Selling Warwick Blogs to Warwick
Selling blogs to Warwick, that's a part of my job. Or at least I should say that part of the still significant task of selling blogs to the University, the whole University, is up to me and the small team of people that I work with. I am the Arts Faculty E-learning Advisor, one of four such advisors, each assigned to a different faculty. I am also one of the people who convinced IT Services and Elab to build Warwick Blogs. Why did I do that? Partly because I want to use it for my PhD, and partly because I wish I could have had it when I was an undergraduate here ten years ago.
If you are reading this entry then almost certainly you have already bought into Warwick Blogs, you have been converted. Maybe you are even addicted to it. But you have probably bought into just one specific idea of what Warwick Blogs is about, one that is quite different to the many ideas that I am trying to sell people. That in itself is OK, but you have to realise this:
Warwick Blogs is a powerful and sophisticated tool. We tell people that it is just a clever kind of notebook or journal, but in fact it is far much more than that. It's potential is huge. It's applications numerous. That's why the team who visited us from Oxford University this week were in awe at what we have done.
There is a need to be open minded about blogs. For all of those people who have done so much to make it their own, to define what it seemed to be to anyone looking at its old homepage, think of the potential uses and the users who might interpret things quite differently. Think of the researcher for whom it might be a useful writing tool, or the international student showing his funders back home what he is part of.
At the moment the system has been occupied by a small percentage of those potential users, using it for a small fraction of its potential capabilities. That's good for them, but we are here to support the whole University in using IT to improve what they do. And this is a big and diverse place. Cultural change in such an environment will always be difficult, and must be handled with great sensitivity. As one of the people who has to sell Warwick Blogs to Warwick, I have a simple message to our current bloggers:
Selling new working/studying practices is really hard. Convincing people to adopt new IT practices is also really hard. Getting people from a diversity of social/academic/national cultures to adopt change at the same time is more than just difficult. The combination of these things makes for a very difficult job, and ensures that selling Warwick Blogs beyond its early adopters is quite a challenge.
I'm the guy who has to do this, and I am telling you that we are facing a big challenge! If the system needs altering to help us to meet that challenge, then it has to be altered. Trust me, I work on this every day. I'm out there talking to people every day.
As a user of Warwick Blogs, you can either help us with this, help us to reach a wider range of people with a wider range of users, or you can decide that you would rather keep the system to yourself, to people just like you. What would be the right thing to do? Here's a little exercise to help you understand (perhaps you could answer it on your blog):
- think about why you use Warwick Blogs, list the things that you get out of it;
- consider how those values are dependent upon the ways in which you like to do things, and upon your working, studying and social practices;
- consider how lucky you are that the University has developed a system to help you do those things;
- now try to consider people with different values and different practices – if you can't come up with lots of examples, then you really are narrow minded!
- consider if your view of what Warwick Blogs should be like will also provide a system that is attractive to them;
- consider if this will lead to an un-feasibly complex system;
- now think about the difficult task that eLab has in pleasing as wide a population as possible.
Hard isn't it!
A summary
I think that the changes to the Warwick Blogs home page are about making it more neutral. I am saying that this is essential if we are to sell it to a wider range of people, which we must do.
The old home page presented a view of what Warwick Blogs is being used for now, rather than what it could be used for. Unfortunately, potential users look at the content on the home page and think "that's not for me, that's not what i want my activities associated with". And they turn away. Yes, the changes are a marketing move. The home page was intended as a marketing tool. And as such, it has to represent a wide range of possible uses.
Robert O'Toole
16 Dec 2004 16:46
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[Skip to the latest comment]I thought that warwick blogs was about the sharing of ideas, and surely that should be faciitated without the “censorship” of this new design. I understand that warwick wants to show themselves in a cretain life, and that this isn’t stricly censorship – i use this term only as it has been widely used in pervious discussion. However with the current system you are limiting the flow of ideas around the blogging population. If a new blogger were to show up, their posts would likely be ignored, as not on a favourites list, unless they complied to the standards of the feature picker. The point with the old system was that everything was there – i could randomly dip into the latest entries and find out about research, movie reviews, issues with the transport system, or just find something that made me laugh.
