ED Blog was launched on February 1, so after four weeks of blogging I’d love your feedback on how to make it better. (News post will be late today, as a result)

Month 1 Results

• This week averaging 122 unique weekday visitors (most people view at work only) plus another 42 RSS feeds.
• 42 Facebook fans and 20 Twitter followers.
• 43 posts and 75 comments.
• Added two guest bloggers – Darel Hall and David Choat.
• Top post was Darel’s one on national standards (by a country mile) and second was mine on ACE - see featured post sidebar for links.
• Added more features, like the ability to be notified of comments that follow yours on a post, a new featured posts sidebar, the newsfeed, Twitter feed, Facebook badge, Sitemeter (publicly available site stats) and a simpler theme for smartphone users. A side result of having an amateur like me add things is that page load speed has declined - the experts are working on that now.
• The site is in the top 100-150 blogs in NZ, with about 1/70th of No 1 Kiwiblog’s traffic, and has good potential to get in the top 40-50 NZ blogs. In perspective, ranking service Alexa has ED Blog as 3,369,972 amongst all websites in the world

Where Should ED Blog Go Next?

There’s been a good start, but the site is only starting to reach its potential. If ED Blog is to serve as a place for the tertiary education community to read about and discuss the issues of the day, then it probably needs to attract 300-500 visitors/day, have more voices on the site and provide a better place for people to discuss issues. But how? What content is needed? How do we get the word out?

I’d really welcome your views on how ED Blog can be improved. I know that many readers feel constrained by work obligations from commenting, so feel free to use a pseudonym or drop me a line via the contact us link at the top of the page.