Just a quick heads-up ahead of the fact; the week in blogs feature which started last Sunday is being moved to Monday afternoon instead.
As means of an explanation, let me give you three reasons, none more or less important than the other;
Firstly Sundays tend to be slow-blog days; most people switch the computer off and chill out. On the other hand a Monday sees returning office-folk desperate to find something entertaining online that will take their minds of another week of work (!); hopefully by moving days the feature will be brought to the attention of more people, which will encourage people to engage in the post-feature discussion and most importantly follow the featured links to read more on things of interest.
Secondly the change means that the review can cover Monday – Sunday, which is a slightly more logical situation than reviewing Sunday – Saturday; now the review will be a round-up of the week that went before and will hopefully round-up the better bits of the previous 7 days.
Finally the change allows me to start the article on Sunday evening and tidy it up in-between that point and the ‘deadline’; that should make for a better read than a rush-job of writing, editing and publishing all in one go.
I’m still trying to balance the definition of the weekly feature in my own head but I think it’s far better to tinker with the style and focus in front of an audience in this instance. Given that the feature relies on what’s going on elsewhere there’s no way that I can have a set plan; trial, error and experimentation is the way to go. Already I’ve had some constructive input and I think this sums up where my head is at on the idea at this moment in time;
I want the feature to be a round-up of the better end of discussion in the Irish blog community; it doesn’t have to be stuffy or serious but it should be entertaining, inspiring or thought provoking. The basic idea is to connect the wide and varied array of bloggers together; show them that they’re not alone in what they’re discussing and hopefully encourage them to read more and engage with alternative ideas more.
I’m not going to just pick the most popular topics of discussion, just the ones that contain the best and most eclectic opinions at the time (although the more bloggers post about one thing the more chance there is for that wide range to exist).
As is the beauty of blogging there is no consensus on anything; the comments I feature will not be always reflective of general opinion or anything like that; if anything I’d rather highlight the alternative PoV than the one everyone has already heard. In last weeks piece, for example, I featured comments on certain things that I completely disagreed with and that were pretty isolated in the wider community alongside the cream of what most people are saying; I hope I will continue to have the ability to do that.
All comments are welcome and encouraged!