Clarity and Focus in Blog Layouts

Working my way through the process of typesetting my old blog posts for the print-on-demand edition of Thoughtport had one unforeseen outcome. I began to appreciate the simplicity and clarity of seeing my words typeset on a clear white page without any digital clutter surrounding them.

When I returned to writing on the Blogger platform, I found the online presentation of my content too busy and distracting. Up to then, I had always used some variant of the conventional two-column blog layout. This was a primary column containing the posts with a sidebar column of ancillary information, navigation, and outbound links. I adopted that fundamental layout structure on the first day of this site. Over the years I had updated and adjusted the types of content displayed in both the sidebar, and in what became a deep footer. But I had never taken a top level review of what I should include and what I should remove. Were the sidebar functions in any way helpful, or were they distracting from my primary content?

I read all my blog subscriptions within the Reeder RSS aggregator app. This imposes one standard visual treatment on to all blogs. So I had become unfamiliar with the design layout of the HTML versions of the blogs I read regularly. I did some ad-hoc research to see what was working well.

Gemmell follows his own design principles in the layout of his blog.

Jeffery Zeldman’s layout seems perfectly optimised for reading on a tablet.

Although John Gruber still uses a sidebar.

Having decided to simplify the design of my blog to deliver some of the positive features I observed in the clarity of my book layout, I was fortunate to then read this wonderful post by Matt Gemmell: ‘Designing blogs for readers.’ (I recommend you read his whole article.) He advocates a merciless editing of blog layouts to focus on legibility and content.  I found that, whether consciously or otherwise, many of the writers I admire had adopted many of his recommendations in the presentation of their material. Gemmell’s arguments convinced me to go much much farther in redesigning this site than I had considered. These images of my previous blog layouts illustrate how much I have changed this site’s design over time.

How this blog looked way way back in 2006. Jiminiy!

Still very busy in 2010 presenting too many distracting links.

This was the last layout I used before introducing the new clarified treatment.

In the end, I removed everything from both the secondary sidebar and the deep footer this time. I changed the harsh white background to a soft creamy white and replaced all of the san-serif typefaces with a serif faces typeset at a larger size. One significant outcome of this new design is that this site is now far more tablet-friendly.

The new reconsidered layout brings my content to the fore and optimises for attentive reading. By reducing distractions and providing some necessary stillness, I hope that I have improved your engagement with my writing.

Quite meta I know, but here is a screen-shot of this post in the new layout.

Excisions And Omissions from ‘Thinking Out Loud’

There are some differences between the printed edition and this online version of my blog. While it may be possible that not many copies of the volume will be printed, I wanted to note those differences here.

My initial impulse for creating the print-on-demand edition was to produce an archival volume of my complete blog. Therefore, I originally included every blog post in the manuscript. However, typesetting everything resulted in a far greater page count than I had anticipated. So I needed to edit my existing content down to a page count that I was more comfortable with.

One complicating factor in deciding which material to excise is that my own perception of the ‘job to be done’ for my blog has evolved over the years. So I had to make decisions about a variety of different classes and categories of blog posts. I decided that the essence of what I most usefully wanted to record in the volume was my own thinking. So firstly I could dispense with all of my published posts where that was not the core focus.

Many of my early posts from 2004 and 2005 were merely web links with short accompanying descriptions, and that text was often only cut and pasted from the linked source page. This was before Evernote had evolved to its current form. One of my primary uses for my blog during that time was as a searchable online archive. There was no value in including that class of posts when editing the volume. I did decide to retain a very small number of such minor posts from 2004 that convey some sense of what finding my feet in my early days of blogging was like.

In retrospect it seems surprisingly prescient or somewhat telling that my second and third posts were concerned with initial attempts at uploading content into the Blogger CMS using my 2004-era featurephone. Wholly without prior consideration on my part, those first brief posts turned out to be the seeds of one of the stronger emergent themes of the collection. So while it may have taken time to find my voice, some of my themes were there right from the start.

