Blogger

When our group discussed how we would go about documenting the progress of our collaborative work, we knocked around the typical ideas — PowerPoint slides, a traditional paper, a website, you name it. We ultimately decided that if we were providing a basic analysis of how Google's groupware supports computer-supported collaborative work, it made the most sense for us to use a Google application and have the use of that tool serve as a sort of meta-experience — which we would, of course, record as well. Google Pages and Google Blogger were the top choices for our presentation, though Google unveiled Google Presentation approximately 2/3 of the way through our project timeline.

Pages allows users to create fairly basic websites (hosted on the Google server) using preset templates that are sufficiently modifiable. Blogger is the ubiquitous blog-in-a-metaphorical-box application Google offers as a means of "helping people have their own voice on the web and organizing the world's information from the personal perspective." We chose Blogger because it afforded us more opportunity for interaction between group members, the class as a whole, and perhaps even passer-by that might have something interesting to contribute to our discussion. What follows is a simple breakdown of how we are using blogger as a collaboration and presentation tool, What you will not find here is a detailed analysis of the user interface, an html vs. wysiwyg editing debate (Jason used both to overcome some of Blogger's wysiwig issues), shortcomings of the image uploader, or the like. At least not right now, anyway.

Barb established the blog for our group and used Blogger's "Permissions" menu to add additional authors to the blog. While she had set each of us as contributing authors (allowing us to post to the blog at any time), we would ultimately need to go back in and reset each of our permissions to allow each of us administrative privileges. While this might not be desirable for most collaborative publishing situations, we had predetermined that we wanted to allow each group member to go in and edit each other's posts to add additional thoughts, edit out extraneous comments, and generally fine-tune our posts.




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With that in mind, one of the drawbacks to this collaborative publishing environment is that only the original author's name appears on the post — though all four group members may have played a hand in shaping the final post. To the best of our knowledge, Blogger does not permit posts to be authored by more than one registered author — at least not very easily. One way we could have avoided this issue was to establish one "group author" that we all posted under, while we drafted our individual posts in Google Docs or via Gmail. This option seemed a bit laborious and time-consuming for our limited timeframe, so we thought it was an appropriate compromise to make for efficiency's sake.

Once each of us was established as an author with admin privileges, we set the "Blog Readers" status to let "anyone" view our blog and we made sure that readers and collaborators were able to comment on each post.

Posting is fairly intuitive, assuming the average user has a certain amount of experience navigating a basic website. Upon logging in at blogspot.com, users are presented with their Blogger Dashboard — a simple menu listing which blogs they may post to or administer. From there, the user is invited to view the blog, author a new post, create an entirely new blog, edit existing posts, settings, or layout (if an admin user). Simple as it may seem, this interface is actually fairly critical. It offers users the basics at the beginning — just enough to get the user to the next step — and then unveils the suite of additional features. This eliminates user confusion and carefully walks the user through the process.



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While we mentioned that a detailed analysis of the user interface would not be covered here, a few kudos and complaints are salient to the discussion. First, Bloggers "New Post" page is simple, straightforward and immediately responsive to user input. The title box is clear. The text box for the blog entry is not labeled, but it occupies a substantial enough screen real estate to imply its purpose. The user is able to toggle back and forth between "Compose" (a wysiwyg editing window) and "HTML edit" (a window showing the raw html behind the post). The window also features a "Preview" tag that affords the user the opportunity of seeing how the post will look when it is published. Unfortunately, our experience showed that there is a substantial discrepancy between a) what is show in the compose window, b) what is shown in the preview window, and c) what actually appears when the post is published to the web. For this reason we found ourselves forced to have an additional window open at all times with the blog pulled up, so that we could see our changes as they really appeared each time we published a post.


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We also encountered major issues attempting to use the wysiwig editor to add images. While we certainly could have created the html tags for images already hosted on the internet, we had to use Blogger's "Add Images" button (represented by a small landscape photo) to upload our screenshots. The upload interface, like the new post page, is clear, free of clutter, and concise. While we wish Blogger might have a more robust image editing option before upload this was more than adequate for our purposes. We encountered problems, however, when we were taken back to the main page. Regardless of where our cursor was when we went to the upload pop-up box, the image was inserted into the beginning of the post. This meant that we had to drag each uploaded images down to its appropriate spot in the post after it had been uploaded. And while this wasn't terribly difficult, the small text editing window (that users cannot resize regardless of how big their browser window is) made moving images around in a post sufficiently annoying.




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Because the wysiwig editor does not permit the user to cut and then paste the image from one part of the post to another, we had to drag the image down through the post, then move the scrollbar down -- and do it again until we reached the appropriate spot. If there's an easier way to do this, it certainly isn't obvious.

One of the invaluable features of using Blogger as a collaborative publishing tool is the robust RSS aggregation options. Each user was able to use their own RSS aggregator to subscribe to the blog's post and/or comments feeds and keep track of changes made by each editor as we went about the work of publishing the blog together.