Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Speedy Links and BuddhoBlogBuzz

A third blog in the IntegroBuddhoblogosphere has been tredding in Blogmandu’s roundup business. Sheesh. I am coming to know how General Motors felt when suddenly competition came from Mercedes Benz, Rolls Royce and Infiniti.

First there was tinythinker with terrific, full-bodied roundups in peaceful turmoil on June 15 and again on June 22.

Then came Justin with his “Blogmandu-inspired weekly Roundup” in American Buddhist Perspective on July 15.

And now there is Bill of Integral Options Café doing daily “Speedlinking” at, something like 4am since Saturday. [July 22, July 23, July 24 & July 25.] [By the way, I deeply thank Bill for his links in Speedlinking to the new group blog Nagarjuna, who solo-blogs Naked Reflections <q.v.>, and I have started, the revamped Thoughts Chase Thoughts <q.v.>.]

Tinythinker, Justin and Bill all do a terrific job and are giving me ideas about how to better do Blogmandu’s Roundups when it comes back full-tilt in September. I very much like the idea of doing shorter daily roundup, rather than the weekly ones I had been doing. There is something, still, about blogging that – rightly or wrongly – demands that the freshest stuff is what we are interested in.

“Old” posts – and by this it can mean something just three days old –- drift down the home page of a blog. The comment thread for a post, vibrant at first, quickly loses its vigor.

Nacho of WoodMoor Village has an old post [five days old!] that digs into the issue of sustaining a conversation in blogging. It seems certainly true, as Nacho notes, quoting an essay, that blogging is set up to be too much a “friend of information but the enemy of thought.” So, Nacho is using a tool that his blogging software provides to create a 'featured post' at his blogspace.

Possibly, there are other new tools and ideas coming along to sustain posts and conversations in blogging. Will of thinkBuddha, always at the forefront of Blogging technology, has coComments tied in with his blog. CoComments has features that allow a blogger to stay abreast of comment-thread conversations he is engaged in. In addition, I noticed there are other clever ideas that coComments is spearheading that have promise in ‘sustaining’ blog conversations.

Possibly, Blogmandu can help out by following along, on a daily basis, some of the conversations that have ‘buzz.’ And, perhaps, on a weekly basis, Blogmandu can announce a Topic for the Week that Nacho or Will or someone chooses that the Buddhoblogosphere can chew on in a flurry of interlaced posts.

Anyway, when the Roundups in Blogmandu come back, I am hopeful that two seeming contradictory issues are addressed to make the roundups more relevant: 1) that the material covered is fresher and 2) that B’du helps in the noble effort of sustaining the goodness of posts and comment threads that have been around a while.

I would welcome comments, y'all, about the general topic of sustainability of blog posts.

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