Then in 2008, while I was blogging my way through my Masters, I began to cross-post some pertinent tweets onto this blog in a Thought for the Day series. I have retained those tweets within the printed volume but, rather than typeset them as complete posts, I gathered them together in the first appendix.

Also during 2008 I ran a complementary series of posts called Quote of the Day highlighting some interesting or inspiring quotations that I had come across during my MA research. As none of those posts included my own commentary I omitted all of them.

I posted the majority of my MA original research on Blogging in the Irish Graphic Design Sector onto this blog as well. I omitted the substantial amount of my quantitative research, which is mostly voluminous check-lists of Irish design companies’ social media activities during 2009. All of that research material still remains available online and would have seemed incongruous and redundant within the printed edition.

There were some interesting (and popular) posts which I omitted solely due to their lack of any of my own commentary, such as the evergreen Colin Powell’s Rules of Leadership. For any number of reasons, not least copyright violation, I did not want to republish any directly reblogged content.

Another small number of posts were so dependant on embedded video that they made little sense within the context of a book.

Finally I had to make some judgement calls. I omitted certain posts that concerned friends and family. While there would be no reason to retroactively whitewash those posts out of the online blog (they are still available here) they just did not contribute enough to the overall arc of my blog to warrant their inclusion.

All of those excisions gave me a more focused manuscript without losing sight of my original intent of producing a representative printed archive of my writing on this blog.

My Book ‘Thinking Out Loud’

So I decided to make a book version of this blog. I made it for myself. It is called Thinking Out Loud and it looks like this. 

Given that so much of my writing on this blog is essentially Digital-First Advocacy, it is worth addressing the question of why I have invested time and effort into reconfiguring my blog writing into a paper-based artifact? There are a set of related answers to that question.

The first reason is the sense of agency achieved by creating an alternative second home for my writing that exists apart from the Blogger platform. My current belief is that Google’s Blogger product is unlikely to be depreciated within the next few years, as was the case with Google Reader which they closed down in July of this year. That said, since I do not host my own blog on my own server, I have to be very respectful of the fact that every single word I have published on this platform since 2004 is always only ever available at the whims of Google. So there is a lot be said for being able to read this material in a separate context not beholden to Google or to anyone else. While a printed edition hardly counts as a viable back-up, there is something (non-logically) reassuring about having my complete blog in one discrete container in my shelf.

While doing some work-related research into ebook publishing at the end of last year I became intrigued with the idea of this blog existing as an ebook. After that initial idea took hold, a cloud of unanswered questions occurred to me. What different characteristics might my blog exhibit when reconfigured within a book format? (Even as the person most familiar with this blog, I still find it challenging to comprehensively conceive of its remit, scope, and what I can only think of as its overall shape.) Would a hard copy make that shape more comprehensible and apparent to me? Would my writing read any differently when presented on paper as opposed to on screen? Was there any overarching narrative themes to my writing over the years? And would those themes become more apparent when presented in a traditional oldest-to-newest chronology? (Blogger presents posts in a reversed chronology, with the latest posts first and older material progressively further downstream.)

What started out as a seemingly uncomplicated idea – producing a hard copy archive of what I had written on this blog – took on a life of its own and my little side-project hobby gradually expanded its scope.

The ‘minimal viable product’ approach would have been just to re-purpose this blog as an electronic book for my Kindle. After considering the amount of work involved in producing an ebook, it seemed to be only a short distance from doing that to creating a physical on-demand printed version. In retrospect, I was very very wrong about that.

To make the book, I had to take on the roles of sub-editor, designer, typesetter, and proof-reader. As a result of taking that one-man-band approach, completing this book needed precisely zero meetings, emails, phone calls , or other mechanisms of coordination. Obviously then, any and all errors of comprehension, argument, logic, reasoning, referencing, attribution, spelling and typography are solely my own responsibility.

Firstly, I needed to correct the assorted typos and grammatical errors that I uncovered. As I originally intended the print-on-demand edition to be an accurate archive of the online version, I made all of those corrections within the Blogger CMS. I did not want to fork the content and end up with an alternative improved version on my own bookshelf and the less polished version representing me online.

