I'd like to propose the creation of a Grex blog-sphere. This would be a new service offered by Grex where users can have blogs hosted on cyberspace.org. If you had a Grex-blog, people could go to http://yourname.cyberspace.org/ (or http://yourname.grex.org) and see a fairly standard looking blog page for you. You'd have a choice of a couple basic formats, each of which would allow you to post messages, and allow other people to post responses. There would be support for "trackback" links linking your blog to relevant blog entries on other blogs on Grex or anywhere else on the net where trackback is supported. As blog owner, you'd have some ability to customize the look and feel of your blog. You'd have the ability to edit your own postings, or to delete comments other people most on your blog. In these ways blogs would be much more under the personal control of their owners than conferences are under the control of fairwitnesses. Users would sign in to post to blogs using their regular Grex logins. Blog owners would be able to enable posting by "anonymous cowards" (users who are not logged in) at their option. RSS feeds for all blogs would be available. Links from the blog to the rest of Grex would exist, but would be somewhat subdued. My plan would be to implement the blogs in Backtalk. This would mean that all blogs would be accessible not only via the blog interfaces (which would be Backtalk interface flavors) but could also be accessed as normal conferences via the normal backtalk interfaces or via fronttalk, making them accesssible to dial-in users and people who like command line interfaces. Though technically implemented as conferences (each blog entry is an item with the responses being comments) the would be administratively different. The "fairwitnesses" would have much more power. It is my perception that blogging requires more personal control of the space than ordinary conferencing does. I haven't done all the coding I'd need for this. The "wasabi" interface used at http://www.greatgreenroom.org/ is a blog-like interface I wrote for my personal use. I'd plan to write one that is a bit more conventionally structured - with the front page showing the most recent blog entries and links to comments on them and older blog entries. I've got trackback links about half implemented. My inclination is to offer a blog to any user who requests one, with the proviso that they might be deleted if they are inactive too long. I believe that we can create yourname.cyberspace.org subdomains without cost (though I don't know the details). I'm thinking that this could be a popular service, partly because of the reasonably cool cyberspace.org domain name. Even if offered for free it could attract more memberships, and perhaps encourage some cool activity on Grex. It would, of course, be possible to offer this as a fee service, and Grex's financial problems make that tempting, but I think it wouldn't be a very Grexian approach to the problem. I don't think the per-blog resource cost is actually very high, unless some blog gets extremely popular and eats up all our bandwidth, but I think that would count as a "good problem". At this point I'm looking for ideas and feedback. Bringing this into existance within Backtalk would require a moderate investment of time on my part, and I'd like some input before I go far down that path.61 responses total.
Very cool idea. I'd think allowing .gif files would be a must though. Is this something Grex can allow? I'd like to see this started on a free basis with the understanding that might change. I hope it doesn't change, but I'd rather be clear from the get-go, it's an experiment. At some point we'll need to start having some serious discussion about Grex's finances.
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For $1 you can get about 30MB of home directory and 30MB of webspace at sdf.lonestar.org where you can post images to link to. NetBSD.
You can get 25 megs of space (and 1,500 megs of bandwidth) per month at free image hosting, http://www.photobucket.com/
It has to be considered how this proposal might affect grex's regular conferencing environment. Hosting blogging here could hurt the normal conferencing, which up until now has been grex's raison d'etre. People could come here for blogging and email, and the regular conferencing would only wither on the vine. Whats the point of even having all this niche speciality conferences, when the groups of people using them can do these blogs instead? What is grex, a conferencing environment or a blogging environment. I don't think it has enough users or activity to be both. I am against this blogging idea. Grex needs ideas to HELP the open conferences, not to kill them. There are a zillion places on the web to have your own blog. Grex doesn't need to be one of them. Grex needs to champion its old style open conferencing. If everyone starts using blogs, it could well kill all but one or two confs here.
Confs are interactive; blogs, afaik, are not.
NOt all the conferences are inactive and never that I know of in grex's history have the conferences not been the center of everything. That would change adding a blogosphere. As a co-fw of three mostly dead conferences, I don't like the idea that the blogs would drive away the few users that still participate in those conferences. Tell me how this helps the conferences. If it doesn't help the conferences, grex should not do it. After all, what is Grex if it isn't ABOUT its conferences...
