Aesthetic passion

OK it's not that I am what you may call "passionate" about this topic, but I have been embroiled in a research paper over the past couple of weeks with a friend of mine here at UBC. I find it quite interesting, and have written on it before, so I thought for our "free-for-all" post this week, I would share a little bit about what we have been up to here in Vancouver.

Essentially what we are doing is writing a literature review for a study that we are never going to complete. All grads at SLAIS have to complete a course in social research methods (yee haw, I know) and our term project is a literature review and research design for a "study" which we won't do (because of time constraints, and the small fact that really this should be a thesis). The saving grace is that you can work with a partner. This may be a curse depending on who you know. I got lucky.

What we are studying is the visual aesthetic elements of blogs and how they affect users' perception of the "purpose" of the blog. This entails researching not only the effects of aesthetic design elements on user perception, but also how those perceptions are influenced by the context of the interaction (i.e. reading a blog). Aesthetic elements of interface design are something I find very interesting, and was surprised to find that until fairly recently, around the year 2000, the study of interface design in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) had not included many subjective elements like aesthetics, and was instead focused mainly on the more objective design, such as usability (i.e. efficiency, measurable ease-of-use, etc.).

The other aspect of our research is a bit more related to this class, in that we have had to investigate a proper definition of blogs as a "genre" on the Web. Aside from that, we will endeavor to break that genre down into visual parts: a blogroll here, a heading there. This is really the forte of my partner, but it has been very interesting to try and classify such a broad area of the Web--blogs--into a single, visual entity. This is going to be a challenge moving forward as we set out to design a study that tackles these issues.

I find this topic particularly intriguing because I have always been interested in art and artists; that personal interest translates professionally into the world of visual information design and interaction. Likewise, I have an interest in the Web, and how people use it to accomplish so many varied tasks. Understanding what dictates someone's perception of a certain blog is a very tricky thing to figure out, but we are hoping it comes down to visual design.

If you're still reading, do you have any insights for us as we move forward in this endeavor? Can you identify what visually separates a personal blog different than a news blog? How about a Canadian blog from one based in Dubai? (All of those were weblog award winners, if you're curious.) If anyone is super motivated, I can point you to about 8 million articles on the topic, most of which will be available through your local library database collection. Continue reading...

Duke University's "Library Hacks"

Found this blog on the Blogging Libraries Wiki: Duke University's Library Hacks. Basically this is a blog dedicated to hints and tips about library use, and productivity in general. From their about page:

Library Hacks is a place to find out about tools, resources, services, and ideas that can help make your research and the library more efficient for you. It’s written mostly by Duke Libraries staff, but we’ll also have occasional student and faculty guest bloggers. (Want to be one? Let us know!)

Our inspirations are blogs like LifeHacker, LifeHack, AcademHack, and ParentHacks, and book series like O’Reilly’s Hacks Series.

I think this is a great way to draw in users that may not already be a part of the library's normal audience. I am a believer in "bridging" the gap between non-users and the library using social software because of its low commitment level. The readers of this blog may already know about the library. But, they may have simply done a search on audiobooks, or multiple-computer productivity, and found that there is someone at the library writing about how to deal those sorts of problems.

And it may stop there. Read the post, move on. But some may read it, see that it is from the library and then come back for more information, or look at some of the other library resources that are linked to on the blog's home page.

The problem with this model is that this is most likely not going to be the first blog a library produces. That may need to be modeled more around news and library programming. In that instance, however, posts along these lines could be sprinkled in, just to add a little spice to the normal fodder. Continue reading...

blogger v wordpress

It seems to me that commercial blog software these days is pretty standard. Some features you get on both Blogger and Wordpress.com:

• Templates for blog layout
• Widgets or gadgets to display archives, blogroll, rss, etc.
• Certain level of control as to commenting, trackBacks
  
• Either WYSIWYG (What-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor or HTML.

The first ever blog I wrote was on Blogger. It chronicles the road trip that I took while driving from Minnesota to British Columbia. We did this in the car, connecting to the internet via a cell phone. I did the posts quickly, and didn't fuss with many settings and found it very easy to use.

The second blog I wrote was on WordPress.com, which I found at first somewhat unsettlingly complicated. This blog was written on how libraries are using Flickr to enhance their collections, and was done for a class last term. This meant it was to my advantage to tweak the settings and make everything look as nice as possible. I found that once I got used to the more advanced "dashboard" that things were very customizable.

After just looking back over my accounts I've identified a few differences:

• There are many, many more templates to choose from on WordPress.
• However, you cannot edit the HTML/CSS of your template for free like you can on Blogger. This is so cool and something I really wanted to be able to do last semester.
  
• WordPress.com blogs allow "Pages"--a separate area for information like, About the Author, or Additional Resources. Nice for separating that information from the side columns on your main page.
• WordPress.com settings take a long time to save, and it takes a while to move between pages in your dashboard. This may be due to the site traffic, who knows, but it's annoying.
• Blogger makes it hard to have an abbreviated post on the main page. This is when you see a little "More..." link on the main list of posts. I think those are nice, and keeps many posts visible at one time on the home page. In WordPress you can insert this by clicking a button. In Blogger you need to edit the HTML of your post with specific code found on a help page somewhere.

As for data portability, it is hard to say. Can you get your data elsewhere after you have put in so much work? WordPress imported my old Blogger blog just fine, and I didn't even have to export it first, it was all done automatically through the web.

However, Blogger couldn't import my WordPress blog, to my dismay. It apparently only supports importing from other Blogger blogs. I'm not sure if that is the fault of the WordPress export file (i.e. they export in a proprietary XML format), or if Blogger simply hasn't written the software that can do the import. Either way, it seems once you are on WordPress it may be hard to get off.

This may not be an issue, however, because WordPress.com also supports a stand-alone server version of its software called WordPress.org. This is fairly robust, I think, and if you have the know-how and staff for it, could be a good option. There is an active community of WordPress users, as well, so tech support is probably often free. Perhaps you would never want to leave.

I think, overall, Blogger is the way to go for ease of use (and that CSS template editing). And, if it turns out I'm wrong, I can always get my data out. The page loading time issue on WordPress is enough for me to stay away, unless I was going to be running my own server. Continue reading...