Bloggers come and go....

November 25 2003

Was cleaning out my RSS feeds this morning.  It's funny that once you add 'em, you have to consciously think about whether they should stay.  For example, and not to pick on any one person in particular, I noticed that "e-Random on Demand" hadn't updated in a while... in fact, I think the entire life of that blog was about one week.  The homepage now says "AASD".
If I may, I think for some of the Lotus-focused bloggers, it's become a bit of a challenge to come up with interesting content on a very regular basis.  I heard a suggestion once that it would be interesting to see some of the excellent, but over-tapped, writers in the community band together to form a community blog...a la Kuro5hin.  Thoughts?

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Blogging  Add/View Comments [21]

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  1. 1  Lance Spellman http://www.worflowstudios.com/lance/blog.nsf | 1/18/2004 8:34:55 AM

    A little late to be posting this comment, but...

    At Lotusphere we're giving away a free Notes community blog reader, that we'll then donate to OpenNTF. One purpose we propose it for is a Notes news aggregator for the SNUG website, http://www.snugdfw.org. This will simply subscribe to all the Notes related blogs that can be found, and republish each day's findings. Then, SNUG members would have the ability to vote on worthiness of each article. This creates a "best of" channel. This is then available as an RSS feed in its own right.

    So, this site would not be attempting to create "new" content, it would simply be leveraging the amount of great and newsworthy content that is already out there every day.

  1. 2  jmichael http://www.lndcentral.com | 4/24/2004 5:22:01 AM

    If you're reading this blog post as late as April, 2004, you might be interested to know that the idea has been implemented.

    http://www.lndcentral.com

  1. 3  Ben Langhinrichs http://www.GeniiSoft.com/showcase.nsf/GeniiBlog | 11/25/2003 9:16:13 AM

    I have heard it talked about by various people, and I think we have talked about it in Penumbra. I think it can work, but I am not sure it has any higher chance of success than any individual weblog. They take lots of time and energy, as you well know.

    I have not had a lot of trouble generating content myself, but as to whether it is interesting, different people might feel different ways. That is part of the problem with any weblog, whether communal or personal. Aside from those people who simply like to hear themselves talk, the writer(s) must get something out of it and they must put something into it. Somewhat like the dot coms of a few years back, many people start weblogs before figuring out either what they will put into it or what they hope to get out of it. Unless those become clear fairly quickly, the interest wanes and the blog just sits there.

  1. 4  Scott  | 11/25/2003 9:30:59 AM

    A centralized Lotus technology blog would be great with all of the different expert opinions, view points, etc. My initial thought was this would be a good spin off the Notes.Net/LDD forums, but could cause quite a conflict of interest in some topics/responses. Not that we would need a place to bash Lotus, but simply a forum where our "experts" could be free to blog about anything related to Lotus technologies, the good, the bad, competitive information, industry trends, and other interesting opinionated postings, without fear of being unnecessarily censored -- although I'm not sure if some of the postings in the discussion forums don't get a little "colorful" every now and then. Ultimately, it will probably have to be a group of individuals outside of IBM/Lotus(like Penumbra) that collectively agree to host such a site and attract and maintain an active participation from a number of those experts in the Lotus community. I think it's true that a simple Lotus-focused blog for individuals is hard to keep updated with fresh content, especially if simply adding comments from blog postings from other blog sites. Seems like it would be better for authors and readers if these could be centralized.

  1. 5  vowe http://vowe.net | 11/25/2003 10:22:12 AM

    Follow the link to Kuro5hin and then at the very botton the link to the Scoop Machine that runs Kuro5hin. You will learn that it works very differently from anything known in the Domino world.

    Now, if a group of people get over the It-Must-Run-On-Domino mindset, this would most likely be the best machine to get an interesting discussion going.

  1. 6  vowe  | 11/25/2003 10:23:51 AM

    http://scoop.kuro5hin.org/special/whatisit

  1. 7  Nathan T. Freeman  | 11/25/2003 10:24:57 AM

    Volker, there's no reason that the Kuro5hin model couldn't be done on Domino. I've been wanting to do a Slashdot model on Domino for a long time, and even wrote up a spec for it once for the Notes.Net team.

  1. 8  Bruce Elgort http://www.BruceElgort.com | 11/25/2003 10:46:12 AM

    You would have to finish it :0) Also why not host something like this on OpenNTF?

  1. 9  vowe  | 11/25/2003 11:09:10 AM

    Nathan, I know. One can go ahead and re-invent any wheel he wants on the Domino platforms.

  1. 10  jonvon http://jonvon.net/ | 11/25/2003 12:51:10 PM

    ...might actually end up being a good way for people who don't really want a blog to get their ideas and so forth published. i'd think that people with fairly solid blogs would stick where they are, as they have probably invested a lot in what they are doing. but the guy who pops in for a week and gives up, or the girl who always wanted to blog, but just didn't care THAT much, but still has something interesting to say, might jump right in.

    or something. which, i think is what you were basically saying, wasn't it ed?