16 Dec 2004, 17:00
Robert O'Toole
Thanks. Perhaps you should read my entry above. It’s the kind of entry that demands a careful considered response, not a knee-jerk reaction.
Ironically, one of the things that many people don’t like about blogs is that it seems to encourage such reactions. That puts a lot of people off, especially academics. They don’t mind if a carefully considered debate happens in one of their entries, but they really do not want to have to deal with lots of ill-considred comments.
By blogging within a community that they understand and predict, they may feel more comfortable. What I am saying is simple, potential users may have been put off by the old homepage. That makes my job, which is to actually make IT more accessible and useful, more difficult.
16 Dec 2004, 17:10
Robert O'Toole
Note that i am in no way saying that this is an ideal world, just that we need to be carefull and strategic if we are ever to move closer to an ideal world in which more people are prepared to use Warwick Blogs.
16 Dec 2004, 17:11
Robert O'Toole
Who is more democratic? The person who engages a wider range of people in accessing a system that will be beneficial to them, or the person who scares all of those people away with their own opinion of how things should be done? The latter may be exercising some kind of ‘free speach’, but they are in no way encouraging others to speak up.
It might be analogous to the role that we have in trying to encourage a wider range of of people to talk in seminars. We use techniques that may in part reduce the volume of the people who are happy to speak in seminars, so as to make the other people more confident about doing so.
16 Dec 2004, 17:15
I did read it, thoroughly. As I have read all the debate about these changes. I would love to see the blogs being used for more than just the random chatter of a small group of people. I would love to find out more about what was going on at our university, along the lines of research. I would love a a forum for informed debate of people’s work etc. but i would like to know that if I express a view that people other than my closest circle of friends who’ve mad me a favourite are going to be able to see it, even if just for the 10 mins that it’s on new topics. If that facility isn’t available than I might as well just tell my mates while waiting for lectures. I use my blog to post my poetry – I want to share this with a wide readership, but it’s never going to come up as a featured entry. I think that a reconsider about what the requirements of an active bogging community are is necessary in light of the debate that these changes has sparked.
16 Dec 2004, 17:27
Steve Rumsby
I don’t know if you posted these expecting people to post answers, but I’m going to anyway!
I started thining about blogs not from a personal point of view at all, but as a collaboration tool for use within a group. A Blog provides an ideal way to:This is quite different from what many people are using blogs for, but is, I think, a perfect application of blogs and one of the uses originally envisaged for blogbuilder (in the form of supporting student projects. The homepage, in its current or previous form, is completely irrelevant for a blog used in this way.
I created my personal blog just as a way of experimenting with the system before trying to sell the concept to the group. I hadn’t really used a blog system before June, so the whole concept was new to me. I have now found that I use my personal blog more than I expected. Much of my work-related blogging is on the group blog, but some goes into private entries on my personal blog (private because they are thoughts and ideas that I don’t (yet) want to share).
I started dabbling with non-work-related entries, not really expecting to keep them up, but I’ve found it an interesting thing to do. Especially because there are other people with similar interests who read and comment on my entries, and whose entries I read and comment on. Without exception, these little communities consist of people I’ve never met in person, even though some of them work in the same building! I’ve always felt this community aspect was an important part of the way Warwick Blogs worked. It was easy to keep up before the start of term, because the “Recent entries” list didn’t change too much. If I’d had to rely on that to keep up with events in these little communities since October, I would have failed. The new favorites functionality is perfect for this.
The group blog has different requirements, and if you read some of the old posts in the Blog feedback forum you’ll see how some of my requests didn’t fit with the way blogbuilder was being developed at the time. I still hope that group blogs will get a bit more attention in due course, but I understand that priorities are focused elsewhere at the moment.
If blogbuilder hadn’t come along, I would have ended up re-inventing some of it. The functionality it provides was becoming more important to the group, and will become more so in the future.
