Peer Review on 'Television and Social Media' by Charlotte Grootscholten

'Pimp your blog'

When opening the blog ‘television and social media’ a very nice introduction at the right side of the page gives a warm ‘welcome to our blog’ to any visitor. For the very same reason I kept on reading this blog and I found some very interesting articles and videos. Next to that it is very interesting to read a blog that is written about the same issue as my group is dealing with. It is nice to see how a different group interprets the same issue and gives recommendations. In this peer review of the blog ‘television and social media’ there will be comment on the layout and content as well and in the end some recommendations will be given.

The blog has been created by four students in the first place. Unfortunately one student quit university, so three students remain to keep this blog posted. These students are Ellen Valckx, Johnny Broeders and Wouter van den Buuse.

First of all compliments to the content of the blog. The articles are very clear and easy to read. They provide a lot of usefull information and also give proper illustrations of issues you are dealing with. There are some videos as well which are an enlargement to the articles. What I liked most is the Pecha Kucha style presentation which gives insight in ‘the people behind the blog’ by using photographs of each group member.

As mentioned before, a warm welcome is provided at the beginning of the blog which triggers a visitor to read the blog. When scrolling down one can go to the older posts where the central question can be found as well as information about the team. It would be nice if these two subjects were posted at the beginning of the blog, probably at the right sight just beneath the welcome, so that visitors can immediately see what the content of the blog is about. Ofcourse the image at the top of the blog suggests that this blog is about BNN, however it does not show the issue itself.

Some articles at this blog are posted by using ‘Scribd’. On the one hand this is a nice program to post long articles, however it is not that user-friendly to the reader. It requires to many clicks to have the text big enough to read. Although it is not my favourite program to read articles in, I agree that it is useful when posting long articles instead of having long articles on the blog right away.
One last suggestion about the layout. At first sight the blog seems a little bit boring, while there is only one main image at the top of the blog and that’s it. Maybe some recognition towards television and social media by using more images at both sides of the blog or as a background would help to make the blog attractive to readers.

To conclude one can say that the blog ‘television and social media’ has a very strong content with clear articles and nice videos which illustrate the issue. Next to that there is a warm welcome at the beginning and a proper introduction of the issue and the team at the end of the blog. A little ‘pimp your blog’ might help to trigger some more readers. I surely can say that you did a great job in creating a blog!