Whole-Group Debriefing: Blogs on Parade

1. Purpose: Irritation to work at finding the blog's purpose. Blogs should indicate--briefly, toward the start--what the purpose is: personal, educational, what it's doing.
2. Audience: Title and description and purpose statement can identify audience.
3. Visual Impact: Good mix of graphics, space, and text. Be really careful with dark backgrounds--hard to read. Hint: check your blogs, wikis, websites from different computers and different ISPs.
4. Structure: Archives with dates but no topics = bad. Helpful to have titles with purpose identified. Use panels of different colors to organize information. Really good blogs (websites, etc.) allow multiple ways to navigate (tabs, nav bars, etc.). We like smaller visual chunks: move through pages via links rather than scrolling forever. Huge, bold headings = good. Use of different fonts and/or colors to indicate different types of information/material.
5. Level of Interaction: RSS feeds, ways to join. We like this interaction. With surveys, maybe ask one question at a time to avoid overwhelming participants and to generate response habits. What kinds of responses are evident? Numbers of response do not necessarily indicate the level of interest or quality of information. Too often, responses are crap anyway (knee-jerk reactions, idiotic venting). With Blogger, you can control who can and how folks comment on your blogs.
6. URLs and Titles: We appreciate specificity and transparency.

Note: Once you title your blog in Blogger, you can't change it. If you need a new URL, you have to start all over.