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Gone are the days when you could read great articles on dotCOM (with 450 articles published in last 12 months, I hope one or two were not bad…). Bygone days.
With dotCOM turning into a blog network (http://goo.gl/M80oQ), the homepage behaves now like a “routing platform”, to redirect our readers to your own blogs in one click. The site now doesn’t contain full articles anymore, but only short excerpts of articles from the SL Sailing blogosphere, without exceptions.
The homepage now displays:
- short excerpts from all known SL Sailing related blogs (those we are aware of – see below) with all links provided
- one click access to each blog
- a quick overview of next events (calendar), latest race results, and RL Sailing News (ISAF)
- Ads widgets may be displayed to focus on special events (eg: Sail For Life)
- a search feature by category/tags/keywords across all blogs
- other features yet to be developed to promote the whole SL Sailing community
The aim is to provide a better overview of our diversity, of the “community spirit”, to better welcome new incomers, to better direct them to the information they are looking for, and to promote the work done by each of you (and in the end SL and SL Sailing).
Emphasizing the blog network…
Actual content of dotCOM is being dispatched/distributed into dedicated blogs for each topic. For instance, Sail For Life has now its own blog, as well as the Calendar, the Blake Sea News, the SLSA Rankings and so on. New blogs will appear. Several sailors, yacht clubs, events organisers can profit from this feature. Some have already started building new blogs here. To date, 21 blogs have being set up in the network, and there are more to come. Advantages are multiple: it better suits the “community spirit”; it may bring new columnists/writers/bloggers; it will provide direct access to specific topics, it may create group dynamics (1), it provides better collaboration tools (eg: sharing categories/tags/search…) than many currently have.
(1) Wikipedia about Group dynamics: two or more individuals who are connected to each other by social relationships. Because they interact and influence each other, groups develop a number of dynamic processes that separate them from a random collection of individuals. Further reading: Sigmund Freud’s ”Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego”… not to mention all the other blogs
So please:
So, if you are interested in joining the network and/or would like dotCOM to echo excerpts of your work (redirecting traffic to your existing site), please fill out this form here: http://goo.gl/b94tM.
- Plans are to move dotCOM to a new host. For few weeks there will a be a transition phase. Actually the homepage of slsailing.com is redirected to slsailing.co (“co” domain stands for “community”). Meanwhile, actual content is being dispatched into newly created subblogs by topics. A lot of work is yet to be done. For you.
- Over 300,000 L$ has been spent so far by MarkTwain White in developing and paying hosting fees for dotCOM. Another 120.000 L$ has been spend on the new site, with the hope that, thanks to you, it’s worthwhile.
- Will “Bea Woodget” shut up? Forget it guys, I’ll keep writing from time to time, using one of the subblogs in the network, without additional emphasis, like any blogger in the blogosphere, no more no less.
