bloggers on March 1st. The updated list will include your name (if I have it), your site, and your site title. I also plan on writing an official letter of invitation to the ME blogger campaign for everyone to distribute in any way that can be thought of! This campaign needs another “jolt” and I think that an official letter that could be sent out via snail-mail, publications, MEA newsletters, or e-mail is just the ticket.
It takes a while for people to find your blog, that is why it is so important that you all use the blogrolls to create a linked network. If I could jump up and down and you could see me and shout about the the importance of building these links between all of our sites, I would. Do not underestimate the importance of this simple step. In bold: The more legitimate sites that link to your site, the more your site will be found by others in the search engines and through browsing our ME network. Don’t be stingy on these links, it will only work against you in the long run.
Also, make sure that you tell people that are currently in your email lists, myspace friends, facebook friends, whatever friends lists about your blog. They will read it and you will find a base of others that may become frequent commenters on your site or even want to build their own blogs… Tell your students if your site is appropriate for them. I don’t write anything that I wouldn’t want anybody to see, including all of my students. Your students are very web savvy and you will find them very interested in your new online persona and activities. Many of them no doubt call you all role models. Let them see what you are up to!
I’ve taken a tip from Will and am going to embed the PowerPoint presentation I spoke about in a previous post into this post. If you are interested in the “power” of R.S.S. or even “what it is”. This PowerPoint is a good start.
This PowerPoint is licensed under a creative commons 3.0 license. You are free to share it for non-commercial use as long as you don’t modify it and attribute authorship.
A few of you have already taken “us” up with regard to our challenge of 100 ME Bloggers before 2009. I have a few start-up tips for those of you that have already started your own blog and want to know “what next”. I hope to post a few of these “tips” every month for awhile!
One of the very first things that you need to do is to have at least 3-4 good posts up on your site. They don’t need to be written one after another, but you need to have some relevant content on your site before you should submit your site to the search engines.
Without your site being visible to the search engines, people will not be able to find your site, regardless of your content. There are different ways to become visible on search engines. The first way is to tell the search engines (google, yahoo, msn, etc.) that you exists through something called “site submission”. Another way is to have your site “linked” to sites that already are indexed on other search engines. This “linking” is one way that search engines rate your sites relevancy in the indexes. That is, if more people are linking to your site, you must be more relevant and therefore your site will be returned “higher” in the search results when people are looking for content that can be found on your site.
This is why it is very important for the ME bloggers (or any blogger) to have their blogrolls populated by and with other ME blogger’s sites -to create a relevancy so that our content can be found by others.
To get started I suggest manually submitting your site to the “big three” (make sure you have content before you submit or else when the sites actually “crawl” your site for the first time there will be literally, nothing to index), Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
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