wild thoughts: my experience on the NDP moblog
Intro | have the objectives of the NDP blog-for-a-cause been met?
technical and support issues | what Real Bloggers think about the NDP blog

I felt the blog-for-a-cause event became too competitive.

I feel all the causes are worthy of support. And to "compete" with them was distasteful to me.

If people could enter their support quickly, simply and for free; and there were no counters, it would probably be more natural. The blogs would be more of a platform to showcase the cause, attracting newcomers to the cause and allowing others, including existing supporters, to share their thoughts and add depth to the blog entries. Instead of merely a rallying point for a handful of diehard supporters.

Have the objectives of the NDP blog-for-a-cause been met?
The official aim of the blog-for-a-cause contest, as taken from HostSara's posting was:

The Foundation theme of this year’s NDP is “A Progressive Society”. This theme seeks to highlight our strengths and values such as resilience, adaptability, enterprise, creativity & dare in the new age.

Blog-for-a-Cause aims to proliferate the sense of community consciousness that underline these values. The public participates by posting comments about the respective causes in the blogger’s NDP blogsites. Through this, it is hoped that lively community discussions could be sparked off.

To allow Singaporeans who are passionate about their Causes to have an innovative and hopefully effective channel to champion them and in so doing, make a difference.

Sense of Community?
Perhaps this would have been better achieved by allowing EVERYONE and ANYONE to participate in the mobolg. Those excluded in the current set-up include:

• People without handphones (e.g., youths and younger kids who can nevertheless access the internet)
  
• MI and Starhub subscribers
• Singaporeans overseas
  
• People who would not want to fork out the SMS charges for each comment
  
• People who would rather not register and be at the end of the promotional messages that get sent to those registered
  

It would have perhaps be better to allow anyone with internet access to take part, without registration. This is true of most standard blogs.

Lively community discussions?
Lively community discussion would only be possible if more people know about and are encouraged to participate.

Publicity? Initially, I got the impression that there would be publicity about the blog.

In the end, aside from the press conference at "go live" well before National Day, there was not much other publicity that I know of.

The moblog wasn't even extensively advertised on the NDP website, aside from a missable button on the right corner. Even at the article on the moblog launch on the NDP website, the link was not to the moblog but to the Singtel website.

Role of hosts? Initially, I got the impression that the hosts would generate interest to visit the various blogs.

While HostSara did her best to generate discussion, this was mainly among bloggers.

Towards the end of the moblog period, HostPhilip directed traffic to the Singtel Moblog site instead of the NDP bloggers.

With most of the blogs inactive, readers might give up after going into the first one or two blogs. It would be more useful to have lastest blog entries among all the blogs to be listed at the top of the main page. Or highlight the most active bloggers.

Even the "Pick of the Week" section of the moblog was not used to highlight active blogs.This section of the moblog was activated only twice in the entire moblog period, with the last posting on 24 Jul.

Without much public interest, I guess bloggers can't be blamed for not being very motivated to keep their blogs updated. And without updated blogs, there isn't much to attract the public, particularly with all the charges and registration and sign up procedures. A catch-22 situation that only worsens with time.

Encouraged to participate? Several issues suggested that encouraging participation by normal visitors was NOT a major principle in the design of the moblog. Technical difficulties of registering, exclusion of groups of interested people due to technical issues, technical complexity of participating in chat rooms, sending comments or even simply navigating in the main blog page and within blog sites.

There was some lively discussion but only among the few who made it into the discussions in the first place and could put up with these difficulties. This necessarily meant that most were friends of bloggers who were kind enough to persevere. It did not allow newcomers to comfortably discuss with bloggers or each other.

For bloggers with a lot of entries, it was hard to track down the new comments and reply to all of them, and thus to keep the discussions going.

The chat function didn't seem to take off. I myself never figured out how to do it. And the only people who initiated the chat function in my blog were the moderators or hosts. Perhaps it would be better to allow anyone with internet access to chat directly on the computer screen instead of a complex series of sms codes.

Innovative and effective channel for bloggers?
There were a lot of technical and support bug bears. Compared to standard blog engines available on the internet, the NDP blog engine doesn't appear very "progressive" to put it mildly.

On the whole, the current engine is NOT friendly to bloggers who REGULARLY put up a LOT of content with lots of links. Neither was it friendly to the readers of such blogs.

Perhaps some of the NDP bloggers would have been more regular if blogging was easier?

More about these technical and support issues.

(Written 30 Aug 04)