It’s been a very quiet blog new year and it’s good seeing not that many flame wars being thrown around. Most of them nowadays are the stale fights with common bloggers. I suppose that’s a sign of a good year ahead.
But even the new year has some things in store for all of us. Like Blogs Malaysia when it first launched last year, generated much hype but towards the end of the year it faded away like old news. Have bloggers lost their interest or is it that every one is still hung over from their new year party.
I’m going to do this review a little differently this time because I’m just too lazy of pointing out what I know. Besides, the more eyes the better. And the more brains, the finer details of the website we could pick out.
So please take some time and analyze this screenshot. I’d like your version of a review. :)
As usual, don’t be shy to look at it in finer detail by clicking on the image.
Please also be honest in your comments. Here, there’ll be no deleting or editing of your review as long you’re not found to be doing it on purpose.
To get the ball started, there have been suggestions of making the text larger and I too feel that it would help.
Pass the ball around.
The site is fine – you guys just need to market it more. No point redesigning the thing if no one knows of its existence.
LJ has something similar named The Readers List, whereby a group of LJers post the best entries they find around Livejournal. Maybe you can increase the editorship more, or give some sort of perk for having a BM-posted entry.
I absolutely love the design, no design changes r needed.
I agree with Tiara with more editors, the blogsmalaysia challenge is lack of new contents sometimes.
From your screenshot got 7 post in the same day (17/1) is very extremely rare. Last time I visited mostly 1 or 2 recommendations a day.
A forum might help?
I have been reading it off Bloglines, so most site design don’t really matter to me :)
Holy cow. I expected the screenshot to be long but that’s abit over. Sigh, sorry about that people.
Publicity is definetely something not really being generated by Blogs Malaysia at the moment.
Jee:
how would a forum help Blogs Malaysia and its goal?
And the problem with blogsmalaysia is not the design, the design is very nice, it’s the editors, they are too picky and have too many conflicting views, for something so young you should just allow virtually everything. There is no Alpha lead either.
“Comment edited due to personal advertising.” – Danny Foo
The heart of something like Blogs Malaysia was never the design, it was always the content. Just that with the scores of blogs that were recommended, alot were turned down regardless hence no content updates and people lose interest in it…even the editors themselves lose interest in it.
Hi,
Seriously, nothing interest me about it. It’s only an excerpt of an original story with 1 or 2 line of editor “review”. 99% chances of the entry have already pinged PPS. And some already read the story. Which brings the point that 99% of blogsmalaysia visitor is also from PPS.
Malaysia is small you know.
My 2 cent :)
Cheers.
Weird, the site does ‘look’ quiet, for some reason.
The following two entries of mine pretty much point out (painstakingly) what’s wrong with the site.
http://swiftywriting.blogspot.com/2006/01/swifty-ponders-about-blogsmalaysiacom.html
http://swiftywriting.blogspot.com/2006/01/oops-too-late-for-digg-system-swifty.html
Both articles focus more on their system than the layout though.
Design set aside, does anyone have problems reading the text? anyone finding it small on their resolutions (if possible, please list what resolution you’re using.)?
I’m going to be upfront here. I’ve been commissioned to give Blogs Malaysia a facelift if necessary. That’s why this discussion is up. But it looks like there’s more to just the design that might need sorting.
Anyone else have any other suggestions of improvements? Or feel I should redesign it? :)
More publicity would help. Maybe some small link buttons that people can put up on their bogs.
No offense, but i don’t visit blogsmalaysia nor PPS… IMO, most people have particular areas of interests, hence, u have things like delicious tags. I read feeds on posts tagged with stuff like PHP, CSS, JavaScript and etc.
What about blogsmalaysia? I’m presented with a whole bunch or crap that I have little or no interest in.. they have dumb categories like “news”, “musings”, “reviews” and “general”.. news? political news? tech news? wonderful.. how am I supposed to locate posts that I’m interested in?
someone cited digg.com. well, if you notice, the majority of posts there are tech/science/geek related.. even the humorous ones..
There is something that could be fixed. Right now it’s a bit confusing to figure out which of the many links in each post lead to the actual entry. There is a “link to original post” thing that could stand out a bit more, perhaps.
However, as said earlier, just giving it a redesign won’t work much…there needs to be an incentive for people to participate. Prizes? More promotion? SOMETHING?
Tiara, we’re looking into marketing methods to promote Blogs Malaysia further. Just to note that the authors are doing BM for free and there isn’t any sponsor involved so I’m afraid any prize money wouldn’t be applicable here.
But of course that doesn’t deter the objective of trying to promote it. Anyone care to test their marketing knowledge and suggest a brilliant plan that doesn’t involve money? ;)
Having the most impressive promotional or marketing campaigns won’t really work if there isn’t anything about BM that can encourage repeat visits.
Nobody said marketing alone would accomplish the task at hand.
So instead of voicing out negativity, why not put up added measures to what you already might have shared with the rest of us here so that BM would be better favored.
From a design perspective I think the site design’s fantastic. Everything’s neat and organized and the community’s just great.
And I need to address this question of yours: “Design set aside, does anyone have problems reading the text? anyone finding it small on their resolutions (if possible, please list what resolution you’re using.)?
I’m going to be upfront here. I’ve been commissioned to give Blogs Malaysia a facelift if necessary. That’s why this discussion is up. But it looks like there’s more to just the design that might need sorting.”
I think the text is fine although for some people it might be a tad bit too small. Alternatively you could put up a Javascript text-enlarger/minimizer so that people who don’t know how to enlarge/shrink fonts (I know of many! ^_^) with their browser settings can still do so easily. Readability helps with web-staying power, really it does.
The design is great already. The problem that I find with BlogsMalaysia is that it hasn’t enough content. One or two lines of personal comments isn’t a “review”, per se. Someone has to put more thought into reviewing the sites that are being submitted; the committee has to be more stringent with the criteria concerning what is good content and what isn’t. And the committee must also be impartial; don’t just favour the posts coming from the “popular” bloggers or their blogger friends.
My two cents, hope it helped.
Thanks Zafran for the insight. I think we could take into heavy consideration about the need of producing maybe average length reviews of a post instead of one liners. :)
Cheers.