My Technology Addictions

e-consultation

The Australian Federal Government is preparing itself to enter the blogging realm. An article in the online Australian IT titled Canberra plans citizen sample blog yesterday states “FEDERAL plans to enter the world of blogging are well under way, with a discussion paper due soon on the proposed “rules of engagement”.” The blog will be up and running by March and will be a place that the public can comment on policy, it wont be a free for all and genuine and constructive comments would be welcomed!

They have concerns that the lobby groups or other anonymous identities may infiltrate and manipulate the blog. Will this just be another place on the web that the government places information for us to read and if we wish to place a  positive/constructive comment then that comment may appear on the blog? Censored comments – that’s an interesting concept, we have the ability to censor, delete and even change comments that are placed on our blogs but most of us would only use these options if we get comments that detail illegal activities, pornographic, spam or are racist and discriminatory.

At the end of the day a blog provides a place for conversation and I would have thought that e-consultation would benefit from conversation not censorship, will we see a spin off of blogs that will continue the conversations? Just by denying it they will in fact make it flourish elsewhere way. I suppose that is just another case of  ”not in my backyard”.

The article states that a spokesman for Special Minister of State Gary Nairn said ….”genuine and constructive comments”, I could not find another mention of this, a speech delivered by Mr Nairn in August mentions the possible introduction of blogs and talks about the things like the need for  moderation of comments would need to be looked at. I hope they do look at this and not take the Big Brother attitude and take the time to consult with people from the blogging communities both users and readers, not people who “know” about these things about do not “participate” in them.

I have tried to stay pretty much on track with this blog and that hasn’t been too hard as technology is a wide and varied field. I don’t want to get into political discussions (am I now censoring?) but as this does loosely relate to technology I thought I would place it here.

Day 2: Run a First Time Reader Audit

The second day exercise is to run a first time reader audit on my blog. This means getting a friend or family member who had not read your blog, loading it up for them to navigate through while we sit quietly watching. I was to take note of how they navigated through the blog, What they clicked on, What they read and what they missed. Then when they had finished as a few questions about design of the blog, first impressions etc.

So I asked my husband if he would be my first time reader of my blog. Just as Michele and Sue mentioned my husband has not read my blog either. So after he had returned home from working a 10 hour day I made sure I fed him first then got him to go through my blog.

This is what I saw:

The first thing he did was scroll down the page to read the second post. Asked what was my blogroll and MyBlogLog. He liked the pictures and that is what had caught his attention on the second post. Mentioned that there was a lot of information and was very interesting.  He then went on to ask how he would add some of the things I mentioned in the post about Firefox addins to the browser on his laptop.

Now it was my turn to ask him a few questions. His first impression was that it was a nice easy to read design, he liked the colours found it easy to get around. The things he liked best were the pictures and suggested that a picture should be placed at the top of the post rather than at the end, which is how had it on several posts. the things he remembered about the blog 10 minutes after was the design and the pictures that had been included. He also liked the idea (once I explained what MyBloglog was) of seeing who else had visited the blog. He did not know about using the categories or tags to find similar posts or even where if if he could add a comment.

And best of all he finished his tour of my blog with “You know I love you and think all of these things you do are great”  So everyone’s happy.

What I learnt from my Audit

After 25 years of marriage my husband still loves me

As I have found when developing software – just because I know what something is or what its use is don’t assume that everyone else does.

Pictures tell a thousand words.

Changes I will make

I will change the wording of myblogroll to My Other Sites

Add a list of other blogs I read

I will put pictures closer to the top of a post if appropriate.

Add more images

Think about adding more information for the first time viewer about navigating site and explain things like tags and categories and how to add comments.

All in all a good exercise that should be undertaken more than once and always good to get feedback from readers, so please keep comments coming.

Now on to the next task – Search for and Join Forums on Blogs Topic