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Featured Contributor: Gabrielle Bryden

Blog: Featured Contributor: Gabrielle Bryden

from Pool team, 08.02.10

Gabrielle Bryden – or GB as we poolies know her – is one of the more prolific members of our Pool community. Gabrielle has contributed some great images and stories of Australian wildlife over the last year or so. When she's not submitting her own work Gabrielle regularly takes the time to leave comments and feedback on the work of so many other people.

We got in touch with Gabrielle to find out a bit more about her and why she spends so much time in the Pool.

What’s your day job?

I am a writer and a mother of two young children.

On Pool you’ve contributed a lot of images of animals and wildlife. Are you a big wildlife person? And is your main interest in photography?

I am lucky to live in a little town on the shores of Hervey Bay, bordered by a National Park and there is abundant wildlife in and out of town. I have always loved wildlife and taking photographs gives me great pleasure. However photography is just a hobby and writing is my primary interest, particularly poetry and my blog. I'm writing a series of children's book in collaboration with a Canadian illustrator. I'm working on a poetry chapbook and have had a number of poems published in journals in the past year. I'm working on a book about autism spectrum disorder. I also post stories, poems, photographs on my blog once or twice a week.

How did you find out about Pool?

I just found it surfing the net and was intrigued by the potential of the project.

What do you like and what don’t you like about Pool?

I think it allows anyone to have a platform for their own material and is therefore democratic and not elitist. There's the opportunity for good material to be highlighted by the people at the ABC and recorded on the radio, which broadens the audience. I think the Pool project is a great opportunity for the ABC, which may be seen as a little old fashioned by some, to re-energise and take advantage of these new technologies. It's a great way to interact directly with the community.

My main problem with Pool has been the lack of comment notification which makes it very difficult for people to know if others have commented on their work. It's currently a bit of a rabbits warren or maze. These issues are going to be fixed in the future, so I will hang in there because I think Pool is a very innovative concept.
 
What should Pool do that it is not doing at the moment?

I think that the staff working for Pool should give more feedback to individual posts. Many posts never receive any comments and it's demoralising for the people involved. I would like other people to provide more comments as well and think that there should be some sort of notice on the pages that suggests people do this.

I think people need to be encouraged to do this as often they are just a bit shy or think that someone else will do it. People need to understand that part of the process for this type of democratic platform is to have a conversation. Comment on others and check to see if they have commented and start to debate stuff. This is also a problem in the blogosphere and I usually don't bother returning to a blog if they don't acknowledge my comments. If they can't even be bothered responding to a comment why should I bother commenting.  It is also the polite thing to do. I get many comments on my blog because I belong to a community of fellow bloggers who support each other with regular feedback and support.

The problem in the Pool is that often people are unaware that a comment has even been made.

I think this will be less of an issue when comment notification has been implemented in the revised version of Pool, however people still need to be aware of this issue. There are too many passive bystanders which leads to a boring environment. Everyone needs to do there bit to ensure Pool reaches its potential.

Thanks Gabrielle for taking the time to answer our questions. We always love to receive feedback - both positive and negative!

If you want to comment on this blog post or any others then you'll need to log in to Pool. If you're not a member then you can join anytime by following this link.

Derived from

Look into my eyes

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