I have been using WordPress for a little over a year now. One of the reasons I moved to its free support for multiple users, opposed to the fees charged by MovableType for the same feature. Fourteen months after making the switch to WP, I have installed five other blogs at ask-mark.com (we welcome Brad as the newest author), but I have yet to register any users on my blog.
On some of the other blogs I host here, two users are setup: one for the main author of the blog, and a backup administrative user for me to help out when things go wrong. So far, nobody has registered for my blog. Am I miffed by that fact? Not really. Would I even know what to do if I had extra users? Again, not really. I’m hesitant to let other users write their own posts on the blog, but I’m not sure it wouldn’t be a bad experience to manage a site with many authors.
So, who knows? Maybe I’ll register yet another domain and make it a more communal publishing space for the other bloggers at ask-mark.com and myself. I’ll leave this post as a way to start the talks about having a more communal forum for our publishing, and see where the discussion leads us. If we were to start another site, what should it be called and what should it be about?
I used to post on a communal blog, though I don’t anymore really. It was a personal blog for my friend Lucas, but every Thursday was “open blogging” where the rest of us could post.
I think the best way to do a multiple-user blog is to have a theme or topic area - that keeps it cohesive, rather than one guy talking about, say, Linux and another talking about her cat. Although, maybe that would make it interesting, I dont know. In general, though, I think a focus is best.
Anyway, I’d be down for it.
I am honestly thinking that television might be the focus. There is so much TV that we (those of us still in the NW ‘burbs) are watching together: The Gilmore Girls, Lost and Alias to name a few. And then there are shows like The West Wing, Ghost Whisperer and Wonderfalls, that are each followed by just a few of us.
The other foci I can think of at this point are food, movies and other forms of entertainment or recreation. Outside of that, the interests of our group of friends is so varied as to prevent any real focus.
And like Al said, I would personally find a thematic multi-author blog more interesting than just having a mish-mash of topics. Of course, that does not exclude the occaisional off-topic post, but those should be fewer than the posts about the focus.
If anyone has any better ideas for a multi-author site, by all means, let us know.