For quite a few years before all this social media stuff got properly conversational, this site was the home of a burgeoning forum. It was created in PHPBB and was home to many a wonderful discussion about all kinds of things, some of them directly related to what I was up to as a musician, but many of them just driven by the supremely fascinating people who would hang out there.
As web-based conversations moved around, Twitter became a really great place for the kind of link-sharing and funny comment stuff that was often the forum’s stock and trade, and many of the forum regulars moved over. It’s been great, and chatting to those people on a weekly-sometimes-daily basis on twitter is a wonderful thing.
But some things were also lost when the forum traffic slowed right down, namely the essays that some of the contributors would sometimes write, and the threaded conversations that would often happen as a result of a link to a news story or link to a youtube video.
So to drag that forum community kicking and screaming into the new millenium, I came up with the idea of a group blog – log-ins to post to it will be made fairly widely available to anyone who demonstrates a desire to become part of that community and write interesting things, though the option to comment there is obviously open to anyone (something else that I didn’t like about the old-style forum was that people wouldn’t often leave a comment because of the barrier that signing up provided – it felt like a bit more a commitment than people who just stumbled in there by accident were prepared to make.
It’s also proving a really useful place for me to drop discussion ideas, embed videos, post silly stuff and start conversations about stuff that wouldn’t necessarily fit here. Yay for that!
Currently, there are a few v. interesting threads and topics over there:
- Indie MP3 Sale!
- ISPs & those troublesome downloaders – A possible solution
- If You Were Curating Meltdown…
- How Do You Keep Track, And How Do You Share?
- Twitter Hype?
- Mos Def’s New Album Released As A T-Shirt.
Please do go and join in, grab the RSS feeds for the posts and the comments (this is definitely one blog where the comments will be at least as interesting as the posts! 🙂 And if you want to write for the blog, start commenting and I’ll be in touch 😉
Love the idea of a group blog, I’m looking forward to the Google Wave implementation – from what I can see it could be something along the same lines…