As part of my work one of the more fun things I get to do is to introduce groups of people to new tools and approaches. The students in the Visual Media module in Archaeology are using blogs to experiment with ways to raise the profile or extend the awareness of an exhibition or artefact.
There's everything here, from the Mitford sisters to a mummy in a museum in Bolton. There's even a blog by Edward VIII himself ( kinda ).
Like all bloggers, they need a little encouragement in the form of comments, so if you have a spare minute or two, could you add a thought or suggestion or response to one or more of these fine archaeology blogs...
http://visualmedia-archaeology2013.blogspot.co.uk/
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Friday, November 15, 2013
Monday, June 24, 2013
Blogger's Identity Issues
Google want you to be you. They sort of insist. And they'd really prefer it if you, the real you had a Google+ profile. And when creating a new blog on Blogger they try and make you link it to a real person's Google+ profile.
Except there's a problem. If you create blog posts with a regular Google identity when at the University of York ( or anywhere ) then if you leave, all the images from your blog posts disappear and the blog posts look as if they are written by "Unknown". Hardly ideal, in fact, pretty rubbish.
I've written about this issue before. It's caused because Blogger is sort of "held in stasis"... it is not a good fit with Google's other tools and yet it is so popular it would be difficult for them to close it down. And given Google's track record with social tools, I imagine they've been working out how to close it down for a while now.
A department wanted to avoid this strange behaviour of Blogger because they were setting up a new blog and knew they'd be handing it over to someone else in the department in six months time.
So we decided to use what we call a Non Personal Account (NPA). These are departmental accounts like chemisty@york.ac.uk or big-project@york.ac.uk that lots of people may be able to answer. Normally the person who had the login details for NPA would delegate email access to other people. This means a team of people might share the responsibility for answering emails ( that would come from big-project@york.ac.uk rather than their personal email account ).
An issue with using an NPA for shared Blogger accounts is that you can't delegate access like you can with email accounts. You have to share the username and password which is something Google frown upon. You have to be a real person remember and shared accounts break all that, horribly.
The first hurdle was choosing a first and second name for the account. Reasonably they chose an acronym of their department and "Admin" as names. They were then told that these weren't real names and that their account would be suspended if the account didn't have real names.
When choosing a "birthday" for the account, they chose, the start date for their project which as it turns out made the account younger than 13 years old, locking their account and requiring assistance to get it re-instated.
You also have to remember to change the NPA password every time somebody leaves.
And the problems that arise from being logged in to two accounts ( their York one and the NPA ) are hilarious. If you like laughing at pain.
The thing about posts in Google+ is that there is no idea or feeling of drafting. Posts aren't something you can save and come back to. You can't share editing with a colleague.
You can't add multiple images. You can't alter layout. It's like comparing DTP to a text message.
You can't easily collect "posts" together into collections... or collate stuff. The post tags don't really work very well either. With Google+ it feels like you're throwing something into the information stream, something quick and ephemeral, but blogs have always had a more permanent feel, a feeling that a post from a few years ago can still be relevant and part of a larger whole.
...is of course that Blogger is pretty much dead to Google and they'd love everyone to start using Google+. I don't mind this strategic coercion, I like Google+ ( a lot ) but when people want a blog, you know maybe they actually want a blog. They want posts and pages with navigation. And they might want it to look a certain way too. People are fussy like that - when they're scrumping for apples onions won't do.
Except there's a problem. If you create blog posts with a regular Google identity when at the University of York ( or anywhere ) then if you leave, all the images from your blog posts disappear and the blog posts look as if they are written by "Unknown". Hardly ideal, in fact, pretty rubbish.
I've written about this issue before. It's caused because Blogger is sort of "held in stasis"... it is not a good fit with Google's other tools and yet it is so popular it would be difficult for them to close it down. And given Google's track record with social tools, I imagine they've been working out how to close it down for a while now.
The Problem
A department wanted to avoid this strange behaviour of Blogger because they were setting up a new blog and knew they'd be handing it over to someone else in the department in six months time.
So we decided to use what we call a Non Personal Account (NPA). These are departmental accounts like chemisty@york.ac.uk or big-project@york.ac.uk that lots of people may be able to answer. Normally the person who had the login details for NPA would delegate email access to other people. This means a team of people might share the responsibility for answering emails ( that would come from big-project@york.ac.uk rather than their personal email account ).
An issue with using an NPA for shared Blogger accounts is that you can't delegate access like you can with email accounts. You have to share the username and password which is something Google frown upon. You have to be a real person remember and shared accounts break all that, horribly.
More Problems...
We, or rather the department I was working with found that even before they'd got started blogging, simply registering with Blogger had issues.The first hurdle was choosing a first and second name for the account. Reasonably they chose an acronym of their department and "Admin" as names. They were then told that these weren't real names and that their account would be suspended if the account didn't have real names.