For various reasons, above and beyond the fact of an unreasonable page count, I ultimately decided that I needed to edit out all of the posts which did not logically or usefully translate across to a printed edition. However, I left in as much material as possible. So this is definitely not an edited-highlights version of my blog. It still includes plenty of examples of my early writing that personally I find somewhat challenging to re-read.

Admittedly, most of the free time I would normally have spent writing new blog posts this year has been absorbed with all those inter-related tasks involved in putting together a book. That is my explanation for the paucity of all-new posts that I have published so far this year. So there was a definite opportunity cost in pursuing this project. Arguably, producing this book may not have been the optimal use of my spare cycles. But, in counterpoint to that, I wanted to create a tangible realisation of my existing writing. I thought that having the book would being me some joy and a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.

My initial reaction to having the physical object since yesterday is that – even though I might be tending towards being ‘Mr. Digital’ these days – I have to admit that holding a printed copy of your own book in your hands is very satisfying.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I made this book for myself. Now having my own hard copy sitting on my bookshelf realises my original intention. That said, I have published this book using Lulu.com which means it is also available to order print-on-demand for anyone else who is interested in having their own copy. Print and delivery took just under two weeks for my copy.

You can purchase copies of Thinking Out Loud here.

Everything included in the print on-demand version will always remain available online here. This blog will still be the canonical version, due to it being both pointable-at and deep-linkable-to. The print on-demand version is a snapshot in time.

Blogs as Apps

For the first time I am actively considering the possibility that this blog could migrate to a different publishing platform. Google’s Blogger platform – although it is incrementally much improved – has not been fundamentally reconfigured in the nine years that I have been using it. The online publishing environment has evolved significantly over that time. Blogger is a stable and dependable product. However, whether it still remains the best platform for this particular blog is now an open question. Specifically I am thinking now about a potential future where I could publish this blog within a stand-alone iOS app. A line of thinking directly inspired by Craig Mod’s ‘Subcompact Publishing’ article from November 2012.

Mod’s key points are that online publishing today needs simple tools wrapped in minimal containers. Readers need to be able to subscribe to an author’s writing in the most simple efficient manner. RSS never made much sense for consumers. So creating a better kind of consumer-facing RSS is a useful first step. Then, given the devices people read on today there is need for optimal clarity and precision in the presentation of content within a minimal UI. He states that any novel subcompact publishing is future-facing, as its customers are most likely to be emergent content producers rather then incumbents, who by definition are embedded within an existing publishing system.

The conversations coalescing around the desire for a potential “Moveable Type For Mobile Publishing” suggest an idea whose time may have arrived. The quality and breadth of discussion inspired by Mod’s article suggests this idea occupies the notional space that VCs refer to as the ‘Adjacent Possible’. Although I can clearly see why the subcompact idea is a compelling Adjacent Possible, I do have to ask then, why has no-one disrupted the mature blogging platforms with such a mobile-first replacement? We are now more than five years into the ascent of the smartphone ecosystems and I do not yet see a viable champion of mobile-first blog publishing.

To clarify my thinking at this point I need to make one critical distinction between the class of novel standalone Blog-Delivery apps which would provide a subcompact container for a blog’s readers and the class of established Blog-Enabling apps (think WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, SquareSpace and the like) which give authors smartphone access into their chosen blogging platform’s CMS.

Today’s primary blogging platforms are still all desktop-first. Yes, they do all have their own mobile Blog-Enabling apps, and are addressing the new mobile reality by implementing responsive design and other tactics. Both their history and the foundations of their platforms were all built upon the desktop Internet.

• A chronology of major blogging platforms
• Blogger (Pyra Labs) founded in 1999.
• Moveable Type (Six Apart) founded in 2001.
• WordPress founded in 2003.
• SquareSpace founded in 2003.
• Tumblr founded in 2007.
• LiveJournal, Typepad, and Posterous were other credible blogging platforms, but did they not achieve longevity within this timespan. 

