SMALL GROUP BLOGS

SMALL GROUP BLOGS

Small-group blogs in which multiple people contribute to the content, have many design and use issues. Design challenges include ways to make the voice of the individual contributor stand out, while also subsuming multiple voices under a single topic. Educational and work project blogs would especially benefit from features allowing one to identify and sort posts by contributor and topic, and tools enhancing the ability to follow the thread of a particular argument, including its references, links and other “meta¬data” (similar to, say, Lotus Notes). This use of blogs was emphasized by Alicia, a director at a research institute. She also noted that a blog could be used to post administrative and scheduling information independently of content, especially for large-group or public blogs organized around a specific topic or event, such as a conference. The “Community Zero” website offers many of these features (such as showing which members of a group are online, chat, and an online photo album), but of course, at a price.

While the popularity of individual blogs can be estimated fairly easily in terms of numbers and frequency of visitors, trying to find a useful or interesting or informative blog from among the hundreds of thousands available is not an easy task. MSNBC assures audiences that their blog posts are edited and fact-checked. Personal blogs do not have—or need—that level of scrutiny. Still, it would be an interesting design challenge to consider "quality assurance" techniques for blogs. This might involve, say, asking readers (at the grassroots or even the "panel of experts" level) to sort blogs into related groups, or to recommend, rate, or provide category labels and keywords for them. An initial experiment along these lines is illustrated in the now-defunct Kundi.com, a Webcam portal which included an "interest-meter" feature, in which Webcam watchers could vote to alert others when something interesting was happening on a particular Webcam. Perhaps a similar kind of mechanism, based on subjective assessments of blog readers, might be useful for recommending especially interesting or informative blogs.

Finally, we should mention that a number of general ease-of-use issues obtain for current blogging systems. The typical window provided for posts is quite small, limiting the ability of the author to see an entire post in one view, making writing longer posts unwieldy. Other issues have more to do with Website integration and management: While most of the people we talked with now incorporate a link to their blog on their home page, some are using, or considering using, the blog itself as the home page, with links to other pages on the site. Attempting to integrate blogs and other webpages on a site can introduce a number of tool-related issues (such as those concerning frames).
It should be noted that many of the suggestions listed in this section call for integrating functions of other kinds of applications into blogs. Others call for incorporating features available only in paid "premier" editions of one or two current blogging systems. Of course, integrating functions and features into an extant system without sacrificing ease of use is no small feat. The most popular system, Blogger, is also both easiest to use and most limited in features. Several of our informants started with Blogger because it is free, accessible and easy to use. As they gained experience, however, they wanted more advanced features, and either constructed their own or migrated to other more full-featured blogging applications.