Help the Old People Blog

December 23, 2007 9:17 PM

I gifted my family a Wordpress blog (it's all up and designed and everything). I want a virtual center for our family that now spans the globe and can't get together often. However, how can I get the older coots to not only understand WHAT a blog is but how to use it. They use the interwebs. But only to look up the goofy stuff old people like - like when Murder She Wrote is on. Or to hate on George Bush. But not so much to interact. More inside.

So I've been looking for an online resource about the Wordpress UI that is NOT geek centered. I have not been successful. Ideal would be an online tutorial featuring a video. Something old people friendly on how to use the UI.

Also. How can I get them to post once I convince them the Blog technology is not an obstacle. My parents have amazing stories to tell (my father was a Journalism major in college but joined the Green Berets instead and served THREE combat tours in Vietnam). They have had a fantastic and interesting life. I want them to share it as time is running out. My wife suggested a story contest. But I figure the young-uns (my nephews) will steal that one.

Any ideas?

posted by tkchrist to computers & internet (14 comments total)

1. You might consider allowing email-to-blog with Wordpress. Blogging would then be as easy for them as sending an email.

2. As for them telling the story - use prompts. There is a book that I used with my parents called Legacy and I highly recommend it for just what you're doing. It would be perfect for this and many older people find it easier when asked to describe (fill-in-the-blank) to write from the prompt - or suggestion - than if they had to select the subject, etc.

3. Consider interviewing them. Encode them as mp3's and put them in the blog as well. Even video, if they're close by.

By the way, what a great idea! One day, you'll have a blog you can turn into a book for the family. I think it's great you are interested in this kind of family preservation. Every family needs an archivist interested in collecting such treasures.
posted by Gerard Sorme at 9:49 PM on December 23, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

I did the exact same thing a few years back for my family scattered across the country.

I took screenshots of the registration, login, and posting process, put them into Photoshop and made a very clear step-by-step tutorial. I emailed the link to the tutorial to the family members. I hand-held several family members through the registration process. Others I registered myself and emailed them their login info.

I kept the blog regularly updated, and each time I updated it, I emailed everyone with the link, along with a reminder to post something, and again included the tutorial link along with my phone number in case they needed help.

The end result in my case: Old coot, and young tech-savvy person alike did not participate. It died a painful (to me) death. I kept things going on my own for probably close to a year. Other than a few replies to my emails ("nice pictures of your daughter, thanks for the update!") there was absolutely no participation.

I hope your experience is different. I don't think my family is all that unusual. Many of them were regularly chatting with me on AIM and emailing me, so there was no computer-phobia involved.

I really don't know what I would do differently if I were to do it over. I did everything short of posting for them.

I'm not trying to discourage you. I do think my screenshot tutorial was a better solution than, say, relying on the Wordpress generic tutorial, so that may be a place to start.

Good luck!
posted by The Deej at 9:52 PM on December 23, 2007

I came in here to suggest email-to-blog, so I second Gerard's first. This is going to be the easiest and least confusing way for the none technical member's to post. Create each of them a user account on the blog and set them up for email-to-blog. Have them add their blog email address to their Contacts List, and when they want to 'get in touch' all they have to do is compose an email instead of opening the browser, getting to the admin portion of the blog, logging in, writing a post, etc....
posted by B(oYo)BIES at 9:53 PM on December 23, 2007

Many tech-savvy people fail to manage blogs, so I don't think the computer-hurdle is the only one. Much of what Deej says rings true, as I myself tried to get journalism buddies to use Wordpress for organizational and administrative stuff.

Great idea, let us know how this turns out.
posted by theiconoclast31 at 10:35 PM on December 23, 2007

Other than a few replies to my emails ("nice pictures of your daughter, thanks for the update!") there was absolutely no participation.

This is my experience exactly! I set it up, held their hands through the learning process, posted tutorials, suggested items, helped them with camera training ... you name it. Two years on, 95% of the posts are those that I made myself ... They like seeing the stuff, but can't get around to contributing, even though they are very willing to 'tell stories' when we are together.

