1 - About blog attrition and lndcentral.com: See, I started a Domino blog once. Actually, twice. I never really got past the first two weeks. There was always either too much going on in my life to take the time to blog or nothing even remotely interesting happened for long stretches of time. Not exactly prime blogging material.

Then Ed came up with the kuro5hin idea which I very much liked but didn't have the time to implement at the time. Actually, had I know how easy it is to set up one of these PHP/MySQL thingies, I would have *made* some time.

Actually, a couple of years ago - must have been 98 or 99, shortly after I discovered Slashdot, I had the idea to build a Slashdot clone in Notes. It never happened, and interestingly, nobody else ever took the time to build something like PHP-Nuke, Postnuke, Drupal, Geeklog, XOOPS in Notes/Domino.

So here we are, lndcentral.com is running and apparently behaving, there have been 18 user registrations so far and the day isn't even over yet

So if you haven't been over there, hurry up before the first 100 accounts are gone and we need to order a new truckload of blank accounts ,-)

2 - LOL, kewl that I got such a response to this. Let me address them in order...

Ed - that is a kewl idea - and I think may be one of those "evolutions" of blogging we're talking about. Group blogging may be a kewl way to give voice to people with like interests who don't have the time/inclination to do their own solo blog.

Alan - congrats on the new boy! You're back on the list

Chris - actually I find that the tech stuff I post is what gets people to come to my blog, but the "off topic" stuff I post is what gets people to stay at my blog. I get many, many more responses to my opinion pieces than I ever do for my tech stuff. I will continue to provide technical information, industry stuff, etc. - but I will also try to balance that with some opinion pieces, personal stuff, etc. I think this is a great vehicle for my readers to know a bit more about me, and for me in turn to learn more about them. The kewl part about it is that if you have a blog, you get to decide what your "voice" is - and this is a comfortable voice for me.

Jack - without question, blogging takes more effort than people think it does, especially when they start blogging and are all optimistic. In fact, I have found that I, and other bloggers I have talked to, hit "dry spells" where it is really hard to come up with something to say - and doing so feels like "work". That is usually the time that a "shakeout" occurs, and many blogs die off. I know I have questioned whether I wanted to continue this blog or not on occasion. So, it is bad to do something you don't want to, and I don't blame bloggers for dropping off. I am just curious to see where blogging goes over the next, say, 5 years or so.

Colin - I agree, and I do like the way your site is organized. I try to do something similar, but not nearly to your level. Oh well . As for new bloggers coming on, they are. I have added a few new ones over the last couple of days, so it appears the cycle continues. Good for us.

Ed - yep, your experience is the same as mine regarding off-topic posts and responses.

Ben - thanks for the heads-up on Ray's blog - it is back on the list. And you're right, it looks like crap in Firefox.

Christian - you're back on the list!

Neil - sorry for the aggregious oversight! You are now proudly displayed on the Lotus Geek Honor Roll

Oh, and I added Olaf back as well ...

Thanks again, everyone!

Rock

3 - I've said that there should be another way to approach this. And sure enough, one of my readers took me up on it. See http://www.lndcentral.com . It's kind of like Kuro5hin.org for the Lotus community. He hasn't launched yet -- that's why it looks like a shell -- but it would be a great place for a bunch of people who can't blog very often to have a place to contribute useful content.

4 - Something that I've done from the start was categorise what I write about, provide separate access points to those categories, and provide a tech-only RSS feed in addition to the normal one, knowing that some might take an interest in my tech ramblings without having to wade through my personal waffling.

A community RSS aggregator is an excellent idea, and could be very topical if suitably filtered.

The idea of a group blog/forum is appealing and if it works that would be great, but I wonder whether it would work. My take is that it's easier to disclaim yourself against accusations of poor quality or topicality if it's your own blog by pleading self-indulgence. If you actually *push* your content to a site you can't hide behind that disclaimer: you're exposing yourself to higher expectations and criticism. I don't know if many people would be inclined to post blog-esque content to such a forum if they're not inclined to start their own blog to do the same thing. Having said that, I'd love to be proved wrong.

As for the dead blogs Rock, as long as enough new ones pop up to compensate for the older ones which fade away, we're in good shape

5 - so, well, im one of the blogs you mentioned above (btw, im still alive with another blog, and soon starting a second, err, third business blog). You asked "Will blogging continue to be viable - both in general, and in the Domino community specifically? Or is this yet another fad technology that quietly dies out". The blogosphere will prosper. That is what i believe. First, you have mentioned it, Blogs are the new personal homepage tools with some new, very interesting elements. Second, there are many users out there, not knowing about blogs. The vast majority i think (maybe not so in the USA, but in the most countries of the internetworld).

