"Top Ten For Dummies " was the name and, well I suppose, it was the game (forgive the sickly cliche). With a variety of topics to choose from, we all made a blog a day with top ten lists. I have to be honest, I chose this group with the idea that it would give me more time to do other work, but it did not. Each post took on average of two hours, because of the research needed. Even the simplest of posts, such as Top Ten Cartoon Characters, consumed a lot of my time.
The idea of course was to spark debate, which didn't happen across any farther than our group and a couple of friends from Facebook due to the rest of the class having their own blogs to tend to. However, I felt that our blog was bringing a fresh interactive element into the world of top tens. Looking online or on print, there seems to be little activity, with publishers saying: "THIS IS THE TOP TEN, DON'T YOU QUESTION IT!"
The blog was hard work, and motivation to post every day was only being fueled by the fact that it was being marked. But the 'office' work in the news room was fun, be it hard work, because of the group I was in.
Being in a group was as I said, fun... But also was hard work relying on people to post their articles at certain times and the group lacked structure in certain areas, meaning consitancy of style was not good. In fact, people decided to style the blogs how they wished, with little care to how the others looked. A group meeting was needed but the usual scenario of an incomplete group happened too many times. People need more than two hours sleep.
Posting on a regular basis was difficult, not only to do with the motivation but the fact that other work was consuming my time and these top tens were not easy. The research involved took a long time, even by looking at top ten websites, research had to be done to come up with a fair top ten. How could a top ten be fair by just posting the first ten you find? You can't, simple.
I think our demographic was a bit broad. Even though we aimed to have a young male "bored office worker" audience, there were posts that seemed to be aimed directly at women. This isn't so much of a negative thing because it could potentially lead to a larger audience, I do however see this as also possibly neglecting niche audiences which create more of a community.
And this is the main aim of our blog that I really felt had potential, was creating a community. The idea of allowing our audience to eventually become contributors I thought was a great incentive for followers to contribute more.
So I think we were on track to achieving our goal of sparking debate. Creating a Facebook group to publicise, and remind people of new posts, was our best form of promotion. Our other goal was to create a blog that would attract advertisers, and our presentation to Kathryn Corrick proved that this could work as she said that our blog was probably the most attractive from an advertisers point of view because of the niche market it could attract.
My own individual posts I found hard to write, because it was mostly research. I found towards the end that I wrote less and less because I let the topics, such as Top Ten Dumb Celebrity Quotes, speak for themselves. This is because I realised while looking at other Top Ten websites, that I didn't pay much attention to the actual writing.
This lead on to the design of the blog, as the writing wouldn't carry itself, we had to look at the layout. It originally started off with a plain layout but we opted for something more entertaining while archiving the posts so it wasn't just one long strand.
I think what we were good at was our enthusiasm and enjoyment of the subjects we chose. We engaged in our topics and got on well as a group because we had fun with what we were doing. The problems I found though was our style consistency. We would sometimes have "Ten" and then other times have "10". This was down to a lack of communication, especially as when a full strength group was a rare occurrence.
If i was to start another group blog, I would probably aim to do something that engages the audience as much as this blog, trying to create a community through debate. However, I would try and aim for a better, more reliable team. I can't take any credit away from any individual member because everyone contributed something positive to the group but I think reliability and reaching deadlines was not taken as seriously as I would of liked.
1 comment:
Thom
This is just some general feedback on your blog - not on the critical eval - which I'll mark properly later.
Overall, there are some interesting posts here - you need to reflect a bit more on what you've learnt during the module - make sure that some of the posts fit the 'learning log' brief.
Broadly, you seem pretty comfortable with the blog platform - you write and link well. You could proof read more effectively - remember - you can fix errors in the posts after they're published.
You've added some content to the sidebar - you could add more perhaps - lists of links to interesting sites. Remember - the module blog can be a kind of personal showcase, one that promotes you but also links what you do out to the net and lets the net flow back in... which sounds a bit odd. But you get my drift.
Overall, this is readable - but you need to do a bit more by the end of the week.
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