Skipping a few questions, out of laziness…
I’m glad they’re doing it and not me! Blogs are aimed at lots of different communities, with differing requirements, and I suspect it simply isn’t possible to build a system that does everything for everyone. Developing our own gives us the best possible chance of getting close, though. I’m sure (never having looked:-) that an off-the-shelf system would come nowhere near as close as the blogbuilder currently does.
16 Dec 2004, 17:32
Steve Rumsby
What’s the difference between the old “New Topics” list and this page. This isn’t a rhetorical question. Obviously lots of people don’t find the latter as useful, and I’m curious to know why.
16 Dec 2004, 17:36
Hear hear. But that’s exactly what the new home page does. It selects a small sub-sample of entries and says to new visitors: “These are the entries most worth reading. This is what Warwick Blogs are all about”. This seems to have been done without any thought as to which entries should be promoted to visitors to the homepage.
Do you think the new homepage really engages a wider range of people? Or just a different range of people?
16 Dec 2004, 17:41
Steve: The difference between the old “New Topics” list and the new one is that the old one actually featured new topics, minute by minute. The new one hasn’t changed for 24 hours now. In the world of blogs that’s a really long time.
16 Dec 2004, 17:44
Sorry – didn’t realise you were referring to the page that’s linked from the homepage… That is less useful because:
1) The link was difficult to spot in the first place
2) Its one click away from the homepage so there’s no immediately visible feedback on the homepage that things are changing and therefore wrth reading.
3) It shows the whole entry not just the title so you have to scroll down a long way to scan them. Just having the titles would make things easier. Particularly when you get a string of really long entries.
16 Dec 2004, 17:53
I can’t help but feel this is directed at me and others like me.
Robert, I understand that it is your job to sell fancy technology to people who’s idea of fancy technology is a toaster and the printed word but if you think that by alienating the people who did enjoy warwick blogs to appeal to those who currently don’t and may never is some kind of superb idea then I ask you to reconsider. I don’t see why we can’t have a balance in the system keeping things simple and inoffensive for these technologically inept/non-power users of a sensitive disposition and providing the functionality and usability for those of us who enjoyed aspects of the old blogging world and wanted improvements to it.
I’m even prepared to put my time where my mouth is and offer to help develop the blogs in this respect if you guys feel you are lacking resources and under pressure from the shadowy forces above.
16 Dec 2004, 19:24
It’s evident to me that the new homepage doesn’t appeal to a wider range of interests, but a different range of interests. None of the kind of posts that have been hugely popular over the last month or so have made the list in the last 3 days. If such posts are indeed an embaressment to the university, then why not add another little feature when you add topics to the list (you already have the bit which lets you specify if the topic has valuable disucssion). This simple feature is… make it so that any entries which would be popular but would also paint the university in a bad light are only visible in the list when the user is logged in.
Of course this would require members of staff openly enjoying “the funny”.
16 Dec 2004, 20:27
I tracked you back dude. Come along to a blog social next term, it might be fun. :)
16 Dec 2004, 20:41
Mathew Mannion
Also trackbacked
16 Dec 2004, 21:35
Wrote a trackback.
16 Dec 2004, 22:31
Robert O'Toole
“I don’t see why we can’t have a balance in the system” – there is. A page listing all new entries exists. It looks to me as if the blogs team have simply reclaimed the system homepage to do what they always intended it to do: act as a means for promoting the system to the whole University and beyond.
Clearly there is a minority of people who seem to think that it belongs to them as their own means of addressing the whole University. I don’t think that it was intended to do that. I suspect that there has been a serious bit of point-missing here.
17 Dec 2004, 00:17
Robert O'Toole
“In the world of blogs that’s a really long time” – so you are defning what the world of blogs is. Actually i’ve found that some people, some of whom would really benefit from using Warwick Blogs, are in fact put of by that idea.
