The Next Step in Hooked Together

If you’ve been following along on my Hooked Together crochet blog project then you know that I took a little break a couple of weeks ago to think more about how I want to organize and present this information when it’s all said and done. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about and are curious then you can hop over to the Hooked Together explanation.) I’m still trying to figure out the logistics of this and I thought I’d put out some thoughts to my terrific readers for some feedback on this before I jump back in to 2012′s series posts (which will resume next week).

The Goal of Hooked Together

The main purpose of Hooked Together remains the same: to show the ways in which the crochet blogging community is connected to itself and to the larger crafter blogging community by revealing who links to who in their blogrolls.

There are secondary goals as well including learning more crochet blogs myself, spreading the word about the ones I already read and introducing my readers to new blogs to continue to strengthen support in the crochet blogging community.

A Visual Display

If you check out my Hooked Together posts to date you’ll see that they are set up as organized lists. In each post, I explore one crochet blog’s blogroll and organize the links in that blogroll into those that I already follow on my original master list, those that have already been Hooked Together in the project and then the new-to-me blogs that are crochet only, multi-craftual with crochet, non-crochet and out of date.

I think this works well in terms of meeting my secondary goals for Hooked Together. It gives me a chance to easily explore and organize all of the blog’s in the blogroll. It gives my readers what I hope as an easy-to-digest way to find new blogs each week. However, what I’m not happy with is that it’s ineffective in meeting my primary goal. It sort of shows the links between blogs through the Already Hooked Together section but this isn’t enough.

What I want is to be able to create some type of visual display in each post that shows how these links relate to the previous week’s links. Thoughts I’m having:

Pie charts showing what percentage of the blogroll has already been Hooked Together.
Bar graphs showing the blog’s links to crochet vs. non-crochet posts.
Some type of display showing the reciprocal links between blogs.

Detailed Industry Report

I’ve been saying all along that in the end, when all of the information is collected, I want to put it together into a big visual display although I wasn’t quite sure how I wanted to do that. That’s part of the reason I wasn’t too concerned with doing a visual display on each individual weekly post. However, as I’ve been thinking about it more, I’m realizing that what I really want to do is to put out a detailed industry report on the crochet blogging industry.

Some of the things this report can reveal:

How we are supporting each other as crochet bloggers with our blogroll links and connections
Which blogs are the most popular crochet blogs
Where the crochet blogging community fits into the larger craft blogging picture
Ways in which we are lacking and may be able to support each other better

I think that this report will benefit greatly from visual displays including charts and graphs so I just need to get a handle on how I want to do that. I’d like to have this report completed by the end of 2012 which means I’ll really need to ramp up my Hooked Together posting activity in the months to come. I think I’ll be taking it kind of easy in January with normal posts the way they’ve been all along and then trying to get more visual posts going by February.

Your Thoughts?

I would really love to know your thoughts on this Hooked Together turn. I’d also love any suggestions or feedback in terms of ideas for charting and graphing (good software programs? tips?) because that’s something I’ve really never done before and it’ll be very new to me.

Buffer

Like this post, please hit the share button! Really love what I'm doing with Crochet Concupiscence? Consider making a donation or becoming a blog sponsor.

Tagged as: crochet blogs, crochet community, hooked together