UPDATE: Tony Dunn has just announced that he decided to put his blog, TFRL, to sleep after 2 people had complained about it to his CIO. That’s a very sad day for the higher ed blogosphere and the higher ed web community. The blog is still nominated for the award, so feel free to vote for it.
As you’ve probably heard (or read in my previous post), the eduStyle awards include a people’s choice award for the best higher ed blog this year.
As a partner for this category and a fervent supporter of higher ed blogging, I’ve decided to publish a series of interviews with the 5 nominees for this award. My goal for these interviews was to provide a good and fair introduction to all these blogs — and help you cast your vote. So, don’t forget to vote by June 1st and let the most popular blog win!
Blog title: Tales from Redesignland
First blog post: Welcome to Redesignland
Number of posts since you started: 57
Total number of RSS/email subscribers: Unknown
Number of unique visitors in last 12 months: Unknown
Authored by Tony Dunn, Tales From Redesignland is a very different higher ed blog – a cartoon chronicling the road to web redesign happiness in the land of committees.
1) Why did you start your blog?
I originally started my blog in December 2007 as a way to explain and document the redesign process at our university in a humorous format, but it quickly became a place for me to express some of the strange and occasionally frustrating things I’ve experienced as a higher ed web worker.
2) In your opinion, what is the biggest differentiator of your blog? What makes it different from the other higher ed blogs?
Well, it’s a cartoon, so there’s that. Also, I think that it expresses – in a humorous way – some of the frustrations and craziness that all higher ed web workers experience during the course of their jobs. It isn’t a blog about how to do your job better, or about best practices or trends in the industry; it’s about what the lives of web workers in higher ed are like and the stranger-than-fiction realities of our jobs.
3) What are your most popular posts? What’s your favorite post?
The most popular posts comment-wise are “The Home Page Redesign Committee Meeting” and “You Think I’m Kidding”, which I think express people’s frustrations with committees. As to a favorite post, it’s hard to pick since I’ve lived them all, but as far as recent posts, I particularly like “If Star Trek Was Like Us.”
