On Group Blogging

Over at the new UIE blog, Brain Sparks, we’re taking the group blog approach. Christine, Jared, and I are each blogging one or two days a week, writing posts in the 300 word range about all the things we’re working on and finding in our research.

Group blogging, in general, seems like a good idea. These are some of the reasons:

• Eases the strain of a single blogger trying to publish quality content every day.
• It really helps to get different viewpoints on the same subject, or the same theme.
• It feels like a nice way to talk to the UIE community, and of course we’ve turned on comments for the return.
• Believe it or not, we’re learning from each other this way. The blog has made apparent that we don’t always articulate to each other what’s we’re working on at any given moment.
• We didn’t realize how nice it was to have a record of all the topics that arise during our work week. With a blog, we simply point each other and others to the post in question
• And finally, it makes good business sense, because we feel that an open dialog is the only way to interact with our community. Just look at what’s going on with Jeff Jarvis and Dell…

We modeled our blog on successful group blogs that we read ourselves: O’Reilly Radar being the primary one. They mix their blogging with their work, and it seems natural. You can even see some inspiration in the multi-colored nav bar with our names on it. We really dug that feature, because it added a human element to the design. Even if we don’t know who “Nat” is, we’re still somehow comforted by the fact that his name is there alongside Tim’s. So, although our content is completely different than O’Reilly’s, we think they’ve done a great job keeping it real.

Other group blogs that seem very successful are: boing boing, signal vs noise, and Many-to-Many

Have you had any experience with group blogging? Good…bad?

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