Another strategy

Activity IV is the one for which I have high hopes. I have some different tools and sites listed on the course outline page . And as I have attempted to categorize them, there can be various strategies for utilization. Consider the following strategy:

1. Create content in a blog and/or wiki,
2. Develop a hook to build an audience
3. Expand the written word to multimedia to entertain and address other modalities
4. Utilize measurement, analysis, and aggregation tools to see how successful your are.
   

At the center, would be a blog or wiki where one would have the actual detailed content. So, by itself, how does a blogger become "read". People may stumble across the blog via a search engine, but there are other methods to advertise your blog -- there needs to be a hook to build an audience. The first hook that comes to mind is the micro-blogging services like twitter. Another is the social networking sites like Ning and Facebook. One builds a following with these tools by continual references to their blog/wiki URL content. Getting other bloggers to reference your content is most valuable. Making your own comments on other blogs that refer back to yours also builds an audience.
Then its time to use multimedia Web 2.0 tools and sites to address folks that respond better to visual or auditory content. You can embed video and audio clips right into your blog/wiki, or just link to it where it has been downloaded. These can be videos/photos/audio that you have created, or others that support your writings.
So, the last set of tools would be for measurement and analysis. The most immediate measurement is the amount of comments people post to your blog articles. There are other tools available to measure success like the number of visitors.
This blog has a couple tools:

1. Site meter is a tool that can simply record the number of visits and you can see in the right frame of this blog. The widget used on this blog shows the number of visitors since recording has begun. But, there is much more detail available for analysis, like the number of different visitors, where the visitors are from, weekly/monthly/etc. stats and more.
2. Whos.Amung.Us is another used on the right. The number displayed is the number of folks currently reading this blog. It also gives daily stats much like site meter.
   

http://bloggertricks.com/2008/01/how-to-track-your-blog-visitors.html has a few more ideas for tools and how to sue them.