Why can't GREX be about blogs AND conferences? For some of us, GREX is about conferences and party. For others, it's about party, solely. For others, it may be about programming, with or without any or all of the other services.
I thought grex was about community. Why does that have to focus solely on conferencing? Why can't a programming community spring up here? Or a blogging community? For that matter, who says it all has to be the same community? Grex can, and should, strive to provide for multiple communities sharing the same space. Building blogging on top of an existing conferencing system provides a nice way to provide a loose coupling between at least two (potential) communities. In short, I'm against the idea that grex is ``all about'' any one thing or the other.
I don't think GREX *is* one community.
I have met many people at grex who never tried the conferences but wanted to 'talk' over the web.
If conferencing fails it's not because of blogging. It's because conferencing isn't working. I'd like to see this tried here. For some already here, it might be a more comfortable way of being part of the community. And it might bring in new people. We really won't know until it's tried. Grex needs to experiment more and try new things. Like, soon.
Agreed.
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Heh. I love the third idea.
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#12...agreed that grex needs to experiment more and try new things. But why something that will kill the conferences rather than enhance them? Why not offer some sort of pop e-mail. Many users would come here for free web email, and limits could be in place and you could only get around those limits if you paid for a membership. Also allow limited use of .jpg files Maybe even a web chat or web interface to the existing party program. The answer is to make the place more web friendly so people coming here will see and USE the conferences. Not to provide them with excuses to not use the conferences. With a blogosphere Grex may as well close down every conference but Agora and Coop.
Re: #16. Is that just trolling?
Also why not a better menu system for the conferences, and since grex is on this fast new server, why not start offering usenet feeds again. Remember the good old days when grex offered tin and trn newsreaders. The problem always was that grex was too slow to take advantage of them. The conferences would be helped with the ability to link to relevant usenet feeds and get people from usenet groups joining grex groups.
Regarding #17; I don't think it will kill the conferences. Those that participate in the conferences now aren't likely to stop; new users aren't exactly appearing in droves. So what are we losing, really? If anything, we might net a gain as users pop on to look at blogs and then say, `oh, neat, what's this conferencing thing?' Anyway, my point is: What makes you so sure that blogging will kill conferencing? I agree that we should do all the other things you mention. Pop and webmail, image files on the web server, and perhaps even web chatting aren't a bad idea.
Someone could do blogs on using a timesharing system, or a system that isn't one of the Big Two. Re: #19. Agreed.
http://www.juiceforjesus.org/
Sadly, they CAN go overboard (you know how they can, too). A gif Collective would be an interesting idea, though. Again, it is unfortunate that staff would have one more detail to manage.
I like the idea of Grex hosting blogs- it still may attract new people (people who want something 'different' than say LJ or one of the other sites). Also, if you're able to link between blog and conference (the way an fw can link maybe? or just a -for the web- clickable link) people who blog but don't know about conferences may be lured over.
I think this is a great idea.
I think this is one of those things that you don't know how it'll work out until you try it. In contrast to what Jamie said above, I think that with interest in and public awareness of the blogging phenomenon exploding as it is right now, this is a perfect time for Grex to be trying out a blogging interface. Computer conferencing wasn't exactly new when Grex launched in 1991 either, but that didn't stop it from being very successful here. (By the way, re one of Jamie's other points -- Grex already has RSS feeds. There's an item in the Garage conference about it.) Experimentation with different kinds of communication interfaces and community-building tools is perfectly consistent with Grex's mission. To address concerns that this might have harmful unintended consequences, an appropriate way to proceed would be for the Board to authorize it but build in a review after a reasonable trial period, say six months. That's how we handled the internet connection when we first got one in the early 1990s, when the internet was new and not everyone was sure that internet connectivity was the right path for Grex.
By the way, here are some statistics I ran across on the current state
of the blogging phenomenon:
By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a
key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet
& American Life Project in November established new contours
for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they
have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and
now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users
say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news
and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich
Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users
have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62%
of internet users do not know what a blog is.
