We never have an open thread here on RFB. I shy away from generic-titled link-remaindering and so I’ve never liked the way “Open Thread” looks in my RSS reader. I realize that this has to do with the weak integration of blog and discussion board ways as discussed recently, but not in an easy way to abstract in the comment thread depending from Why are all blog commenting tools braindead?

I know the difference between a message board and a blog and I use both, but I wonder whether ANY of the people who create blogging tools have any knowledge of or use for the affordances of message board conversations that enable many people to discuss many topics with many other people over many days, weeks, and months. On all blogs I know of, the comments scroll off into invisibility after the posts they are attached to are replaced by new ones. Sure, if you are fanatic about a particular post, you can add a comment much later — but who else is going to participate? This is what I want. Somebody please build a plug-in or add it to the next revision of your blogging tools. (I tried to nag Ben and Mena about this, but they were too busy.)
I want to be able to SUBSCRIBE to each comment thread that interests me, SEE my list of subscribed threads when I want to, no matter how old they are, READ the new comments that have been added to my subscribed threads since the last time I read, and ADD a comment at any time. If you think in message board terms, each category is a forum (conference, folder, newsgroup) and each thread (string of comments) is a topic (item, thread).

To me, the open thread convention on some of the political weblogs is an inelegant kluge. It doesn’t archive well. But now that I think about it, I’ve never stood on ceremony before, and it obviously works as a stopgap, as a way of giving the readers a platform for suggesting topics or for asking questions or for seeking help and alliances among the rest of the readership. I’m no Derek Powazek when it comes to community-building. I still to tend to think in terms of publishing and authorship, auctor, auteur.
So, ignore my inchoate ramblings. Post whatever you want in the comments. It’s an open thread. All ye, all ye, outs in free.

One of the more popular (commented-on, linked-to) posts here in the last year or so was my somewhat sketchy Weblog strategies for nonprofits entry. At some point I was talking to CompuMentor about some kind of panel discussion on the subject in SF but I haven’t heard anything about it lately and I’ve been kind of busy with the campaign and writing my book anyway. There’s a chapter on nonprofits in the book, though, so I haven’t wandered too far away from this subject yet.
I just noticed my editor posted a link to an article called What’s a Blog, and Why Should Nonprofits Care? in the Nonprofit Quartery (NPQ).
Everywhere I look people are trying to build more interactivity and more personal voice into politics, activism, and nonprofit organizations, so now more than ever the time is ripe for some kind of do-gooder technorati-ish group to provide some kindling.

Over at apophenia, danah boyd points to her current blogging bibliography and asks for other suggestions. A few people have pointed to other lists in her comments:

• Academic papers on blogs from Klastrup’s Cataclysms
• Nick Olejniczak’s syllabus for a class on blogging
• Common blogging resources from Write It

Now we just need someone to maintain the meta-list.

Blogfather Glenn Reynolds advises would-be webloggers to pioneer underreported topics, instead of crowding into overpopulated subject-areas, such as war and politics, in The Next Wave at Tech Central Station:

There are lots of political/national security blogs (“warblogs” as they’re sometimes called, though most of them spend a lot of times on non-war subjects). There’s always room for another, especially if it offers special insight: either in terms of knowledge or location. But there’s no question that the warblog field is probably the most crowded, and that it probably is harder to get attention, even with a very good blog, in that area than in any other.
So if I were starting out from scratch, with the goal of having maximum blog-impact, I think I’d give that subject a pass. Instead, I’d look around to see what’s going on that’s potentially very interesting, but that isn’t getting enough attention.

Wait for it…
Indeed.

Chuck “Blogumentary” Olsen and Lori “Secret Farm” Idontknowherlastname have started a blog together called MetaSecret MicroFarm in which they are blogging about their blogs. I tell you, it’s infinite regresses all the way down.

Kaye Trammell offers some tips on how to keep a secret blog secret. [via Scripting News]