Need help again - an easy to use blog community?
Last Friday I mentioned I was experimenting with tools for an upcoming workshop I'm co-facilitating. Bev and I really want to use tools that are open, easily affordable and allow some new experiences rather than put the course behind a password protected wall on a learning management system. But the challenges of an easy to use interface for non techy users and the need to be able to replicate the set up keep biting us in the proverbial pants. Argh. So my question is this:
Has anyone found a really good easy to use tool that creates a community of blogs? In other words, individual blogs that aggregate well together, easy navigation between them, AND the ability for email alerts t1o all members of the community when new posts or comments are added?
Has anyone used blogs (perhaps in concert with wikis and email lists) for a non techy group of participants?
I have used WebCrossing (on Share Your Story with a very stripped down interface) but that is not a freely available tool for afterwards.
Today while googling we found James Farmer's good reviews. We dutifully went to Edublogs and tried that out, but the complications for non techy users jumped up. We were thinking about 3 group blogs with 6 users each. That means everyone would have to sign up for an individual blog to get an account, we'd have to know their user names, create the group blogs, assign the users, then create an uber blog to aggregate everything or do it on a web page or wiki. Imagine trying to explain that. Also many of our group will be working in English as a second language. Do you see my pain point?
We then went to 21Publish and at first thought, yes, here it is! But no. Navigation hell. Once you are in to a subsection, there is no clear navigation back to the home. The weblog and picture blog interfaces are so dissimilar, you have to learn two interfaces. BLAH!
So we are thinking again of using a hosted instance of Moodle and trying to make it less classroom-y like and more oriented towards community. Sigh. We could use Drupal, but we don't have the time to find a host/customizer for what we need and if my limited experience with Drupal is correct, we need that kind of help.
Heck, it looks like free and easy is not so easy. We have minimal budget for hosting. Are we dreaming for naught?
Anyone have any suggestions?
(This "thinking out loud" is also useful for me to be more discerning and clear about our design criteria. People ask us every day about "what tool to use." It is a really challenging and contextual question! Just Monday I had a phone call with a person looking to find a community platform with some particular needs and specifications. I pointed her to this blog thread and Bev's sister post. As you may be guessing, we are trying to make our thinking open for others' improvement and use.)
posted by Nancy White at 12:12 PM
14 Comments:
How about a multi-user blog using www.wordpress.com? It's free and the interface is one most people can learn rather quickly.
What we found with wordpress was people had to register first, before we could put together the multi user blog. Or maybe I didn't understand correctly. In fact, what we want is an uber blog that aggregates individual blogs. Maybe I'm not describing the fantasmagorical picture in my head!!!
The system you describe sounds ideal, but I don't know of anyone who does that. If you find something, I'd love to evaluate it.
Scoop does some of that, it powers RedState and Daily Kos. It has the concept of diaries, and people promote interesting items to the main page. I found Scoop to be very difficult to install and the development community was quiet.
I'm pressing WordPress into services that I'd not considered. I'll second the idea of a WordPress group blog.
One of my healtier examples of a full blown WordPress rig is varrecchio.com. I've used tagging to create sections as needed.
At some point in his campaign Nick wanted a speical page that had just his endorsements. All I had to do was add a link to the endoresment tag.
http://varrecchio.com/tag/endorsement
Now I'm quite confident that with the tagging mechanism, I can defer navigation until a weblog starts to find it's purpose.
I've written a blog entry on how to build a WordPress rig.
http://blogometer.com/2006/04/03/blog-unrolling/
I've got additional plugins that I'm using for sticky entries, Podcasting, and event calendaring.
http://kiloblog.com/tag/pimp-my-blog
Using a single tool has made it easier on me to adapt.
Hi Nancy, I don't don't have direct experience but I think it may be worth looking at elgg. This povides opensource blog tools with fine grained privacy controls, and also tagging, wiki, podcasting, more..
http://elgg.org/
The advantage here is that, as with moodle, I believe there is strong support community which means you should be able to overcome any setting up and runtime problems promptly.
And it's endorsed by George Siemens as a connectivist learning environment to boot.
