A great inititiative

My good friend Gareth has really outdone himself here, setting up this piece of cyber real-estate for us to collectively stretch our legs in. Thanks Gareth.

I just want to make two quick points. To make the blog a nice interactive place rather than a one-way flow of information, we need to make extensive use of the comments. Thus if a particular post generates interest and discourse, that should take place in the comments to the post rather than as a series of separate individual posts. Try to keep each post to a specific topic, let the comments to the post roam where they may, to some extent.

Secondly, the blog is not like the mainling list. New content is not going to magically just appear in your Inbox. But instead of having to bookmark and check it manually each day, I recommend that you set up an account with a blog monitoring site called Bloglines. You use Bloglines to subscribe to the blog "feed". Then to watch all the blogs that you wish to subscribe to, like this one, you only need one bookmark (even better, make it one of your home tabs in Firefox), and you will automatically know if there is a new post. I think it is even possible to subscribe to individual comment feeds.

Let's make this thing work for all of us.

Steve Lacey