Revamp?
I've been wondering what to do with the Thanet Blog List, and so I'd appreciate some input from you, the Thanet Bloggers.
Currently people either email me or submit a comment to tell me about a new blog that's started up and I'll put up a new post about it and add another link to the sidebar.
Obviously this isn't a very efficient way of doing things but it's the way it's always been done. In an ideal world I could set up an automated website with loads more details on there, something maybe like London Bloggers, although it would be a lot of hard work, but would add loads more functionality, and in the long run would, I believe, become a great resource for Thanet.
But is this what people want? Or do you all like the simple life?
Also at the moment I only add blogs from actual Blogger sites, but should others be submitted too (wordpress, etc within reason... no Myspace!), or would this detract too far from the original mission statement?
Please just leave a comment as it'll help me out a great deal. Just tell me what you think.
Currently people either email me or submit a comment to tell me about a new blog that's started up and I'll put up a new post about it and add another link to the sidebar.
Obviously this isn't a very efficient way of doing things but it's the way it's always been done. In an ideal world I could set up an automated website with loads more details on there, something maybe like London Bloggers, although it would be a lot of hard work, but would add loads more functionality, and in the long run would, I believe, become a great resource for Thanet.
But is this what people want? Or do you all like the simple life?
Also at the moment I only add blogs from actual Blogger sites, but should others be submitted too (wordpress, etc within reason... no Myspace!), or would this detract too far from the original mission statement?
Please just leave a comment as it'll help me out a great deal. Just tell me what you think.
posted by thanetbloglist at 2:01 pm
7 Comments:
Also... how long should a blog go without any new posts before I should remove it from the listings?
Has the Committee met yet to discuss my application?
The Blog
The Other Blog
Hi Jeremy,
tricky one this as our mission statement says:
"This blog is intended to be a list of all Thanet bloggers. The best will be done to search and include all the blogs that are out there and present them on this site. There will be no attempt to decide whether a blog has appropriate or inappropriate content other than whether it is in Thanet."
Yes you blog a bit about Thanet and visit many of it's blogs.. but the question is really about whether you have a Thanet Blog, as even your blogger profile declares your residency as London. An example of this is that now Skin of Stars has moved out of the area, his blog has been removed from the listing page.
I hope you can understand the reasoning behind this as I don't want to dilute the site.
Then again, as you saw I'm having a big rethink and am looking for opinions so maybe in the future there will be an 'associates' page.
Regards
Thanetblogger.
1. Should just be Thanet blogs or blogs with a strong Thanet influence. I would personally include Jeremy (oh, you already have!), and even Dusty.
2. Why not include sites from Technorati, myspace etc, as long as they meet the above criteria? There's a lot of crap out there (my blog included), but people can make up their own minds.
3. It's a bit hard to navigate at the moment, and with additions from myspace etc that would only make things worse, so some sort of grouping would be good (e.g humour, politics, personal, etc), but I appreciate that would be a lot more work.
4. Perhaps you should add something to the mission statement about only including blogs that have been active for the last 90 days. That would weed some out.
5. Keep up the good work!
Cheers for those suggestions ECT. I was wondering if you'd be interested in investing some of your wealth in this endevour?? After all what's £50,000 to a millionaire like yourself??
I would definitely look to adding some kind of structure if I went down the route of accepting more than just blogger blogs, but I guess I am a bit of a snob about myspace.
I may look to creating some type of form whereby people can decide what category their blog fits into.
I think that the mission statement is good, and whether you start including those that have a Thanet connection is one to consider as long as it doesn't get too top heavy with those out of the area.
Once you decide to include other areas than blogger it might have to be myspace too, though I know how you feel.
Perhaps you could have an archive area for those that haven't blogged for 90 days, but I would not like to see them deleted as to lose sight of 'Old Ramsgate' etc. would be a shame.
Lastly, groupings could be a disaster if done by type as several bloggers alternate between, humorous, political, news, comment etc. but could maybe be done by blogger, myspace, website.
As it stands at the moment I don't really have any problems with the site
That London bloggers site is excellent and if you really wanted to go down that road then I don't think thats necessarily a bad idea; user submitted and sorted. It would be alot of work to build as you'd probably have to make a custom system but if it worked the benefits would be huge.
Its a real shame to miss off wordpress/moveabletype/typo2 style blogs, but this was done for a reason. Without some restrictions this site would easily have spiralled out of control. It should also be noted that the bloglist grew out of the blogspot community.
I agree with the TBL in so far as not having myspaces/facebooks. My reasoning is that they are not blogs, they are profiles. There are also hundereds of them in Thanet and I doubt any of them come here.
I think an archived area for more than 90days since last post would be ideal (you could ave a static blog category for things like old ramsgate). If you were to build a custom site then it shouldn't be too hard to have them automatically archived.
As for out of town blogs... what are you all doing reading this? I'm not a Thanet blogger! Weirdos, the lot of you!
Keep up the good work.
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