When choosing a "birthday" for the account, they chose, the start date for their project which as it turns out made the account younger than 13 years old, locking their account and requiring assistance to get it re-instated.
You also have to remember to change the NPA password every time somebody leaves.
And the problems that arise from being logged in to two accounts ( their York one and the NPA ) are hilarious. If you like laughing at pain.
Google's Response...
During all these fun and games, Google helpfully suggested that "what we really need is a Google+ Business Page"... like this. I'm not convinced.The thing about posts in Google+ is that there is no idea or feeling of drafting. Posts aren't something you can save and come back to. You can't share editing with a colleague.
You can't add multiple images. You can't alter layout. It's like comparing DTP to a text message.
You can't easily collect "posts" together into collections... or collate stuff. The post tags don't really work very well either. With Google+ it feels like you're throwing something into the information stream, something quick and ephemeral, but blogs have always had a more permanent feel, a feeling that a post from a few years ago can still be relevant and part of a larger whole.
The Elephant in The Room...
...is of course that Blogger is pretty much dead to Google and they'd love everyone to start using Google+. I don't mind this strategic coercion, I like Google+ ( a lot ) but when people want a blog, you know maybe they actually want a blog. They want posts and pages with navigation. And they might want it to look a certain way too. People are fussy like that - when they're scrumping for apples onions won't do.
Not A Great Place To Be...
... not having a blogging solution at York that I just don't feel comfortable with...- Using a Blogger blog with an @york.ac.uk account isn't really tenable. Old blog posts get shredded if you leave.
- Using a Google+ Business Page instead of a blog isn't remotely realistic.
- Using a Blogger blog with an NPA account isn't very secure (shared password) and has a number of set up and usage issues. I tend to advise people to use two separate browsers ( i.e Firefox and Chrome ).
- Using a Blogger blog with a consumer gmail account is probably best. It's long term, in that it won't blow up if you leave York.
... and the worst part is that Google have all they need in terms of technology sitting right there. It just need a little re-wiring.
Google could spruce up Google Sites - which has a woeful Announcements page feature, or make Google+ pages and posts just a shade more configurable, or even make collections of Google Docs be presentable as a blog. It's all there - there's nothing new. It's only blogging. And in terms of our needs, corporate or organisation blogging isn't even very demanding. We don't need the latest far out technologies, we just need a blog... for a department... that doesn't do evil.
Monday, February 4, 2013
Using Blogger For Student Reflection ( Archaeology )
The Idea
+Sara Perry in Archaeology has been using Blogger to support a project in which her students create an "object narrative" that tells us the story of a museum exhibit. The project, in flipping the students' perspective around on the objects on display gets them to think differently about museums and exhibitions.
In a workshop, each of the students, having chosen an object ( from a crystal skull to a penny to a bike to a Christmas bauble etc ) were guided through creating a blog and began telling their object's story.
What We Did
We created a central aggregator blog that subscribed to the feeds of each of the students' blogs, creating a point from which the students, and Sara could easily get to each of the latest posts. We did this using the simple RSS gadget in the Layout Editor. Like this ....png)
The bottom half of this blog ended looking like this...
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... creating a useful "Starting Point" for exploring the objects' stories.
Conclusions
Students were willing but initially far from comfortable with blogging, none had ever blogged previously. I was surprised by this.
Some students had issues with anonymity and their academic reputation when "reflecting in public". This view may be the more savvy. Next time we go through this process we may include a more involved process including the creation of the identity that is writing the "object narratives".
Whilst the students gained useful blogging skills, next time we will include an introduction to Google Reader and maybe a few activities to help students better engage with the blogosphere which, for most, was a totally new and alien environment.
The final blogs are linked from here http://visualmedia-archaeology.blogspot.co.uk/ but the students were marked on their final presentations, where they reflected on their experience and opinions about the potential for blogs ( and online in general ) to augment the museum experience.
It's worth pointing out that one blog was used as a "pitch" for a museum project and won.
It was a brief project, but I was impressed at how the students adapted creatively to the new world of blogs and developed interesting ideas of "how they would do it differently next time".
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
The Blogger vs Wordpress debate
I have had four people THIS WEEK (and it's only Wednesday) come to me to ask about the University of York's blogging options... that we don't have.
The Social Policy Research Unit wanted to start blogging this week, so I showed them Blogger. Within minutes they'd created a blog, mimicked their dept's colours and added the logo and started adding content. Interestingly, to me, they're using tags/labels to manage the main navigation.
Wordpress. We Simply Don't Have The Manpower
There are two compelling arguments FOR Wordpress. People know, use and like it and from a branding perspective - it is easy to create "York Blogs" with a locked down design created by the Web Office.