I am specifically concerned with thinking through the issues for single-author blogs here, rather than addressing the needs of the larger publication-scale blogs with multiple authors, (think TechCrunch, The Verge, Engadget and ReadWriteWeb). That class of news aggregation blogs have already embraced delivery via their own dedicated apps in support of their page-view driven advertising revenue models. If app-based delivery can work for that blogging model, then some adapted variant could be useful for the smaller single-author blogging model.

It is surprising how few bloggers have released their own apps. One pessimistic hypothesis could be that the heyday of blogging is past. The existing cohort of bloggers are all wedded to their chosen platforms. Perhaps the majority of nascent proto-bloggers are now writing on social media platforms and see decreasing value in the effort required to maintain a dedicated blog. If the significant addressable market for blogs-as-apps is too small then the products will not be developed. That said one or two of such apps do already exist.

I installed the app version of Seth Godin’s blog when it was released in December 2012. While his app offers some moderately useful functions, such as creating an archive of favourite posts and cloud sync across all of your devices, using it never become a habit of mine. I did not discover sufficient additional utility from having his blog’s content available within a stand-alone app. (Now in my particular case, that may be because it is the only blog on my daily reading list which I do not read via RSS. My email subscription to Godin’s blog predating my adoption of Bloglines as my first feed reader some time in 2002. So perhaps more than ten years of an email-based reading habit is simply too difficult to break.) Another factor which may be limiting my adoption of his app is that Godin’s blog is very much a one-way publishing channel. He does not support comments to his posts. So any conversations around his ideas must necessarily take place off-site.

So where a dedicated blog app may potentially prove more useful would be for the class of blog which delivers as much of its significant value from the conversations taking place within the comments as from the posts. Trying to follow longer and more involved comment threads within mobile browsers is still a sub-optimal experience: one with many opportunities for improvements and for potential innovations.

One appropriate example which I have in mind is Horace Dediu’s essential Asymco blog. Most of his posts seem intended as starting points for discussion with his audience. He actively seeks their collective knowledge and insight to improve and expand upon his initial thesis. Reading Asymco within an RSS Reader merely delivers his original inciting arguments; without the depth of any broader discussions which follow.

However, as a lot of my own available recreational reading time tends to be when I am limited to mobile access, I find that I do not follow those conversations in as much detail as I would like to. I find that following the debates on a desktop browser is far more effective than on a mobile browser, mostly because of the way that the user experience has been configured and presented on each platform. Asymco’s interface in the desktop browser is a very effective at delivering the site’s content. The corresponding mobile interface uses a standard WordPress mobile theme. Which I find problematic as once comments are nested more than three indents deep their legibility is significantly impaired. I end up trying to read paragraphs set with only one or two words per line.

So to appropriate the key investigative tool from Dediu’s own methodology – what would be the ideal job-to-be-done that would be solved by delivering that blog packaged within its own dedicated app? Could a notional Asymco app further enhance the user experience of reading the comment threads? And what additional, novel, and superior functionality, such as increased levels of valid participation within the Asymco community, could such an app version afford? A line of thinking worth exploring further.

I think that Ev William’s new Medium project is one interesting response to some – yet not all – of the issues I have been ruminating on here. As a contemporary web product, its authoring tools and CMS incorporate the latest technology in a thoughtful and considered manner. Yet it seems to me that its essential business model is not to become an underlying publishing platform. (I doubt that you will see ‘Powered By Medium’.) Rather than being able to build and establish my own blog on top of their platform, the affordance provided is more for me to write within their framework. It is a subtle distinction – but a critical one. I worry that, if say I adopted that platform, my writing would ultimately end up building the Medium master-brand, rather than my own personal brand. (Although my initial analysis may prove incorrect, as while I was drafting this post, the online magazine Epic has launched using Medium as its delivery mechanism.)

