Book People Archive

Re: Road trips, book submissions, BP format

[Moderator: This was sent to the main posting address.  I did ask
 for comments to be sent to the admin address, but this gives me
 the chance to respond to a few common questions and concerns. - JMO]

On 4/15/07, John Mark Ockerbloom <ockerblo@[redacted]> wrote:
> I'm looking in particular, at Blogger,
> which appears to allow threads to be started as they are now (posted
> by moderators but going out under the contributor's name) and then
> continued as comments without the bottleneck of moderators who sometimes
> go on trips at inconvenient times.  (Moderation after the fact would still
> be done, however, to deal with spam, off-topic, and otherwise
> inappropriate posts.)  The blog format could also allow people to
> participate that don't want their mailboxes filled up, but still be
> kept up to date by checking the blog itself or its feeds.

I enjoy reading it in the email reader, and would not appreciate yet
another page that I have to check every so often. Email, or
LiveJournal, where everything is batched up is fine, but there's too
many pages that I have on my check daily list that get checked every
three or four days, or every few months if they get forgotten.

Blog spam seems to be entirely posts, and seem quite common in
unmoderated situations. I've never personally had a problem with the
comments being moderated sometimes sporadically. That would be a
complete downside for me.

For those that don't want their mailboxes filled up, there's always
gmail (, etc.) accounts or a decent set of filters that can put all
the messages from this list into a folder.

[Moderator: We wouldn't go to blog format unless we had an RSS or Atom
 feed for both initial posts and comments/followups.  This would allow the
 forum to be read without having to make a special effort to visit a page
 (though one could do that if desired),

 A number of email programs, such as Thunderbird, allow you to subscribe
 to blog/RSS feeds and read them as if they were email.  There are also
 various standlong RSS aggregators.  There are also RSS to email services,
 though one correspondent tells me that they haven't worked well for him
 in practice.  (And since moderation on comments would be after the fact,
 people receiving the blog comments as email would get them unmoderated.)

 Also, to make it clear, a move to a blog would be intended as a change
 in transmission medium (and in moderation workflow) but not a change
 in types of posts, or a limitation of the people who could make posts.
 If you're worried about the forum turning into a bunch of short, cryptic
 links and in-jokes, as some blogs are, that's not the intention.  (Though
 posts that have links along with summaries and/or comments would continue
 to be welcome, as they are now.)

 There are in fact a number of blogs that mostly consist of longer-form
 posts, and extensive further discussion in the comments, in many
 cases in longer form as well.  Two examples iof such blogs that
 often deal with book-related topics are Making Light
 (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/) and the TeleRead blog
 (http://www.teleread.org/blog/) .  This is not to say that
 there would be no change in dynamic -- any time you change the medium,
 you're likely to get some change in communication dynamics-- but that
 I'm not contemplating replacing apples with oranges. 

 We still haven't decided whether we'll actually make the move,
 and if we did, it wouldn't be for a while, but I thought it worth
 letting listmembers know early on about the possibility.  I can't
 say I've gotten particularly enthusiastic response  (some seem happy
 to give it a try; others don't like the idea), and I've found that
 Blogger doesn't seem to have all the features I'd ideally want
 in a blog-based forum.  (In particular, it has fewer options for
 comment moderation than I'd like.   Movable Type, the software 
 that runs Making Light, seems to have the full range of options
 I'd want, but it looks potentially more troublesome to set up 
 and maintain.)

 It does sometimes get difficult to run this as a mailing list.
 These two weeks when I'm traveling and otherwise very busy,
 I don't have much time to send posts through, so sometimes
 things can get delayed quite a bit longer than I'd like.  And sometimes
 moderation itself is not much fun.  (But neither is the noise
 of most unmoderated forums.)   But I hope that folks find it useful
 and interesting to read.   If we think it would work better
 in blog format, given the resources we have available, or that it's
 time to close the forum down, we'll act accordingly.

 Thanks, and I'm still happy to hear further comments and questions
 at the admin address. - JMO]