17 Dec 2004, 00:20
“Clearly there is a minority of people who seem to think that it belongs to them as their own means of addressing the whole University” – I don’t know where you pulled this idea from. Noone as far as I can tell has ever expressed this idea, certainly not me and it is a totally false characterization.
“I suspect that there has been a serious bit of point-missing here.” – I agree.
17 Dec 2004, 00:32
Robert O'Toole
“I use my blog to post my poetry – I want to share this with a wide readership” – Helen, that’s great, definitely something we want to support. In fact i’d be very interested in supporting you and other poets in developing means for doing this. We could for example get poets together to establish a group blog, a web site using SiteBuilder, or using other IT tools that we are investigating. Or if you are worried about ending up in some kind of poetry ghetto, we could look at ways of doing this that would attract people who may not be otherwise interested in poetry (which i think might be one of your aims).
I suppose that the blogs homepage seemed like an atractive and easy way of communicating with the whole University. I don’t think it was ever intended as that. And in fact it not only started to have a limited and predictable readership, but was causing many people to turn away from blogs, so in the end may have had a negative effect.
Some time ago I was a member of various groups including the Poetry Society. I was also an editor of the infamous ***collapse philosophy journal. These groups had to work to attract an audience. They existed in a broad and competitive market of the sort that now exists in blogs. The groups that attracted an audience did so by working at their publicity whilst building a network of followers. The favourites system in Warwick Blogs replicates that networking process. The page listing recent posts can supplement it. But you are going to have to work for your fame and popularity. It’s no coincidence that this is exactly as it is in the real world, because you are in the real world.
Perhaps the old Warwick Blogs home page was just too artificial a community. The ability to post, or indeed in some cases shout, to what seemed like a big and somewhat anonymous community did effect the type of writing that occurred. Had the focus been on departmental collections, for example, and posts were seen by your colleagues and lecturers as belonging to the department context (more of a natural community), would the content of those posts be different?
17 Dec 2004, 00:45
Robert O'Toole
“What’s the difference between the old “New Topics” list and this page. This isn’t a rhetorical question. Obviously lots of people don’t find the latter as useful, and I’m curious to know why.” – I think that many people feel a sense of ownership over the whole blogs system, and hence feel that because the new topics list has been ousted from the home page they have had that ownership impinged. This is ironic as Warwick Blogs aims to give people a strong sense of ownership over their own blog, not the whole system, and certainly not the home page, which is just a means of publicising the system and directing people to FAQ and support.
17 Dec 2004, 00:53
Mathew Mannion
Of course, the context of those posts to a departmental community would be different, but it would also segregate the Blog system into departments, much like University naturally does – you meet people who you go to lectures with, not who you don’t see at all. With the Blog system as a whole, there was communication between large groups of people regardless of degree, and in some cases regardless of whether a student or an employee/academic.
I’m interested as to what evidence you have that the front page was causing many people to turn away from the blog system, could you please elaborate on this?
17 Dec 2004, 00:54
Probably emails along the lines of “your blog system looks unprofessional and immature, yours persuasively Prof Bob PhD MSc MEng MA A-Level GCSE”. I doubt any students are being turned away because previous posts by the staff had indicated a positive response far beyond anything they had expected. There were graphs and everything. My blog has graphs but nobody takes that seriously.
17 Dec 2004, 01:00
The old new topics list was prominently displayed on the front page and very easy to read. The new (well old since it was there before) page feels cluttered and very much like a news feed with its whiteness and lack of style, and of course the new home page has no good replacement for the community spirit of hot topics. Instead it had a selective system. I don’t think hot topics was ever totally predictable, several new blogs made it on to there over the course of the term, including my own, mats, synch speed etc.
Noone thinks they own the home page, a lot of people preferred the old system to what replaced it.
Siince this is being abandoned now anyway the point is fairly moot. We should be discussing what should replace it.
17 Dec 2004, 01:04
Of course I don’t mean to imply that I thought Hot Topics was ideal, but as a community water cooler it gave us some focus.
You could choose to make lots of little water coolers (improve favourites page lots, or broad blog categories) or improve the big central water cooler so that everyone can sup at it without intimidation, embarassments or what-have-you.