  1. 11  Libby http://www.e-promag.com | 11/25/2003 3:07:08 PM

    A well-known magazine made something like this available?

  1. 12  Manning Clark  | 11/25/2003 3:21:08 PM

    Eventually, someone should "own" the content, or it will devolve into something that is completely unusable. Then you have to consider who can submit articles and what actually gets posted. Also, look and feel would almost certainly be an issue.

    In theory it sounds like a great idea, but I think that it would be very difficult to implement.

  1. 13  John Roling ("Greyhawk68") http://greyhawk68.dominohosting.biz | 11/25/2003 3:23:12 PM

    I think a community site for Domino similiar to \. would be very cool. Would we want to keep it Domino\Lotus Tech only, or any kind of development tech? Also, I think the ePro idea is a good one Libby, but I don't know if it would seem better as an independent entity (ie OpenNTF). What's everyone else think?

  1. 14  vowe  | 11/25/2003 3:45:54 PM

    Manning Clark, I advise to actually READ about the scoop engine and you will realize that a community can be functional without an "owner" and somebody who "decides" who can post.

  1. 15  Steve Castledine www.dominoblog.com | 11/25/2003 3:56:35 PM

    I emailed a note to myself this morning saying "Allow WIKI type blogging" as Ive always thought that blogs and blog replies are not enough sometimes - readers should have the opportunity to create their own blog topics as and when (if the owner so wished).

  1. 16  Justin Freeman http://walnut.netmonkey.biz | 11/25/2003 4:23:26 PM

    I chair the local Notes user group and also manage the "user group" website. This was setup as a community blog & portal so that anyone from the Notes community could blog, share ideas, links etc.

    It uses opensource software - PHP PostNuke and has a structure similiar to http://www.slashdot.org. (A few people have said that it's funny that I don't use Domino to host it. To which I reply give me the $AUS 5,000+ for the licenses and the $AUS300 per month hosting and I'll make it happen. The conversation usually ends at this point).

    Anyway, I get a few people submitting news everynow and then, but more often I am the main source of articles (I've got a lot to say).

    My reasoning here has been that:

    1. Notes/Domino people are generally very busy.

    2. Notes/Domino is a business tool and operates primarily in a business environment. As a result there are few "hobbyists" out there. (Or naval gazers as I like to refer to them).

    3. Most people hitting the Walnut website are looking for answers to a specific question, rather than looking to commune or share ideas.

    4. Domino is not generally thought of as being "fun".

    That's my thoughts for the day at least.

    Back to work :)

    Justin

  1. 17    | 11/25/2003 6:07:20 PM

    Steve, it is not really Wiki-like. You get to post your own articles. The scoop engine lets members vote on the articles so that interesting articles are preferred.

  1. 18  Joe Litton http://joelitton.net | 11/25/2003 11:55:11 PM

    It seems that Libby might be up for working with e-pro and the Domino community to possibly host something. I think that could be wonderful!

    One of the problems I have is that there's so much good content that folks post, and (so far) no really good way to search it all. And some sites kind of disappear. In fear of losing good info that folks have posted , I sometimes archive the articles on my own. DDN has started a multi-blog search among DDN bloggers, and I know of at least one other hosting outfit that has considered that, but these are all partial solutions.

    What about a well-known e-magazine hosting a site that allows folks to submit content, and also allows folks to nominate content from other sites? Nominate an article or blog post, and if the content owner agrees, then that content is also posted on the new hosted site, and thereby available for searching, archive, etc.

  1. 19  Ben Poole http://www.benpoole.com | 11/26/2003 4:23:18 AM

    I think Justin's hit the nail on the head ;-)

    With regards the \. model, I find it almost unusable. I dislike the way threading works in it, and I also find much of the content to be worthless... YMMV!

  1. 20  Manning Clark  | 11/26/2003 8:17:28 AM

    Scoop. So anyone can submit articles. What if the information is wrong? The article will be read, rated, and commented on. But it's still there. Numerous people have to trudge through it. Then the article would appear in a search. Yet more people see this inaccurate article with a low rating and comments. That's not a workable solution especially if it this centralized weblog is used as a reference tool. Personally I'd rather have no data than bad data.

    There is a wealth of information in weblogs. There is almost certainly inaccurate information out there as well. However, there is a certain amount of trust that is built over time when reading a specific weblog (credibility), and you can stop visiting it when that trust is lost (loss of credibility). It wouldn't be that easy in a centralized solution.

    Again, it sounds like a great idea, and I'd love to see it work. But the level of administration required to make it credible appears to me to be too high.

  1. 21  vowe  | 11/26/2003 3:49:14 PM

    Go to www.wikipedia.org and see that you can change anything you want. Why is not full of b/s?

    If one has been living too long in a world of centralized control and administration it seems hard to believe that other things might work.