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/144/report_display.asp
Hi, Mr. Remmers!
ah, maybe Im just too attached to the old ways of doing things. Obviously there are people who come here now and to them Grex seems like a quaint old site. People won't drive old cars without air conditioning so you have to put air conditioning in'em, no matter how nice the car is. Same thing here. The bells and whistles become more important to buyers than anything else
re resp:27: I have briefly looked at blogs, but have never participated in one more than that. I don't really know what the excitement is all about. I keep seeing mentions of blogs, even in newspapers, but that's the extent of my knowledge.
In response to richard (#29), at some point, the bells and whistles become necessities. When I bought my Vic-20, I never imagined ever being able to buy a computer with 1.5GB of RAM and a 120GB disk. At that time, a 5MB drive costs close to $500. But I wouldn't have purchased this PowerMac that I'm writing to you from if it didn't have what I couldn't imagine then. I even got dual processors! It's really not about what you can sell, it's what you need to get the job done. Can Grex support blogs? That's the question upon which all others hinge...
How much setup time and work, and how much maintainence?
If perhaps a couple design options were created- so that people could just pick the one they like. Give the 'blog' owner the ability to delete other people's responses (for innappropriate behavior if nothing else). It shouldn't take too much work/maintainence after it's all set up. People with coding knowledge will likely play with the layout of their blogs, other people will want a simple design that requires no tweaking. As for set-up time, no idea.
I like the blog idea a lot!
My thinking is that Grex either moves into blogs in a big way, or else it becomes even more of a hangout for antiquarians than it is now. I've been finding that even more of my long-time friends are turning up at LiveJournal; unfortunately it seems to take a death in the "family" to bring all this activity to my attention.
I "think" most blogs also allow posting of pictures, so guess then grex would have to allow too , else there would always be better blog sites which allow pictures to be posted. And only bloggers we would get prolly would be current bbs users , so few new guys maybe.
If you've never seen a blog, here is an example from an author familiar to most grexers: http://www.potifos.com/polygon/ No, blogging is not new. New is not the only possible virtue an idea can have. I would be amazed if this killed the old style Grex conferences. But if it did, then it would indicate that old style Grex conferences aren't working very well for people. I'd rather have people abandon conferencing on Grex for blogging on Grex than have them abandon conferencing on Grex for blogging elsewhere. I don't think either will happen though. Conferencing still viably serves a niche. I would initially not allow pictures. That is, I would not allow pictures that are stored on Grex. Pictures stored elsewhere can already be included in Backtalk postings, in conferences that enable that. Can't remember if this one does. As for storing pictures on Grex, we need to make some policy decisions about that. Backtalk already has some support for attaching arbitrary documents to posts (images, Excel spreadsheets, whatever) that is not turned on here. I'd need to do some more work on quota code to make that viable here.
blogs and the conferences are similar in how they work, posts by people which over time tend to form communities. if the original suggestion that they be tied together is consider then would there not be blogs named 'spring' and 'coop', just as there would be a new conference 'malymi' were i to create a blog? (there are some glitches i see in this -- are there any existing collisions?) but i don't see the danger to the conferences in general. there certainly may be danger to particular conferences -- are not those in the most danger already virtually dead? must the virtually dead be maintained forever merely because they once had a following? even so, the conference/blog would exist and some effort by the existing community could help make it flourish again (just make a post a month may be sufficient), via the magic that is indexing (and aggregation), something that is impossible for the conferences as they stand. i.e., today you must have learned that grex exists and come here and look before you can 'test the waters', while being indexed via the blog interface (or a more open backtalk) would mean that many more people might find the discussions, the community.
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I'll try later. The system seems broken right now.
Yeah.
I'm hoping this topic gets added to the next board meeting agenda. Adding blogs to Grex's mix could be a very cool. From reading over the past 40 responses, it seems there is support for us to give this a try. Maybe we could start with a board vote endorsing blogs on Grex? I suspect we'd need such a vote as administering blogs will give users a much enhanced level of control over their journal or blog than we've allowed in conferencing. Usually a blog's owner can decide whether to allow comments from others. If comments are allowed, the blog owner reserves the authority to remove comments and block some users from posting. In essence, it's the blog owner's journal and he or she makes the rules. I guess the only real limit I'd like to see imposed is that the blog must be readable by all Grex users. What do others think? Does the board need to authorize this? Am I right in my sensing most of those here would like to try this tried on Grex?
yawn.