The 'problem' is - in a nutshell - they just don't 'grok' it. Even though 'we' have a good comprehension of what instant publishing is, some people, and I guess particularly people of a previous generation, just can't seem to understand the concept: you type in this box, press 'Save', and it's published.

What I'm hoping for is that I can convince the young great-grandson to take this on as a project (in exchange for being given the tools .. camera, video, etc.), and get him to be the family 'blog editor'. Problem is, he's only one year old, so it's going to be a while before he's ready ... :-(
posted by woodblock100 at 10:54 PM on December 23, 2007

I think one possibility of overcoming the apathy that woodblock100 and I experienced would be to just ask permission to post things that family members happen to send by email or share on the phone. Again, you are doing all the heavy lifting, but at least it's something.

I guess particularly people of a previous generation, just can't seem to understand the concept

I think what made it particularly frustrating for me, I that I probably am the previous generation!
posted by The Deej at 11:00 PM on December 23, 2007

I set a blog up for my mother as she was after me to set her up a website. Result: 2 entries.

I think part of the problem--and I have this as a person who is on my butt all day in front of my computer and is tech savvy--is that blogging isn't actually much fun, most of the time. It has about the same level of pleasure as filling in a tax form. The anticipation is great, and the process is a let-down for all but the most hard-core.

I'm wondering whether some drag-and-drop photo sharing site would have been a better solution for me. Even a short caption on a photo can tell an interesting story. And photos online provide instant gratification.

Wasn't their an FPP about a centenarian's blog where the entries were all transcribed from interviews? That was really great, though the work all fell on one person's shoulders. Could you do something similar, or have someone do the same?
posted by maxwelton at 12:13 AM on December 24, 2007

My experience with older people who don't contribute...they think whatever they write has to be precious. Carved in stone. Get them past that and it might be easier.
posted by artdrectr at 12:18 AM on December 24, 2007

Do they actually want to blog?

Because if they don't, nothing you can do will convince them to do it. It's not like eating, where you have to do it to stay alive. If they aren't getting some kind of reward for typing and posting, then they aren't going to do it.

OTOH...

You mention your fathers war stories - could you point him in the direction of a blog that contains similar sorts of stories to his? Perhaps one with lots of traffic, so he could see that people are interested? The old folks like Murder She Wrote? Point them to a blog that discusses plot lines or something. Encourage them to comment on it. Hint that people would be interested in what they have to say on the matter too.

I get the feeling that this is going to be an uphill battle, especially if they aren't used to writing, either online or off it. I blog every day, and enjoy writing, so it's a large part of my life. My father, on the other hand, reads an awful lot, but I'd put money on the fact her hasn't written anything since he retired from work over 6 months ago. It just isn't a big part of his life like it is mine.
posted by Solomon at 3:55 AM on December 24, 2007

I've had deej and woodblock's experience. Maybe 10 percent of family members participate and the whole thing becomes just sad.

Yes, photos have a much better chance of succeeding than words.
posted by rokusan at 4:55 AM on December 24, 2007

My personal experience is that parents and relations have little interest in using the web as a recording medium. They are happy and confident with email, anything that requires an additional user account is met with disinterest. For example, whilst I had limited success getting my mother to use Flickr, her interest has waned dramatically since she worked out how to attach images to her emails. In short, with the older generation blogs and the like don't tend to work, email does.

On the archive front - you may have to do a lot of the work yourself. I would suggest keeping a tape recorder/minidisc/DVR handy, talk to your mum and dad about their lives (when they're in the mood to reminisce), either in person or over the phone/skype. Post the recordings to the blog, along with any important photos, and you may find it grows into a really useful historical record.
posted by vaxtv at 5:32 AM on December 24, 2007

As someone who spends lots of time trying to encourage librarians to blog or just use web tools generally, I feel your pain. I have a family full of bloggers (sort of) and different things worked for different ones of them, I'll share a few anecdotes.