This has turned out to be a post where I have asked a lot of questions without a clear idea about what the answers may be. It just indicates that there is still a lot left to think about the topic of blogging and that there is plenty of scope for innovation and new ideas in this area.

Innovations in technology will always create new affordances that open up new opportunities around the acts of writing and publishing. Opportunities for collaboration, critique, debate and conversation. Opportunities for distributing ideas and connecting with audiences.

I am convinced of the benefits that accrue from writing consistently in public. It is a practice to which I remain committed. Over the long term, whether my writing is delivered by an evolved blogging platform or via some as-yet-to-be-created novel technology is less significant then the act of publishing the work and making is available for debate and discussion.

The writing is what is important.

Update

My opinions about reading the Asymco blog in a mobile browser were formed back when that site just used the most common mobile Wordpress theme. After just checking Asymco, it would be remiss of me not to note that blog now uses the mobile Basic Maths theme by Khoi Vinh and Allan Cole which has a superior smartphone UI. Although not addressing all of the commenting issues that I discussed, it definitely makes reading the comment threads a much more feasible endeavour.

Revisited, Revised, Remixed and Remastered

I am working on an archival copy of Thoughtport using Blurb.com’s ‘print your blog as a hardback book’ service. Contrary to my usual digital-first stance, I have now become interested in seeing what my blog will be like as a physical artifact. What will the heft and weight of eight year’s worth of writing be like when it is paper in my hands? Also, I still find it quite remarkable that it is now technically feasible and cost-effective to have a single copy of a book printed for our home bookshelf.

Unlocking the Value Within Podcasts

I am interested in the tendency of many of the bloggers whom I regularly read to now also become podcasters. These are people who have blogged successfully over many years, yet now seem to need to augment that activity with regular podcasting. Of course, bloggers have always appeared on podcasts as guests or as interviewees but this is a far more noticeable trend now – it seems to have almost become a given for full-time bloggers to also have their own related podcast. Even in cases where their key strength remains in the written word.

Dicta-Blog

I tried dictating a blog post this afternoon for the first time. The new Mountain Lion OS now allows me to easily dictate into the laptop. I had the house to myself this weekend, so I could easily grab a quiet hour to natter away. As part of my experiment I composed the blog post on the spot, rather than work from draft notes as I usually do. I had been listening to lots of podcasts doing chores over the weekend, so I did a brain-download on that topic.

A few initial observations (some about the technology and some about my writing style):

Analysis of Eight Years Blogging

I began writing this blog eight years ago today. My three hundred and twenty-two blog posts completed to date average out at slightly less than one post a week. So ‘quality rather than quantity’ seems to have become my preferred approach. (Well that is my story and I am sticking with it.)

All of my existing posts are distributed across the eight years in this manner. This year’s value is for the first six months of 2012

8 YEARS OF THOUGHTPORT POSTS | Create infographics

I studied for my Masters during 2008 and 2009 and purposefully used blogging as a learning mechanism throughout. Hence the massive spike in posts published during that twelve month period. This graph highlights my complete writing burn-out in post-dissertation 2010. While I have learned not to make any forward-looking statements, I think I am safe enough in predicting that I will not exceed my personal best of 77 posts again this year.

The graph below shows the monthly distribution of my posts for each year. The earlier months are at the top and later months at the bottom (months with no posts get omitted automatically). You can roll-over each bar in the graph for its month heading.

Looking through this monthly breakdown it seems there is no real pattern or seasonality in when I am most productive in my writing.

A Modest Proposal: Content Credits to Offset New Broadcast Charge

I find it difficult to reconcile all of the actual media consumption that I observe around me with the Government’s mooted new Universal Broadcasting Charge intended to support large scale state-sponsored broadcasters.

Consider this domestic snapshot from last Saturday. My son glued to his iPod watching a succession of home-made Lego stop-motion animations on YouTube (this week’s novelty for his six-year old attention). At the same time my daughter was watching some Studio Ghibli movies in the original Japanese (even though she cannot read the subtitles yet). I was catching up on some 5by5 podcasts while doing housework. This mélange of professional, semi-pro and wholly user-generated content is typical of the mix of media consumed by the people formally known as the audience. Welcome to the 21st century mediascape.


