Creating a Blog for Goal Cultivators

This article explains how to create a blog to participate in the Rob Pasick's Goal Cultivators communities in Ann Arbor, Michigan. You must be registered with Rob to participate.

Weblogs or blogs are a form of pushbutton publishing on the Internet that makes it easy to share thoughts and ideas with others. Blogs recently came to the fore in the political campaign, and ABC News named bloggers as its people of the year. It is possible to blog anonymously, and as a result many people feel freer to communicate in their blogs than they do face-to-face.

Rob Pasick wants to use blogging in this community to help maintain the connection and energy between meetings. The Community Engine, of which I am the founder, has agreed to support this activity for Rob by providing guidance in how to blog as well as by creating a community site to aggregate all of your blog postings in one place. In my consulting and knowledge management activities, I have found this use of individual blogs to be highly effective in maintaining the between-meeting connection for distributed groups.

Creating a blog on Blogger, the service we will be using, is pretty simple, but there are a few bugaboos to look out for. I'll list the steps and highlight potential problems. There are a few things we want you to do. Those items are emphasized in the text below as are potential problems.

Feel free to contact me (Bud Gibson) at any point if you encounter difficulties.

Creating A Blog on Blogger

Go to www.blogger.com. If you are already a member. Just log in and create a blog. If you are not a member, register and create a blog. The steps are very straightforward and the blogger help system has enabled literally millions of people to create blogs within a few minutes of registering. As you register, remember to jot down your username and password.

A potential problem here is in selecting your domain name. Let me suggest something like goalcultivators-[YOUR FIRST NAME].blogspot.com, where you replace [YOUR FIRST NAME] with your first name. If you do not want your first name to be this public, invent a name to put in place of [YOUR FIRST NAME] that you would like to characterize this endeavor (e.g., aspirations).

Once you have created your blog, make an initial post about what you would like to achieve in your Goal Cultivators experience. Once you have successfully published your post and viewed it on your blog, note that the time of your post is off by three hours. This is because blogger defaults to California time where it is headquartered. You may want to change this default. To do that, make sure you are logged in to blogger, then go to the Formatting tab under Settings, and set the time zone appropriately.

Hiding Your Profile Information

For a variety of reasons, you may not want to publish identifying information on your blog. It's pretty easy to achieve this. Once you have logged in to blogger, go to www.blogger.com/edit-profile.g and make the privacy settings you desire.

Enabling Your Blog for the Goal Cultivators community

Once your blog is set up, send me (fpgibson@gmail.com) the URL (i.e., http://[YOUR BLOG NAME].blogspot.com, where [YOUR BLOG NAME] is the name you chose earlier. Also, please include your identifying information so that Rob will know who you are. Within a few hours of sending me the mail, your blog posts will start to appear on the blog community site that will be located at: goal.thecommunityengine.com/january05 (note: The site will not be active until near the first meeting, January 10).

Ongoing community participation

Rob will be making a weekly post on his own blog and asking community members to respond. The post will relate to goal cultivating activities.

To respond, simply make a post on your own blog. Use a title that reflects the main message of your post.

You may also wish to comment on other participant's blogs that you become aware of through the community blog site. To do so, just click on the post title and that will take you to their blog directly. Once there, you may just leave them a comment on their individual blog. This method is less public.

You may also wish to comment in a way that will appear on the community blog site. This has the advantage of engendering a larger discussion. One more step of set up is required to enable this functionality.

Go to this link, and follow the directions for setting up your browser. You will either wind up with the BlogThis! bookmarklet or the Google toolbar, depending on what you choose.

Now, when you see a title and summary on the community site that seem interesting, click on the title to go to the participant's individual blog. However, instead of leaving an individual comment, use the BlogThis! bookmarklet or the Google toolbar to create a post on your own site. That post will reference the post you are viewing and link back to it. On the community site, it will appear as a serial conversation.

Final Notes

In my experience, the real issue with blogging communities is getting them off the ground. Once people start to participate, the community becomes self-sustaining, and people derive a lot of value from it. Read the testimonials here (posts from a class I taught at UM) to see one example of this phenomenon.

So, expect a lot of encouragement to get blogging in the initial stages. With a little practice, it gets easier and easier to just post. We believe that you will derive real value from this activity.