I’ve been cheating on my blog, sorta. Nah, let’s face it; it’s a full-blown affair. A while back I was offered an opportunity to participate in the closed beta of a blogging community. A social network of bloggers basically. My fellow writers and I shared similar tastes in online journalism and essaying. Most of us were Salon.com members. The blogging experiment, Open Salon, is now open to the public.
Things have been a little chaotic as membership shot up from a bit over 1000 to just under 3000. The constant stream of new posts and comments have jostled the closed beta members who are at least familiar with each other, if not attached at the hip. Content ranges from balmy to banal, with large doses of political punditry sprinkled with photos and food.
The site is a live animal, just finding its legs. Most of the technical growing pains have been hammered out. But emerging personality differences remind me of life with maladjusted siblings. Recent peeves have centered around the cover page content: too many Olympic ass shots, too many pretty boy photos, and more personal revelations than a shrink hears in a year. Well it’s true you can’t please everyone.
If you’re a new visitor, the best course of action may be to browse a few tags that interest you. There’s been a push from the editors for bloggers to use tags more appropriately. Geez… a quick peek and it seems they’ve removed the tag cloud. OK, you can search at the top of the page. A word of caution, politics will return posts for days. Any way you find content, if you like the writer I suggest you subscribe to his/her RSS feed. The link is beside the author’s photo.
So that’s it, the explanation for the freshly accruing coat of dust around here. For a while I’ll be back and forth. Hope to see you at OS.