And the Domino Blogosphere? I cant answer this, since i left the Domino business months ago. This will be a phenomena in general: many software dedicated blogs wil become in decades ruins. Nothing unusual, the technical progress wont ever stop.

("Jonvon" & "Joe Vet L.": hi, if you read this, you see, i did not forget you. Dont ask me why, but i feel something like "back home" when i read your blogs. I wish you the best guys!)

6 - I am not dead, just busy with the new baby in the evenings when most of my blogging is done.

7 - Seems I made to the list as well... not completely dead, just at a different site. http://www.chrisbekas.com - cheers!

8 - Doh! I didn't read your last paragraph properly. A lot of folks took the plunge when blogging was new and exciting, but over time I'm sure that things will settle. As long as new bloggers are arriving, I don't think a net shrinking of the number of active blogs is anything to worry about (yet).

9 - Chris: Hmmm, I thought someone was/is aggregating the Domino blogs in a single RSS. DominoDeveloper.net had been, but I don't see it anymore. I dunno about putting something on an IBM site, but I'll think about it.
As for not caring about United's new logo - my blog is what I advertise it to be -- not just about Lotus. As Colin mentioned, I too categorize entries and you have a choice to view by category. While the vast majority of my "regular" readers are in the IBM Lotus community, the majority of my drive-by readers are from the other stuff I write about. Some of them stay. And I tend to get more comments per post on the non-Lotus/IBM/MS topics than I do on the tech stuff. There's plenty of my personal life I'm keeping off the net -- early blog entries notwithstanding -- but I like to share some of the experiences that go along with the job, and from the page hit counts, I can tell there are people reading

10 - Yup. Reality hits hard. Blogging sounds so cool (doesn't ThinkGeek have some blog centric T-shirts?) but you and I and every other blogger know how much time and pressure a blog can create for an author.

All the best,
Jack

11 - I show the LotusGeek blog icon, and dont appear to be in you list, my partner Dawn is.. Dont you like me, or my blog

12 - Heck, Notes.net, oops I mean LDD, discussion fora load like dogmeat in Firefox as well. But I will never go back to IE except when I have to develop for it.

Back to Ed, I was just using United as an example.

The bottom line is that webblogs, like the early web, is hype waiting for maturity. Rememeber when the web first hit in the masses wayyyyy back in '94/'95? Everyone was saying "Wow, now everybody will be able to publish their own personal content to the web and bypass traditional publishing routes". Sound familiar as webblogging hype in 2004?

What is different is the technologies available, such as RSS, web services, etc which make the content readily accessible in ways beyond just "surfing" the web.

13 - The group weblog's here!

http://www.lndcentral.com

14 - BTW, Ray Davies' site is up and running. His last post was April 12th.

The site itself still looks like a dog's dinner in Firefox and Safari though

15 - Not that blogging is a bad thing, but the problem is that there are so many of them, it can be hard to keep up. Much like the notion that if we have the Notes Discussion fora, why are there so many side places you can go as well.

Now what would be cool is if IBM (hint hint Ed) took a tool like Neil Revelle's aggregator and added a consilidated RSS feed from Blogs in the LDD Domain. That way people can go to one place to see all content.

The blogs also tend to have a lot more family and personal stuff (not that that is a bad thing, jsut would not be my style as I keep my family off the net) than technical at times, and as such people might or do stop coming. Do I care about United's new logo (Sorry Ed, just the quickest example at this point)? Most people probably not and as such will stop coming to Blogs, making them less useful.

The plus is that it does allow people to self-publish when they have not made the leap to write for Advisor, LDD, the View, etc...

16 - Hi Rock!

My site moved from http://domino01.brandlehner.at to http://chris.brandlehner.at which should be availabe except some minutes for backup a day. -> error 503 indicates maintanance or backup downtime.

Chris

17 - Actually, I have wondered before what would happen if a well-known blogger in our community passed away? Now, one could argue that it happened with Olaf. The jury's still out on that one. But in reality, we'd probably never know if someone really died or just quit writing because they weren't interested any more.

Reminds me of that website some time back that was titled something like "Am I Dead Yet?". You could put some JS on your home page that would return your life status. If you didn't log on to their server every x number of days and check in, it would report you as dead.

18 - Well, News4Notes provides a pretty nifty aggregation of the more useful technical content.

Like some others here, I think categorised content is useful for those who just want the Domino / Java / whatever posts.

It's also worth noting that this is easily extended to RSS feeds as well.

One categorised Domino view + a few pages to embed it in = nicely partitioned RSS.