So will the safety elephant hang onto his job or not? And in the long run will it make a blind bit of difference if he goes? We’ll probably still end up haveing ID cards forced upon us.

Very True Mood:  cynical

Just been reminded that today I’ve got to go and talk to a group of students from Central St Martins about blogs. I have very little idea of what they’re expecting from me, so I’ve scribbled a checklist of semi-technical issues that new bloggers might find themselves needing to think about.

• Allow comments or not?
• Single or multiple authors? Show identity of individual post authors or use a collective identity?
• Allow themselves to make some off topic posts (the blogs in question will all be fashion focussed)?
• Frequency and length of posts.
• Post-publication editing and updates. ‘Stealth’ editing.
• Searchability, both within the blog itself and from web search engines.
• Update notification services.
• Tags (as in Technorati not as in HTML).
• RSS.
• Trackbacks and pingbacks.
• Linking to other sites and especially to other links. Permalinks for inbound links (and finding permalinks when linking out to blogs).

Have I missed anything? I’m not there to give them technical advice on LiveJournal/Blogger/Word Press/whatever they’re using, nor am I there to give design advice.

Very True Mood:  surprised