Saturday, April 30, 2005
(11:27 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Whither The Weblog?
The Good Professor's post below ties in well with a broader question: What exactly is it that we're doing here?For instance: How has my strategy of radical hospitality, making this page into an open forum for anyone who gets up enough nerve to write something and ask to post it, worked in practice? Has this page remained somewhat coherent as potential writers self-select? Has it created significantly more diversity than would have been possible if this had remained basically an Adam Kotsko solo operation?
I suppose another possible measure of success would be whether any of the many, many co-bloggers (eighteen people currently have posting privileges, and yesterday I silently deleted a couple accounts of a few people who either haven't posted in months or never posted at all) had created his or her own following, which could be determined in a variety of ways. I think there is an argument to be made for a couple people, particularly Ye Olde Doug Johnson. Bitch PhD seems to have brought part of her pre-existing following with her, and I'm sure that some people would check here more often if Adam Robinson ever posted. No one is really coming close to my every-day posting schedule, and I don't expect anyone to do so, but there is always the danger that at any given point, every name in the recent posts column will be mine. That is, it still seems to be something between my own personal site (Adam 'n Pals!) and a real group blog, although lately it is moving more toward the latter than it ever has before. It might just be that this page still feels too much like "mine" to feel like home to anyone else.
But no matter what comes out in comments, the only concrete action I have in mind is this: I really am thinking of getting rid of the "H is O" contingent of F. Winston Codpiece III, Kamala the Ugandan Giant, and anti-anti-Kamala. That would bring the number of persons writing down by three to fifteen (although in the real world, it would only reduce the number of human beings with posting powers by one).