I posted some comments referencing your quest. I don't think you'll be able to get away from having to register people, unless I misunderstand!
My experience with a private multi-user blog (not aggregated individual blogs) I set up for a group of teenagers was that it was an astonishingly effective way for them to very quickly get to know each other.
Nancy: I'll try to avoid the sales-pitchy stuff here... but there are at least a couple ways to do this with a JournURL community.
(1) Distributed: People create their blogs wherever they like (Typepad, Blogger, self-hosted, etc... anything that produces a feed.). You set up a community, and create an account for yourself within it. You click the "feeds" tab and subscribe to each source blog, putting a check in the "publish" box for each one.
Poof! Everything posted to those feeds will automatically flow into your blog, which can host threaded, centralized discussion as well.
(2) Communal: Each person registers an account within the community, and creates their individual blogs. They tell the system that your account is allowed to share their entries, and add them to a list of shared blogs in your own settings.
The upside to this approach is that you can share more than entries... blogrolls, for example. And the individual bloggers don't need to actually *be* bloggers, since JournURL's interface looks like a message board. If they can post a message, they can contribute.
The downside, of course, is the hideous lack of documentation currently available. On the upside, I'm pretty attentive to issues and newbies, so there's a *bit* of balance there.
Ah, I love community! Thanks David, Alan, Andy, Mark and Rodger. I am now looking into all your options and promise to report back.
Did I say I love community??? YES!
I shall lurk contentedly and await your further thoughts, Nancy. Certainly JournURL sounds interesting ....
One of the reasons it might be so hard to find a good, functional and free community blogging site tool that aggregates individual blogs is because of the noise it attracts. A core community seems to struggle through junk posts and registrations to keep the topic. Eventually the site becomes so diluted it is abandoned. We've been building event blogging sites since 2003. The goal for each site is connectivity among bloggers. Yes there is registration. The only way we found to eliminate noise yet open up the site is to moderate registrations and posts. There is a main RSS Feed. The bloggers make up an OPML list. We use categories for event sessions, tracks or topics. You can take a look one of these at http://www.convergencebloggers.net There are other sites active right now and I'll be to share the urls just let me know if there is interest.
You could use SuprGlu to capture everyone's feeds and display them on the one "group" blog. Here's an example of me using suprglu to bring together all the different things I do online into the one place. Now imagine each of those things of mine being a different person's publishing.
If your group is not using a newsreader yet, then you could use Feedwhip to email users whenever the SuprGlu "group" blog get updated.
Problem with SuprGlu tho, is that it is limited to about 7 feeds in. You have to request more.
Alternatively, Wikispaces displays RSS in a similar way...
Hi, Nancy, Alerted by your post I immediately checked our interface again. The user interface for blogs and photo blogs is as far as I can see it identical.
But in fact there is a dissimilarity in the interface of the community admin (like you) and the end user (your members/bloggers). 21Publish has a two layer approach. The landing page or as we say BlogPortal is the blog that the community admin manages and where members log in or find aggregated content from other blogs. The interface of the Portal admin also holds options to manage the whole community like sending newsletter, defining registration process or choosing available member templates. All this functionality is not incorporated into the end user interface. Is this is what you meant by dissimilar interfaces?
Apart from that we are currently redesigning our interface and will be introducing a breadcrumb navigation that helps you find your way home.
I have learned that we need to work harder on making the concept of our two layer approach and the different functionality and features of each layer clearer. It would be helpful for us to get more feedback from you so we can continue to improve our product. Thanks!
Thanks for your comments, Stephan. I had not realized what the admin saw was that different from the rest of the community, so I'll have to go back. Also, I have really tough standards for simplicity of use because I am most often not working with early adopters and online mavens. So consistent navigation is one of those things I look for. What we noticed is that for us (in the admin role) things were not consistent.
I really am encouraged by the approach you have. I think there is a need/niche there. I'll be cheering on from the side and I'll keep checking back. (Which reminds me, I should post about what we eventually decided!)
Nancy - your last comment here was "(Which reminds me, I should post about what we eventually decided!)"
Did you make that post and I missed it? I've been waiting anxiously!
Nope, I haven't made it yet, but I'm working on the write up this weekend.
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