So the existing Irish TV licence is an anachronism given the ever-increasing convergence and democratisation of media. Therefore something is obviously going to change. But is it appropriate to levy a flat charge for all media consumption for the benefit of specific actors within the mediascape. I foresee robust debate about where the proceeds of such a broadcasting charge are to be distributed.

Reading between the lines of recent Irish Times’ commentary about the proposed charge, I see them already angling for some portion of the resultant subvention fund. I think they want to broaden the state’s framing of what a broadcaster is within the terms of the relevant legislation. If some of those monies are indeed passed on to The Irish Times, then how much should go to Journal.ie, to Politics.ie, or to Broadsheet.ie? And you can just keep on adding names to that list…

But wait, aren’t we all broadcasters now? I broadcast hundreds of tweets, status updates and Instagrams each year. Not to forgot the occasional essay on this blog. A lot of people I know are equally as active as content producers, each broadcasting to their own web audiences. At present we do not receive any state support for our myriad broadcasting activities. Surely we are just as deserving as the Joe Duffys and the Pat Kennys? Who will right this injustice?

Here is a mischievous idea; why not also offset any new broadcasting charges with a system of ‘Content Credits’? Then those who merely graze and consume content* without broadcasting and contributing back into the mediascape would pay the full amount. While net contributors would have their charges reduced in line with their broadcasting activities. I can imagine a sliding scale: maybe a tweet would be worth one cent per thousand followers, while a blog post would earn a one-euro credit per thousand words per hundred impressions. Or, if that kind of approach allowed people to easily spam the system, perhaps the credits could be calculated as a multiplier of people’s Klout score or some similar metric.

Would you be happy to blog your way to a reduced broadcast charge?

* Lets call them “Content Spongers”. (It is almost too much fun not to resist the urge to spin the rhetoric around.) Think of all the One-Percenters sponging on the system who only consume content and contribute nothing back to the Internets.

Blogger iOS App: What Took You so Long?

The Blogger UI compared with Google+ and SquareSpace apps. (One thought: orange, seriously?)

I have just downloaded the first official Blogger iOS app from Google this morning. I am posting my initial thoughts and reactions while trying it out.

Firstly, I have to note that it is surprising that it took Google so long to launch this product. They introduced an Android version of the app earlier this year. The iPhone is four years old now and plenty of third-party Blogger client apps have been brought to market in that time, so the demand for this product has been there. Leaving aside the current antipathy between Google and Apple, the iPhone has a substantial user base that has to be well worth serving. Plus, I do not think the shine has gone off mobile blogging yet.

For a long-awaited product this app is very rudimentary. All of Google’s services, including Blogger, have all been getting a badly needed and long overdue update of their UI over the course of this Summer and are now much improved. There is little evidence of that kind of design thinking in the 1.0 release of this app. The recent Google+ app has been criticised in my circles for lacking functionality, features and finish. However, it is a work of art compared to this product.

My only experience to date with a blogging app has been the official SquareSpace client app that I use for our company website. The difference in both appearance and functionality between the two apps is stark. This Blogger 1.0 app is such a bare-bones client in contrast.

Given they have taken so long to provide this minimal app, I wonder how aggressive their update schedule is going to be and how much focus, attention and support Blogger is getting within Google. This product needs a lot of iteration.

Some people are all about their blog analytics and I expect that they will be a strongly requested feature for the next release, but I will be asking for Markdown support in version 1.1. (Pretty please.)

Seven Years of Blogging: A Quick Reflection

This blog is seven years old today. While the core essence of blogging as an activity remains little changed since 2004, it is chastening to look back at how limited the Blogger service’s bare bones feature set was back then. It is also interesting to think about some of the innovative related technologies that have come on-stream since then.

