very nice to see you here . How’s everything?

That’s two key issues you raised there: how the blog’s reader “community” interacts with the pre-existing community (once commenting there is allowed, how interactions shift), and the control issue, which changes radically when blogs interact with the old structure.

This experiment is being quite interesting . Best regards,

Miguel

Nice place! I even managed to learn a few new Spanish words such ac Correo, enviar comentario!

Blogs as a community killers — what a topic. I would say yes. Blog came from the US. US is the most individualistic society. What do you expect? Community advocates collective livings. Which is in oposition to individualism.

But then again, depends on the kind of blogs. As long as the blog does not touch on anything to do with human behaviours, that blog can be neutral. Anything neutral would not pull-the-community-apart. But as we know, most blogs allow comments, and that if not control could create problems.

Control is the key. We somehow has the romantic ideas that, let’s creat a space, let’s come and share ideas. That would not work. If we want to have continuos flow of ideas, activities etc. there has to be control. Control in this sense is more about regulations … regulate where, when, how, why and what. If there is no control, things would just fall into pieces. Just like a plot of land. If you want to turn it into a garden and wishes it to stay a garden forever … what would you do?

Cindy

we had that opportunity with Invision (they do a blog component for their forum software along those lines) but the collaborators voted it down. Several times. They fear it would take the conversations away from the forums.

Still, there may be a channel issue there: email and web navigation are not so linked as forums and web navigation. Maybe that’s a reason most of your members are not taking up the offer, and most mailing list’s portals don’t thrive.

Re the middle ground you suggest, that would amount to integrating the independent blog with the community portal (more or less closely). That’s something that could work, I think. But, if there’s no payment or contract involved, there’s a certain risk of assymetry: either the portal is promoting the author, or the author is promoting the portal (or they’re both good enough and the issue is not relevant). It needs a lot of good faith and trust to do it (which is not saying it can’t be done ).

Thanks for your opinion and experience (and please keep up the news ).

Best regards,

Miguel

Perhaps there is a fertile middle ground in the creation of multi-author blogs? We are working on/with the adoption of a third party community site. On that software platform, each member is entitled to a personal blog if they so choose.

Nothing substantive enough to report yet on how that is going. Or maybe there is: so far, many folks are using just the listserv.