For my Mom the photographer, I first got her set up with a flickr account and wated until it was clear that she was actually using it (she is a fine photographer) and had a blogging need. Basically she said that some of her friends found Flickr a little too tough to use and she was looking for a way to pull out photos to give to them that wasn't email... So, I set her up with a blog and configured Flickr up to post the photos to the blog. So, she doesn't do much "blogging" per se, but she can put photos up on a separate blog and this is what she likes. One of the things that was great sucking her in to Flickr was the nice group of commentators. She liked comments and commening. This may be something that will help your family see blogging as more fun than, say, email.

For my Dad, we also sort of started with Flickr and what he liked was the ability to bulk upload from his WinXp machine. So, he had gotten a ton of slides scanned and just wanted to upload a thousnd at a time to Flickr which he could do, within reason. I did a little bit of work organizing them and setting them up into sets for him. He doesn't really do anything with it, but it was good to get the photos online.

For my stepmom the real push was when she had a grandkid. She reads my blog but was doing their own once a month with FrontPage. Hoever this wasn't frequent enough when the kid was born and so she moved herself over to Vox. She liked how easy it was to put pictures online and set up a profile.

For my sister who spends a lot of time interacting with people on Craiglist, she set up an account on Blogger because her and her roommate could share one and each have their own independent style to their posts. She doesn't use it too much but likes that it is a total no brainer once it's configured. She also uses Twitter now because her friends are on it.

So, none of these is an exact answer to your question, but while you start out you may ant to just do as peopel are suggesting and get peopel to email you stories [or photos] that you post and then email the link around. One thing that appeals with WP is when you change the permanlinks to inclide the title so

http://tkchrist.com/look-at-my-grandson not
http://tkchrist.com/index.php?=34

A few more suggestions while you're getting this started

- I always stress "it's a box, you type into it" and all the other stuff is basically not necessary especially for starting
- make sure they know they can copy/paste from Word right into that box
- seconding the post from email
- if there is a way to get photos online, even if it's just pictures from Wikipedia, make that as easy as possible [i.e. linking from flickr is easier than uploading from WP, minimize new words to use]
- maybe start some of them with commenting. Upload a photo with a few mystery people and see if you can get them to comment "oh I think that's Fred Raines" or upload total crowd pleaser photos like pictures they're all in
- maybe find a few example blogs that do what you think is near to show off to them?
- set the blog up with a sidebar that goes to other online content that inteersts them, whatever that is
- figure out what content they DO look at online and see how to mesh or merge this in with it. Some people like RSS readers, or google readers or bloglines, some people like having stuff on their Yahoo or Google homepage. The trick to my way of thinking is to figure out what they are already doing and where they are already going and use the flexibility of the blogging platform to help shift the content that way.

I know it's super frustrating, but it's also true that for a lot of people they're not going to gravitate towards blogging until it solves a problem for them. Figuring out what that problem is is the first step i think.
posted by jessamyn at 6:50 AM on December 24, 2007

Thanks you guys. The email to post thing sounds like a good way around UI frustration.
posted by tkchrist at 3:31 PM on December 24, 2007

Check out Flock. Someone asked me for advice on setting up a blog and I briefly looked into several options. I wasn't concerned with such extreme technophobia and as it turns out lack of enthusiasm wasn't much of a problem either so our situations are far different. I only played with it for a couple minutes but I was really impressed with how easy it was to set up and post to a blog. It sounds like setting up the blog will be your responsibility in any case so I'm not sure this offers any benefit to you. Also, I was primarily impressed with how easy Flock made it to pull in links, media and text from other websites and incorporate them into your posts and I'm not sure that this is something you expect your parents to be doing so again I'm not sure that Flock offers much of a benefit.

But, I was impressed with how easy it was so maybe it's worth looking at.
posted by stuart_s at 7:02 PM on December 25, 2007