Get Your Blog On

A friend of mine has been talking about setting up a blog, and then talking and talking about it some more. A year later and there is still no blog. Here is my advice for anyone stuck at that point. In true blogging metier, I have composed this as a ten-point list (ironic or not, you decide).

We Are All Semi-Geeks Now

Waiting on a friend in a bar the other night, I noticed that all of the conversations going on simultaneously at the three nearest tables (it was a small bar: everyone was pretty close together) were all about tech and/or social media. Now this was not a high-tech, early-adopter crowd, it was a typical off-Grafton Street Thursday night shopping crowd.

It Is Only The Map: Not The Territory

Here is a cautionary counterpoint to all of the blog-love that I normally tend to post here. It is something I came across in this Reuters feature on Larry Ellison over the weekend.


Ellison says he learned that Sun’s pony-tailed chief executive, Jonathan Schwartz, ignored problems as they escalated, made poor strategic decisions and spent too much time working on his blog, which Sun translated into eleven languages. “Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales” said Ellison.

It is always worth remembering that a blog is an adjunct to your core activities. Having a great blog is of little use unless you also ‘Do Great Work’.

How Micro Is Your Ultra-nano Niche?

In researching blogging I have identified a frustrating quandary; a Blogger’s Dilemma. I can best frame it in this way.

For clarity I am going to discount blogging as a hobby here and just refer to ‘Business Blogging’. This is still a broadly-defined and imprecise term itself: one including both blogs owned by businesses and blogs written by individuals where their persistent topics are primarily concerned with their field of commercial expertise.

In my MA research the two relevant sets are the blogs of Irish graphic design companies and of individual Irish graphic designers.

While the aims and objectives of such blogs are as individual and unique as their creators, in achieving their aims they all have to address attention and reputation, which are the two currencies of the Internet.

To maximize attention and gain the best (reputational) return on their efforts, it is worth considering whether their best approach to go ultra-narrow in focus and become the recognised expert of a very unique and specific area. For example by become Ireland’s expert blogger on the design of corporate identity systems for Irish state agencies; or on designing literature systems for Irish third-level institutions; or on bilingual design conforming to Official Languages Act. The scope is endless.

If a substantial cohort of professional Irish graphic design bloggers adopted this approach, the end-state would be a deep reservoir of focused experts, all discoverable via the Internet. Given that most of the blogs reviewed in my research are generalist in their approach, being far more specialized may be a viable strategy for elevating Irish graphic design blogs out of obscurity.

Summary Analysis of the Uses of Business Blogging within the Irish Graphic Design Sector

Today I am releasing this summary report of the quantitative aspect of my Master’s research. This research analyses the uses of business blogging by graphic design companies and graphic designers in Ireland and evaluates that usage against current best practice.

Existing Irish graphic design blogs are surveyed, details of their activities and characteristics are collected. The data collected on each blog is categorised. The category data for graphic design companies and individual graphic designers is compared to identify any differences in emphasis and approach between them. The category information is analysed.

In conclusion the current state of the Irish graphic design business blogosphere is evaluated. Recommendations on policies and strategies for business blogging and micro-blogging are given. An increased focus on listening and engaging with stakeholders through blogging and social media is recommended.

Please feel free to share this report and pass it along to anyone you think may be interested.

Blogging in the Irish Graphic Design Sector

Online Behaviour of Irish Graphic Design Companies

Before analysing the blogging activities of Irish graphic design companies, it is useful to give an overview of the relevant norms of online communication pre-exisitng within this sector. How the form and tone of the graphic design company websites contrast with the norms of business blogging is relevant to this research.

Much marketing of graphic design services is still constrained within the paradigm of the portfolio. Websites predominantly feature images of the outcomes of the company’s work: brand marks, brochures, packaging and so on. Even on websites making the most use of explanatory text, this is invariably a condensed project summary of the brief and deliverables, with little explanation of the analytic thinking and exploration underpinning the creative work. This approach is symptomatic of the ‘Old Economy’ mindset characterised by Krishna De as being “too afraid of giving away their insider knowledge” (De 2009, interview).

