Setting a Good Direction

Interesting image

Waiting for the text :)

Done! Sorry for the wait.

All this goes beyond strategy too - what do we want to be taking about generally? What do we want to do or represent as a community? There's loads of places to post photos yet it's the people that make moblog not the platform.

It is definitely about the people some mulling of thoughts to be done :)

So I looked over the features/design/changes spreadsheet last night and actually 4 features that everyone wants are quite easily done and there are at least 10 more that are not too hard.

So, have posted here about starting a design competition to get new pages designed. Not sure on prizes yet, but it could be a way forward. I guess the prize will be that we actually implement it!

:)

Congrats on your 'new' role, JC.
To be honest, changing the look of any of the pages wouldn't make me post more at all. It's always been about the people, not the design.
One thing that was fun was the comps, but more the challenge of thinking of how to get an original/funny shot rather than snag a prize.
So maybe try running some simple challenges?
What do you want to do: lure people back or hook new ones?

I agree with JD the challenges Nige set, people responded to. eg jump
I too don't object to the basic visual simplicity but the home page is not good.
I think anyone who has looked in recently is looking for the same reasons Somehow moblog created a group of friends. It made me want to meet these people and I did quite a few of them. It attracted friends of friends and had no other initial purpose than collecting random images. Anything that caught our eye, sparked our imagination. It made a camera an essential part of life - you could share your pics with this new world and people responded to them. You had snap shots from all over and although it wasn't essentially about communication maybe because of Alfie's boundless enthusiasm this rubbed off and moblog was a welcoming social environment. I don't think that it should be overthought! It started in an organic way and collapsed because it stopped being nurtured due to people moving on and systems not working. Just by being more active people are looking in, maybe you just need the ball to start rolling and the users creative juices hopefully would dictate it's direction but evolving rather than being mapped out. As for funds I think only the people who have continued paying would really be prepared to - could be proved wrong.
I think the answer to the last question has to be both but people brought people before. Probably the best way now.
Don't know how a co-op would/could work
HL's used to cause a lot of trouble because people cared - but then getting to the top of the pile was very difficult so maybe a monthly moblogger of the month or something :)
The randomness of the HL's might cause friction but we thrived on that.
Number one priority is that it works well. Easy to access, easy to post, easy to share (more than FB)
On everything. Still need to stop the spam and capture is annoying!
That's it for now :)

Weird, I never got an email that you guys had commented so I assumed that this thread was dead.

Thanks Jane - the competitions are a good point. Viv and Dhamaka have both said that to me aswell but it didn't fully sink in maybe. But I can see how that's the best area to focus on.

It's interesting that you both think a redesign isn't worth much. I get that people bring people, but I have long felt that new people don't stick around because the site doesn't look nice or work well. So, to hear different is good.

One thing you both said which chimes with something Swamprose said to me which is having more conversations would be good. And that part of the appeal of competitions is to do the original/funny shot.

Swamprose mentioned that we could come up with new concept competitions or group blogs like "what is your mayor up to today?" It's a silly example, but it's a very different idea to stuff #jump or #mirrorproject.

But at same time, I like going back to something basic and fundamental like hashtagging #jump pics and then judging the best one. Or, going back to real grass roots and doing stuff like "soundtrack to your life" competitions.

The difficult bit will be finding prizes. I looked into it last year and found that getting companies to give away phones is a lot harder to do these days because of a law change around endorsements.

My five cents worth.

first of all, 'mo' stands for mobile, I believe, and yet, there is no mobile app. To keep the new people in, there is a need to catch up with instagram in functionality (at least).

Secondly, moblog is 10 years old. Occasionally, i like to flick through the past entries. I must say, there definitely is a need for a modernized navigation interface and a smarter search engine.

And lastly, as it's been mentioned above - moblog is a community, so, i think, an update of the means of communication here is one of the important tasks too. Not only it's a community, it's a small-town-like community, where everybody knows everybody. I hope there is a way to keep that feeling, even when the site grows big.

Also, if it was a self regulating community with more user roles, and karma, and abilities, and levels there'd be new ways of keeping up order on the front page

thanks

to rephrase what i said above into a direction: keep moblog up-to-date.

Thanks for your response, JC.

"The difficult bit will be finding prizes. I looked into it last year and found that getting companies to give away phones is a lot harder to do these days because of a law change around endorsements."

I get that: I don't think you need prizes! It's just a fun thing to do : )

Thanks for your responses. It's weird, but I'm not getting any email notifications for comments - is anyone else having that issue?

As usual, meant to reply earlier and now I cant believe that nearly 3 weeks have gone by with no response. Sorry about that.

Not that I haven't been thinking about your suggestions though, honest!

Will reply individually in next few comments.

BFish, regarding an app - I hear what you are saying about an app but that is actually extremely expensive, not even necessarily to build, but maintain. We'd probably go HTML 5 before we can even go the apps route.

But in summary, your point about keeping the site up to date is the issue I;m trying to solve. We're basically running on pretty old tech now, so the question is how to migrate it to new tech. Imagine that right now we are running on leaded fuel whilst the whole country is changing to unleaded - or diesel to petrol, or petrol to electric - it's that kind of issue.

I've been contacting lots of developers for help, but the usual issue is developers hate using old code and would rather rebuild from scratch - so the challenge is finding someone who would be willing to get to grips with the old code. Anyway, long story short, I am toiling away at that and sending emails out every week approaching people who might be able to help.

BFish, regarding an search and navigation

Totally agreed and this actually seems like the most solvable issue. Basically we could pare a lot of the functionality down, and I put some suggestions up here, in the hopes that perhaps we could do a design competition.

Any responses there about features you are happy to ditch and ones you definitely want to keep would be useful. Any feedback appreciated but particularly around stuff you think is pointless and don't use.

BFish, regarding user roles

I would love this! We can easily create new roles for those interested!

Great idea, I'll speak to Viv about refreshing our mods list. Anyone interested, please shout in the comments!

Also, if anyone is interested, I do have an app built for Moblog now that alerts you whenever something new is posted -it's a little complicated in how it works, but I could talk you through it.

As to the notification sissue - yes Wilvir had that problem - it was checked on his profile - I deleted and rechecked it and now it's working! :)

So totally agree Bfish the community moblog created was a very special thing!

Jane Doe

This was a great point you made and I'm going to focus on this!

I think it makes sense to do it via tagging rather than to group blogs which have barriers to entry.

Viv, Jane, Bfish

Thanks for talking through this with me.

Here goes nothing! Competition started.

Hiya as always i'm trailing behind everyone else! I joined Blipfoto last year, presume many of you here know of it ? It was very similar to the dailyme thing we did 8 years ago differences being you can only make one post a day. it seemed a very friendly site and peopel rated your image by number of stars so it was a little competative but based on the community as a whole liking a photo rather than the HL option we have here. What I didnt like was that you could only post one photo a day and it wasnt that easy to navigate the site. What i'm wondering is if there was a group/featured daily post, perhaps a particular topic/theme for the day/week/month - no prizes just fun or the kudos of being peer picked so like a competition but an ongoing thing. I agree with JD people dont always need prizes, its fun.

Like that photo of the day idea... I do have a new competition i want to run which is illustrating phrases.

I can donate the next prize.. a lens cleaning cloth from Canadian Tourism Commission.. will shoot it and post it. It's not big but it's useful - and can be used for glasses too!