Blogs have not been very popular on my site, usually a post there was confused with a forum post and vice versa. I looked through my forums and blogs to find a common topic to better define what the blogs should be. I am going to use mine for product reviews. First thing I did was visit the Language Editor. Nearly everywhere I found the word "Blog" I changed it to "Product Review". There's a lot, and some you shouldn't change so be careful. Now its very clear to anyone on the site. "Add a Product Review" "Read Product Reviews" "Featured Product Reviews" and so on.
I went a step further and added a page to start to pump up the submission of these blogs/reviews. I may add incentives at some point as well. I also added a tab and a banner for reviews.
Here's the page: http://girlriders.ning.com/page/product-reviews
I hope this give someone some ideas of their own for utilizing blogs in their network.
Replies
Blogs are probably THE most used tool on my network. We use them for product ( almost exclusively book ) reviews and interviews with authors, artists etc. We also have a monthly competition, 'Top Blogger':-
http://americymru.net/leaderboards/blogposts/week
-: for which we use the Leaderboard rankings and some discretionary points. We also offer a prize for the winner each month. Separate blog categories....including a Review subsection, would be useful though imho.
I have two networks...on Mommalicious its used for blogs..on Readers Paradise (my new networkz) I've turned the blog section into a Book Reviews Section..
I changed all the wording like you did :)
Annette,
When you enter "blog" as the search term in Language editor you get pages of results. There were a couple that said something more or less about link to blogging services such as blah blah. Just read them and make sure it is actually talking about YOUR blogs. Also, I didn't change the address references. You'll see one place in the editor that has /yoursite/blog/... I didn't want anything to get misdirected, so I made sure I was only changing text that appeared on the site.
Hope that makes sense. Good luck!