Week 5 - Experiment 1

As my tutorial was last week, I was not scheduled in this Friday. I have been working independently on developing my project.

For my first experiment I asked some of my friends to answer a simple questionnaire about their blogs, so that I would have a better grounding for the criteria through which I will assess the success of the blogs I make later. I used Facebook to send the questions out, for convenience and to make sure people replied quickly.

As you can see, I tried to leave the questions open-ended (e.g. why did you choose it) so I could gather a wide range of opinion; I got about 12 replies which gave me a good amount of information to work with.

Here is an example of the kind of replies I received.

I chose to show Olivia as an example as her blog is the most successful in terms of the most followers, and as she has just be awarded 'Best New Fashion Blog' at the Cosmopolitan Blog Awards (well done Liv!)

Instead of posting the rest of my replies on here, I have read them and written a summary, trying to include everything people have said.

First, most notably, my friends used either Tumblr or Blogspot. Wordpress was not represented at all in my survey, except by my tutor. This is interesting to observe; apparently Wordpress caters to a different age group/ clientele. Tumblr and Blogspot were equally represented by my peers, and interestingly they preferred to follow blogs of the same type as theirs. There was one exception, a Tumblr user who favoured "proper blogs on Blogspot". The fact that users gave similar reasons for using their chosen site (easy, quick, customisable) made me wonder if they were really that different, but a pattern did emerge of Tumblr being better suited to image posts and Blogspot lending itself well to more wordy posts. One Blogspot user said "posts feel more special" but of course this is just his opinion. People seem to find both blog providers easy to use, though one Tumblr user mentioned it was only easy "once you get your head around it". Of everyone I asked, the Tumblr accounts had between 20 and 1700 followers, whereas the Blogspot blogs' followers ranged from 92 to 1105, not a huge difference. Tumblr seemed to used more for displaying work and Blogspot more for fun, but they crossed over. Though this was not the case for my friends (many of whom are illustrators)  I have observed that a lot of Tumblr users simply re-blog existing images, whereas Blogspot users are more likely to post original material.

The most interesting part of the survery revealed what people thought was missing from their blog providers. The improvements they suggested were:

• Making it easier to see how many people read your blog and more information about them (location etc)
• Separating the words and pictures onto two separate pages
• Easier access to images
• Larger images/videos
• Better comment system, so individual comments could be addressed (incorporate instant messaging?)
• Making it easier to blog from a smartphone
• Being able to add other people's posts to a list of favourites. 

Now I need to move on to my 2nd experiment: making the 3 blogs. I will refer back to what I have learnt here when I come to analysing them in terms of efficiency and success.