17 Dec 2004, 01:11
Robert O'Toole
Evidence, anecdotal based on the fact that I have demonstrated it to many groups and individuals as part of my work, and they didn’t like it. Sorry, but that is just the case. You might have thought it was great, but large numbers of people disagreed,
17 Dec 2004, 01:39
Can’t you show them one of my graphs? They’re made of 100% pure fabricated evidence, also cotton.
17 Dec 2004, 01:41
Robert O'Toole
“but it would also segregate the Blog system into departments, much like University naturally does” – yes, and that’s not ideal, and in time there will be other solutions.
17 Dec 2004, 01:41
Robert O'Toole
In fact i think i have demonstrated it to more people than anyone else, so am in a bloody good position to say that the home page was a major turn off.
17 Dec 2004, 01:43
Robert O'Toole
Now, I suggest that you put your energies to a more useful goal – prevent Oxford from kidnapping Kieran. They are just so jealous of Warwick Blogs (and SiteBuilder too). I am seriously worried that he will get bundled into the back of a Mini Cooper and whisked away to a secret underground location somewhere on the Cowley Road. Forced to program for the enemy, he will be subjected to a life of fine wines and roast swan for dinner. This must be stopped! Save Kieran!
17 Dec 2004, 01:47
1. Thanks for the offer of help with publicising poetry. I would like to hear what ideas you might have for this.
2. If you have managed to use this evidence to convince the blog team then why not share it with us the bloggers, you’ve spent so long arguing your case, why don’t you lay down this evidence – it might just help us try to come up with some ideas to make the site more useful for all – never underestimate the power of bloggers
17 Dec 2004, 10:05
Robert O'Toole
I am a professional employee of the University. My job is to gather requirements and feedback. I have done that job by talking to many individuals and groups about Warwick Blogs. What I have found repeatedly is this: they love blogs, but are made unsure and nervous by the old home page.
Just accept it. Either you trust my word as a professional, or you say that I cannot be trusted – you choose.
Actually I didn’t have to persuade the blogs developers of this at all. They have had the same experience.
17 Dec 2004, 10:16
I think then do we have consensus that a divided blogging system, down a personal and academic line (or possibly more lines) would be in everyones interest?
People could select a default style for their blog (and have an option on particular entries to opt out), blog builder could monitor the categories to make sure innappropriate entries don’t slip through. People could subscribe to whole chunks of the blogs on their favourites page or the different sides could each have their own portal. You (Mr. O’Toole) could market the academic side of blogs easily to those rooms full of suited University House employees or PHD students. Meanwhile the social, comedy, outcasts and whathaveyous could carry on amongst their own kind? The seperate portals could do things like highlight poetry, comedy, reviews (similar to Hot topics I guess but somehow better :D) on the personal side, while the academic side could have things lists of things like PDP, group projects, interesting links, current issues in the media and so on.
I think it is clearly of utmost importance however that we protect Kieran immediately. I suggest a full bodyguard be posted on him immediately.
17 Dec 2004, 12:27
Neil Godwin
You’re sacked, Brent.
17 Dec 2004, 17:03
I think that’s a very good idea, Daniel. After all, it’s no use a whole lot of PDP stuff being on a person’s recent entries list if they’re looking for stuff about pirates. Or indeed vice versa.
Dividing the blogs into personal and academic seems sensible, and then possibly subdividing in terms of department. And then, should anyone feel the need, in terms of years.
There are so many different uses for blogs that it’s not currently conceivable to have a system whereby you get everythign you want instantly. Things like favourites are a great idea, as we tend to stumble upon things by trial and error.
However, what if you only want to say a particular entry is a favourite? Is there a system for that? If I happened upon a blog that usually contained material I wasn’t particularly interested in, but contained one really good entry, do I have to add the whole blog (or section of blog) to my favourites?
Maybe there could be a separate section for favourite entries.
18 Dec 2004, 15:01
Robert O'Toole
“I think then do we have consensus” – of how many people?
