Thrilled to see all the responses!
Let me talk a little more about my thoughts on all this.
A long time ago we set up a very different blog type system (using MoveableType), where we had a bunch of columnists who were supposed to write something once per week (each columnist had a different day of the week).
I think the schedule just burned people out, and it was yet another separate source of info on the site.
So when I decided to restart blogging at DC last year, I implemented something very different..
Go to our current blog page at:
http://blog.donationcoder.comYou'll see that the blog items are actually made from forum posts(!).
This lets us easily create new blog posts based on interesting forum threads, which keeps the forum as our single place for discussion, but still allows us to extract a few posts a day for spotlighting, especially for people who aren't daily hardcore DonationCoder.com forum readers (And the hardcore forum readers still see everything since the blog posts are built from forum posts).
I think this actually works great. But what would *really* take it to the next level is if we incorporated more opinion and traditional blog-style items in the blog. Right now it's mostly items about web/software discoveries, with very little personality and often focusing on things that were found on other sites.
So, my the idea is to find some members who want to be more regular bloggers, who might be willing to go out and discover stuff, or write opinion pieces, etc. There won't be a strict schedule, or strict format. You will simply make your posts on the forum in a normal forum section (Living Room, General Software, Developer Corner), but your forum posts will be regularly Blogged, and posted on the
http://blog.donationcoder.com page, and maybe mentioned in the newsletter. We could figure out a special name for them, and create a special page collecting all your items after a while.
In short, there is no formal arrangement we have to make. I encourage all of you who are willing to give it a try, to consider yourself "accepted" into the blogging elie at DC. Just post your essays as normal posts and we'll figure out a way to recognize them and blog them if appropriate - messsage me when you make a post you think would be a good blog or something. Think of it as a trial period - if your posts get turned into blogs then you are a success and we'll promote you officially and give you permission to create official blog items yourself. If not, worst scenario is you just created some nice posts on the forum that weren't quite blog material
And of course we will try to figure out a way to properly show appreciation for the bloggers. Keep in mind that all mini-reviews and coding snacks get blogged, so any time you write a mini-review you are essentially creating a blog item. So you see that "blogging" on DC really just means writing a blog-worthy forum post. My challenge to some of you is to pro-actively try to write such posts on a regular basis, and we will try to recognize your contributions more formally.
Sound reasonable? We can figure out more details later as well - i'm open to suggestions.
