Collaborative Tools Project

Google want you to be you. They sort of insist. And they'd really prefer it if you, the real you had a Google+ profile. And when creating a new blog on Blogger they try and make you link it to a real person's Google+ profile. Except there's a problem. If you create blog posts with a regular Google identity when at the University of York ( or anywhere ) then if you leave, all the images from your blog posts disappear and the blog posts look as if they are written by "Unknown". Hardly ideal, in fact, pretty rubbish. I've written about this issue before. It's caused because Blogger is sort of "held in stasis"... it is not a good fit with Google's other tools and yet it is so popular it would be difficult for them to close it down. And given Google's track record with social tools, I imagine they've been working out how to close it down for a while now. The Problem A department wanted to avoid this strange behaviour of Blogger be...

When someone leaves the University of York, their account is suspended which has the knock on effect that in Blogger your blog posts are written by "Unknown".  You can still see the blog posts. Worse than that, all the media uploaded by that person also disappears. See this post here . I'm looking into the Blogger API to see if I can at least find a user's posts and re-create them as someone else as an awful workaround. I've added an Issue to the Blogger forum.... tumbleweed ... and nobody is interested. This all comes about because Blogger isn't a "Core App" of Google Apps but it's rubbish. Boo Google!   At least let us be able to transfer ownership of blog posts or something. People regularly come and go at a University and hobbling their blog posts seems ridiculous. This may force us to have to think about using Wordpress ... which will be a shame.

I have had four people THIS WEEK (and it's only Wednesday) come to me to ask about the University of York's blogging options... that we don't have. The Social Policy Research Unit wanted to start blogging this week, so I showed them Blogger. Within minutes they'd created a blog, mimicked their dept's colours and added the logo and started adding content. Interestingly, to me, they're using tags/labels to manage the main navigation. Wordpress. We Simply Don't Have The Manpower There are two compelling arguments FOR Wordpress. People know, use and like it and from a branding perspective - it is easy to create "York Blogs" with a locked down design created by the Web Office. We have been looking at both i nternally hosted Wordpress and buying a Wordpress service from Page.ly. The result of this seems to be that we don't have the man power to host Wordpress ourselves ( and also back it up, running a development/test...