There are examples in the international graphic design industry of business blogs delivering the benefits outlined in the literature review. They enhance the understanding of the initial creative thinking that informs the design work and the personal and organisational interactions that shape its eventual form. Although they are experts in visual communication, a review of the websites of Irish graphic design companies gives little real sense of the personalities of the individuals behind the creative services being offered.

Limitations of customised website systems
Client’s baseline expectations for interactivity and engagement constantly increase and arguably now include some level of participating, commenting and sharing. None of which have yet become common features of Irish graphic design company websites, many still being online portfolios with few inbound or outbound links. Research has shown that design companies still de-emphasise the kind of community or link-based functionality that can play an important role in the business utility of their websites.

This research has observed personal blogs hosted on free service platforms delivering a far richer media experience than professional design company websites, many of which are unable to easily embed RSS feeds and other media content and cannot easily be updated with social media tools or other methods of client interaction. Rather than using standardised platforms with large installed user-bases and active developer communities (such as WordPress) the majority of the websites reviewed are one-off builds incorporating Flash elements with little semantic value. This suggests that being constrained within bespoke-developed website solutions may be one technical reason limiting the adoption of business blogging by Irish graphic design companies.

Irish Graphic Design Company Blogs in 2009

This post is a detailed listing of all 24 Irish graphic design company blogs analysed during my research project in 2009, giving details about the nature and characteristics of each blog. Any additional blogs added after September are not included in the research analysis. The full 2009 list is after the jump.

[UPDATE: The 2010 list now has its own separate page in this blog, see the ‘Irish graphic design company blogs’ tab at the top of this page.]

Irish Graphic Designer’s Blogs in 2009

This post is a detailed listing of all 22 Irish graphic designer’s blogs analysed during my MA research project in 2009 giving details about the nature and characteristics of each blog. Any additional blogs added after September are not included in the research analysis. The full 2009 list is after the jump.

UPDATE: The 2010 list now has its own separate page on this blog, see the ‘Irish graphic designer’s blogs’ tab in the masthead of this page.

On Blogger’s Antipathy to Corporate-Speak

One interesting theme emerging from my literature review is the evolving etiquette and norms concerning the appropriate tone of voice for business blogging. There are many recurring lists exhorting bloggers to be honest, be yourself, be truthful, own up to your mistakes and such-like. This propagates a misconception that no companies ever communicated in these ways before business blogging arrived.

Dave Winer, one of the originators of blogging, is an anti-corporate iconoclast who believes blogs should only ever represent the unique voice of an individual (Israel et al 2006, page 59). His stance is indicative of the observed antipathy within the blogosphere to what is characterised as ‘corporate speak’.

Although prominent bloggers can draft, rewrite, parse and craft their words as obsessively as any author (or Masters researcher), many have an undisguised aversion to what they perceive as the inoffensive, committee-written, homogeneous language of much marketing communications. Particularly when it is used within the blogosphere.

These bloggers often self-identify with that idea of the ‘unique voice’. Le Meur relates this to blogging initially flourishing in cultures where people are “accustomed to expressing our thoughts as individuals out in the open” (Israel et al 2006, page 115). Silicon Valley software developers, engineers and technology entrepreneurs, or “religiously libertarian anarchists with ponytails” (The Economist 2003), brought a counter-cultural mindset with them which typified the early phases of blogging. Israel and Scoble also perpetuate this distinction between bloggers being ‘authentic voices’ in comparison with the majority of other corporate communications, which they denigrate as an “oxymoronic hybrid of cautious legalese seasoned with marketing hyperbole” (Israel et al 2006, page 14).

Any attempt to define one ‘true voice’ for blogging can only be an exercise in futility. Any more than saying that there is one correct way to use a telephone or to write a letter. Particularly any effort to establish a certain mode of blogging as ‘authentic’ based on the characteristics of the early adopters only highlights the cultural, social and even geographic characteristics of the first cadre of bloggers.