Image courtesy of Flickr user kk+.
This question is not particularly brilliant, but I’m not sure there’s a good way to ask it, and it needs to be asked. Our ideal bloggers are going to push the limits of the system we create for them a little bit. To do that, they’ll need to not be afraid of their content management system, at a minimum.
We’ll be starting out with the friendliest interface we could find – WordPress – which at this point is arguably cleaner, prettier and more configurable than Microsoft Word, has some mobile publishing options, and auto-saves your content, to boot. Even Web publishing n00bz tend to grok WordPress pretty quickly. And if there’s any sign that they’re scared of WordPress, well, that scares me a little. Can a candidate who can’t handle WordPress build a successful Web community? Not sure.
At this point, given the mainstreaming of Web publishing and link embedding and sharing on sites like Facebook and Twitter, I don’t expect these ideas to intimidate too many people. But beyond the not-being-scared criterion, our ideal bloggers exhibit some fearlessness about CMSes, within reason. They’d understand that it’s going to be fairly difficult to break the system, and if they do, we’ll restore it. They’d embed weird objects into their posts, do unholy things with Google Forms, and develop all sorts of zany workarounds to have their way with their sites. We want to learn from our bloggers’ workflow, so we can take the more productive mutations of the format and fold them into the system. If all the bloggers operate perfectly within the constraints they’ve been given, well that’s just no fun.
Related questions: How comfortable are you with HTML markup? Did you just cringe when you heard the term “HTML”? Do you know how to link to something / pull a photo off Flickr / embed a video? What CMSes have you worked with in the past? What does the term “WordPress” mean to you?
What to watch for: If the candidate breaks out in a cold sweat at the mention of the words “WordPress,” “CMS,” “HTML markup,” or “link to something,” that might just be a disqualifier. A sense of fearlessness – a dismissive shrug of the shoulders, even (“I can handle anything you’d throw at me!”) – would be delightful. I’d accept a candidate who said, “Well, I haven’t really used much beyond [Wordpress/my news org CMS/Flickr], but I don’t think I’d have too much trouble learning the basics.”