Since support for blogs would add a significant new communication avenue to the current conferencing/party/mail mix, and *could* have an impact on those (especially conferencing), board endorsement would probably be a good idea. I'm leaning towards handling this the way the internet connection was handled when Grex first got one in the early 1990s: Authorize it for an initial trial period (6 months? a year?) and assess the impact at the end of that period. I don't know the current position of this project in Jan's priority queue (he's the one who suggested doing this and volunteered to do it), but I'd encourage him to proceed, as I think it's a really good idea for Grex.
I still think it's a good idea too.
As do I.
Me, too. I agree with remmers on how to handle this.
I don't see there's much difference 'tween blogs and conferences. Both are started by soneone about a topic, and both allow people to respond, including the originator. So what's the big draw?
Blogs tend to be more personal, stories from the blog owners own life rather than just 'on a topic.'
The "ridicule" factor as jep puts it might deter people from using them.
Perhaps- but if, as we've mentioned, there is more content control the blog owner would be able to delete comments they didn't like.
But can't the conf owner do the same thing? I'm always reading about this or that person being banned. Re. 49: So. You can do the same thing with Grex. It's called "start a new conf or thread."
People banned from conferences, on Grex?
If you look at a blog simply as a collection of posts and attached comments, they seem to be a lot like conferences with their items and responses. But that's not seeing the whole picture. There are significant differences between conferences and blogs. One is control: Blogs don't have "fairwitnesses", they have owners who can set limits on content, in particular comments from others, as Anne pointed out. But there's another significant difference: Visibility on the web. When we say "Grex support for blogs", I assume we're talking about enabling Grex users to become part of the world-wide community of bloggers, commonly known as the "blogosphere". This means that blogs hosted on Grex will be more web-visible than the conferences. To post anything in a Grex conference, you have to be a logged-in Grex user; but with blogs, you'd want to allow the option of anonymous posting by anyone (the owner could turn this capability off if desired). Also, Grex conferences aren't indexed by search engines. But if you want folks to find your blog, you want to let the search engine spiders in. Then there's the issue of inter-blog communication. Modern blogging platforms (Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, TypePad, etc.) all support "trackbacks". It works like this: If blogger A makes a post that talks about something posted on blog B, then blog A can send a "trackback ping" to blog B reporting this reference. Blog B can then post a link to the item on blog A, or perhaps the actual text of the item -- sort of an "external comment". All of this is automated. Blogs A and B don't have to be hosted on the same blogging platform. It helps bloggers find other bloggers with similar interests and thus facilitates community-building beyond the borders of any particular hosting service. I gather from Jan's #0 that support for all this is part of his plans.
Will people be allowed to remove entire blog threads which contain commentaries from others or will Grex uphold the Blue Ribbon free speech campaign for once?
The blog owner rules his or her blog and can either allow a post or not. This is very different from our conferences. You'll know when you post to a blog that the blog owner has editorial control. It's not a free speech issue from the get-go. Unless, of course, you start a blog and promote free speech by announcing you'll never edit any comments. Which would be your choice. I'll be very interested to see how this goes on Grex. Right now, in the conferences, it's any anything goes event. From lucid, well considered commentary to the outbursts of the mentally ill. It's all there, one big pile to sort through. With the addition of blogs you'll be able to spend time in more controlled discussions. For some, this will be wonderful, for others, well, it won't work as well. I think having the choice to do either, or both, would be good for Grex. About the only rule I'd like to see applied to blogs would be that they are at least readable by anyone who can log into Grex.
I agree with mary on this.
With that kind of control, the "mentally ill" folks here will stick to confs, unless of course someone creates a blog for these folks. Well, thanks to Mary's enlightenment, I'm all for the blog thing.
Sometimes the truth sucks dead rats.
It's hard to imagine that the truth isn't disease ridden, then.
TROGG IS DAVID BLAINE
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