Connecting a hosted Multi-site Wordpress service with our authentication system isn't straightforward. The LDAP plugins don't work out of the box ( although a Google authentication plugin may be a solution, but this is completely untested... and we don't really have the manpower to test this with any sense of due diligence ).
The hosting of the Wordpress install may also become a pain. If terribly popular then configuring and tweaking the caching needed is not non trivial.
One of the big pluses of Wordpress is its hackability and the ability to add useful plugins. When this is done at an organisational level we can't simply add any requested plugin not knowing how it may impact other sites from both a design and security perspective. We would need to evaluate the shared need and impact of adding the sort of "quick" hacks that most people used to working with Wordpress take for granted. Then we'd need to test them.
Blogger Got A Whole Heap Better. They May Have The Manpower
Whilst we have been looking at the Wordpress options, Blogger ( owned by Google ) has improved significantly. If you haven't noticed York has "gone Google". Furthermore, recently it seems that Blogger now has Google+ integration ( automatically offering you the option to publish a link to Google+ and showing your blogs on your Google+ that you are a "Contributor to" ).As you can see from this blog, although I have probably annoyed the dickens out of Dan Wiggle ( and rightly so, it's just an experiment Dan ) with regards to the design, I have with a few tweaks addressed to some degree the branding issues of look n feel and that horrible "Next Blog" link in the navbar ( come on Google, get that fixed! ).
So Which Is Best?
I challenged one of our most articulate Wordpress fans ( who shall remain Ned-less ) recently and asked him to clearly state what the actual advantages of Wordpress were. And, I may be wrong, despite him trying, he could come up with one concrete advantage except for the fact that people both like and know it. Which is a very, very good reason I know but...Blogger | Wordpress | |
Personal Ownership | From an organisational perspective, until Google properly integrates with Google Apps then a Blogger blog better suits the needs of an individual. A person can change job and take their blog with them. Personal "ownership" of a blog is often a key motivator anyway. | If we ran Wordpress, then, when people leave, we would still have control of their blog and content. People could export all their blog content (as an XML file and re-import it into a new blog). |
Control | Although Blogger works with your York credentials, any content created can not be deleted by York staff. | York Web Admin staff could monitor blog created and offer advice, or indeed take down any appropriate content. |
Branding | Some branding is possible ( see this blog ). Removing the nav-bar is probably against Blogger's policies, but a. Come on Google sort out the Next Blog issue and b. What if you don't remove but set its top to -30px? Note: Breaking the ToS can mean removal of Blogs without warning. | Full branding is possible so that people don't need to worry about this. Many projects and depts would prefer this to having to hack the designs themselves. |
Hacking Risk | Whilst Blogger blogs do get hacked, this is normally if someone's password has been guessed, which would also apply to WP. Most support issues would become Google's and not be ours. | Wordpress sites do get hacked. Keeping the site up to date needs to be done regularly. Lincoln seem to be able to manage this OK ( currently 614 blogs ). DoS attacks? Even testing software updates ( moving content from LIVE to DEV - munging relative URLs in content ), moving the wp-content folder THEN applying the patch will become quite a task in terms of data size. |
Monitoring Content & Serendipitous Navigation | One BIG problem with encouraging the creation of lots of Blogger blogs is that there is no way to keep a track of them. This is not from a control perspective, it prevents people from finding out what other related blog content there may be. The irony here, is that IF we run with Blogger then it really raises a HUGE need for a central aggregator of these disperate blogs, both for monitoring content and to allow people to find other interesting or related blog content. Ideally this might have a TagCould like interface. | Were we to use the BuddyPress plugin in Wordpress ( like this site or Lincoln's above), all blog posts are listed. |
| Future Proofing | We can't guarantee that Google won't shut down Blogger tomorrow. | We can't guarantee that Wordpress won't get bought by BigCorp tomorrow. |
| Features | From an editing perspective, Blogger doesn't seem as powerful as WP. Many of WP's "cool features" are often replicable with Blogger's Gadgets. | Remember, pretty much all WYSIWYG editors suck. |
| Cost | Free. No dodgy ads. | $29.97 - Go Ad-Free $30.00 - Custom Design $12.00 - Domain name transfer ______ $71.97 = TOTAL |
My Conclusion
I begun trying to get Wordpress running over two years ago. I was an ardent fan of Wordpress. Now I'm not so sure.For me, our Blogger vs Wordpress debate comes down to:
- Manpower - to it properly
- Control - an the need to be able to at least show people where the other blogs are
This suggests to me that WHATEVER WE CHOSE, before we chose it, we need a central aggregator to pull together disparate blog content into one lovely tag cloud.
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