Web Services

A few more bits of inspiration for UCL bloggers…

• Orwell Diaries – Why publish a diary in the traditional way, when you can blog? This adds a new dimension to a posthumous diary – now Orwell’s diaries are open to all, and also open for all to comment on. Personally I’m keen to see how this will develop – will the multitude of comments distract from Orwell’s writings?
• ColourLovers Colour and Design Blog – An attractive blog that is yet another attraction for visitors of the ColourLovers site. Extra effort is made for each post to appear well-designed, and to also be genuinely useful/interesting, thus guaranteeing visitors are sure to return at a later date.
• RadioNation AudioBlog – I suppose this is similar to the concept of a podcast, except that it’s theoretically easier for visitors to discuss and comment on individual audio ‘posts’. Strangely, I can remember personal audioblogs being more popular around 4 or 5 years ago, but I struggled to find any particularly good examples for this today.

As mentioned previously in this blog, it seems that we’re always being asked  to set up new new blogs for UCL staff. While everyone has preconceived ideas of what a blog should be, we thought it might be worth looking through some successful sites that might give potential bloggers ideas of what they could do.

• UCL Slade Centre for Electronic Media in Fine Art Blog – a colourful blog used to highlight events,  news and items of interest relevant to the department. Personally, this is my favourite type of blog: the author notices something they find fascinating, and therefore posts the relevant details to share with others. If I visit a blog like this, and I share the same kinds of interests as its authors, then I’ll keep revisiting it because I know I’ll consistently get interesting content that won’t take an age to read through.

• UCL Research Challenges Blog – short chunks of information posted within the blog about possible research themes and ideas. The blog is aimed purely at discussion from readers, rather than giving a longer post/article and allowing readers to add short comments to it afterward.

• Edge Hill Web Services – Various members of their staff contribute to the blog with new items of interest, developments on the web, but also just letting readers know what’s happening in their department.

• Indexed (above) – Who says blogs have to be text-based? Ingenious Venn-diagrams about life, the universe and everything, presented for the public to discuss.

More to follow…