Grex Blogs

Jan 4 15:41 UTC 2005

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.