From Blogs to e-Zines: An Open Letter to the Salon Blogging Community
While Salon may escape the headman's axe this time around, thinking outside the pond for Salon bloggers ("Sloggers" in Rayne's colorful coinage) is probably not such a bad idea for the long run. I am far from a technical guru, as evidenced by my losing battle dragging my own site to a new Web host, but I have a few ideas for ways we Sloggers could lash our (b)logs together and form a raft in case the big ship goes down.
Currently, between 40 and 50 blogs publish new content in a 24-hour cycle. Taken together, that's a whole lot more original stuff than appears fresh in a week on the Salon home page, or Slate, or any other e-Zine. Many of us have static links to each other's sites. A few have some code to indicate whose pages have been recently updated. Some wizards in our ranks subscribe to each other's syndicated content. The wonderful Mark Hoback even personally edits a weekly best-of superblog, Virtual Occoquan.
All of these are steps in the right direction. But what distinguishes the home page of an e-zine like Salon from a series of linked blogs is, essentially, a few lines of text: those teaser summaries of each feature story preceeding the jump-link. I'm wondering if there's any way, technically speaking, for us to publish, say, a 160-character summary tag for each new post, that others in the community could subscribe to and stream into a dedicated column on each of our blog pages. That way, everyone's blog page would feature their own work, but also provide a detailed menu of links and teasers to everyone else's blogs. Instantly, each of our sites would become the home page of a vast and varied e-zine.
I'm sure something like this has been tried before, as it's not a big step between simple links and the story teasers that I'm talking about. Still, it would be cool for our community, and a good way to hold on to readers and momentum in the event of a Salon melt-down. If anyone out there with the technical know-how could move this discussion forward in terms of easy (or at least possible) way to implment this through Radio, I'd be really interested to see where it leads.
2:59:02 PM 
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