“Dividing the blogs into personal and academic seems sensible” – not for everyone, in fact there are people who disagree.
Don’t worry, we are thinking about these things, but as part of a wide process of careful and wide consultation and consideration.
One approach that almost already exists is for people to create ‘shared categories’. If more than one person creates a category with the same name, for example ‘Jokes’, there is a collection page that lists all of the entries from the category in the blogs with that category. At the moment it only works within another pre-existing collection, such as department or module. That’s a lot more useful than the old blogs home page. It’s the kind of smaller more focussed community that we want to see develop.
You can subscribe to a single entry by treating it as the same as an external url.
Thanks for your comments.
18 Dec 2004, 19:43
Robert O'Toole
The changes to the Warwick Blogs homepage are about making it more neutral. I am saying that this is essential if we are to sell it to a wider range of people.
The old home page, presented a view of what Warwick Blogs is being used for now, rather than what it could be used for. Unfortunately, potential users look at the content on the home page and think “that’s not for me, that’s not what i want my activities associated with”. And they turn away. Yes, the changes are a marketing move. The home page was intended as a marketing tool. And as such, it has to represent a wide range of possible uses.
18 Dec 2004, 19:58
I definitely think the homepage should be as professional-looking as possible, the idea of a staff-picked list was good for this purpose. However, the implementation came at the cost of what many believe was a valuable hot-topics list. Perhaps the homepage could be a glorified information page with the staff-picked list, from which the user progresses to the “real” site with the more dynamic content. This is already done to an extent with the recent topics page, but giving this page more content and functionality could be an interesting option.
18 Dec 2004, 20:41
I am curious as to what the objections are to a divided content approach to the blogs. I’m sure there are some excellent objections, but I just can’t conjour them up in my mind right now.
18 Dec 2004, 21:11
The shared category thing already works across the whole of Warwick Blogs. There is no screen which shows the top categories, but if you try this http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/showall/category/jokes/ then you will get all entries in a “Jokes” category across the whole system.
20 Dec 2004, 08:59
Robert O'Toole
Superb, now we can see all the bad jokes from the whole of Warwick Blogs ;)
But seriously, that is very useful. Thanks.
20 Dec 2004, 09:18
Robert O'Toole
Quick answer to Dan: opinion is divided as to whether there should be a formal division between academic and social blogging.
Firstly, here’s a sweeping generalisation: people from the sciences and engineering have a more clear division between work and socialising. Is that because they work in spaces that are more formally designated as working spaces: the lab? Whereas people from the Arts do much of their work in spaces that accomodate both social and working activity. For some people, blogging is about recording and reflecting upon real-time events, which for people from Arts, may combine work and social. In fact they may not even concieve of a strong difference between the two. In the distant past, when Kieran and I first thought about the combination of social and academic in a single blog, I think we decided that forcing an artificial division on people would be wrong. Instead, they are left to make the distinctions themselves, if they want a distinction. The method through which they can make that distinction is categorisation, and if they so wish, also permissions control. Categorisation is not perfect, but it does allow for social and academic blogging to happen together in combination. A single entry may record the social and the academic aspects of an event, even when that event is more academic oriented. But as I said, this approach leaves it up to the individual.
A second, and perhaps more pressing requirement is this: we want undergraduates to develop confidence in their abilities to write about what they are doing, and implicitly, to become more confident about what they are doing. Confidence is a big issue for first years. We do not expect them to start writing academically sophisticated blog entries right away. If they can write cogent accounts of their university experience in general, then that would be good. If they then include some details of their academic activities within those more general entries, that would be better. If they go on to writing accounts of their academic activities, that would be superb. The PDP people at Warwick, whose job is to work out ways to improve personal student development, have seen blogging as a means of encouraging students to develop a joined-up whole person view of life at Warwick, and to make the transition to thinking and speaking confidently about their academic and social activities together. Forcing them to see the world as divided between academic and social activities may work against this.
20 Dec 2004, 09:51
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