Blogs Are Like Front Porches
A social list I'm on is discussing how to find and invite a few new interesting folks to the list. One of the proposals is to create a blog where some of the more engaging posts can go, so people on the web can find us better via searches or RSS. A concomitant worry amongst the folks who haven't had experience with blogs is that the existence of the blog might splinter the group and its discussions into the blog group and the list group, and end up dissipating the group entirely.
In trying to describe that a blog isn't really the same kind of discussion space as a list, I hit upon an analogy: our list is like a house, where the list lives. (And in the case of this particular list, it acts very much like a family, with all the large and small details of life and living, and all the bickering and love that a family has.) Blogs are like front porches. As people amble by on the sidewalk, they find an interesting person or three on the front porch swing. They might follow a bit of the discussion, and be moved to say hello. Or they might amble on, and when they get home to their porch, talk about how they saw so-and-so talking over on Elm Street about such-and-such.
Houses which don't have front porches and people on them? Nobody knows what's going on inside them (cf. my earlier you're just a lurker post).
Does it have to be a front porch? How about if we just have a home page for the list, instead of a blog? That's a start -- but a static home page is more like a billboard than a front porch. Aren't a couple of live people talking in front of a house more inviting than a billboard?
And the family's life and living -- where does that happen? Well, the family spends some of its time on the porch -- but the real living, and all the juicy discussions -- they go on inside. So I don't worry that having a blog, or a front porch, will cause the family to disband.
By the way, you're welcome to visit our list, while we figure out whether to add that front porch or not. It's not very big -- around 100 people -- but most subscribers are active. It's nominally about the English language, and that's a common interest of many of the subscribers -- but it's not the main topic.
Some other things we like: gossip, regionalisms and geography. We're on the older side -- average age is probably around 50. That predicts more than we'd like (as part of the discussion of how to describe the list, I offered "a cranky gang of old farts," and got a chorus of "tell it like it is!" responses instead of disagreements :-), but less than you'd think.
The place is a "bog of self-reference," mainly from being around forever (since late '89). Listen for a while, or ask. And last but not least, it's high-volume, 100-200 messages per day. Start by deleting a lot. :-)
If it still sounds interesting, you can subscribe on the Words-L Listserv page. There is also an alternate Words-L web site.