Is This Thing On?

[Daniel Hatadi]

Are you recording? Red light's on? Okay.

Hello and welcome to crimespace, the new hot spot for lovers of crime fiction to meet--

Oh? I've done that already? The blurb, it's up the top of the page? Okay ...

So ... what now?

I suppose I can ponder on the necessity of adding yet another blog to the world, or even worse still, a whole collection of the things. When I set up crimespace I didn't really want to have blogs attached. There's plenty out there and Crimespot already has a good handle on the indexing of crime fiction blogs. But I didn't realise that the blog feature was built in to this thing and it's left up to the individual user as to whether they want to make blog posts or view anyone else's.

That leaves us with three options:

1) Keep the blogs on crimespace as they are. Use them as a separate blog, maybe targeting posts for the crimespace vibe, or doing a manual copy & paste from any blogs we might have elsewhere.

This seems like a possibility, but seeing as many people out there have their own blog and some even post regularly to a group blog, it might just turn into a helluva lot of redundant work. And this place should be about fun, not work.

2) Wait for Ning to sort it out so that the blogs showing up here are taking all their posts from external blogs, thus removing the need for tedious re-posting.

If you look through Ning's tips on customizing this place, you'll see this tasty tidbit: "One of our next projects is to make it easy for your members to pull in RSS feeds to their member profile pages. Additionally, we want to make it easy for members to fully import their external blog to their member blog on your social network." So we can just wait and see how this turns out. I imagine it'll be like a mini version of Crimespot, although not anywhere near is good, more like a quick convenience.

3) Remove blogs from crimespace altogether.

I'm not sure if this is possible, as I don't think this is Ning's vibe. I think the idea is to have these spaces completely configurable on a user level. If you want to read something, keep it in there; if not, then get rid of it from your page. If you click on Manage, then Features, you'll see what I mean.

What say you all? Does the world need more blogs?

Cheers,
Daniel

EDIT: Let's see if updating this post gets it on to the main page.

[Daniel Hatadi]

Well, that's a vote for #1. Not that it really matters, as this is all in the hands of the individual.

Go for it, Christa. If it inspires you to write more, it's a good thing all round.

[Christa M. Miller]

Oops, I wrote that before I noticed your comment on my blog. :P Never mind! I will just see how the whole thing shakes out.

[Christa M. Miller]

Hmm, I'd been thinking of starting a new blog that would focus on my fiction (BSPs, process, etc.) and was planning to use my space here to see how that would work out (if it did).