Contribute to RFB

I would like to make Radio Free Blogistan a more inclusive resource and less of a one-man show. There are a few ways that people can contribute.

Anyone with a weblog- or metablog-related category in their own blog can set up an RSS feed for the category and tell me about it. If the information in the feed seems to be of value to my readers, I will add your last four or five headlines to my sidebar, as I’ve already done with Lockergnome’s RSS Resource, Weblogging for Poets, a klog apart, the Blog Herald, and Micro-Content News. As with a blogroll, I will add to and prune that list as needed. Corante on Blogging would be there for sure, for example, if Hilton weren’t on hiatus.

Next, I am going to make all the categories at RFB trackback-pingable and I’ll probably set one up specifically as a default ping receiver to remove the choosing-a-category obstacle from among the barriers to participation. I’ll write a little how-to tutorial if I ever get that done.

I have some related ideas, by the way, for facilitating a more interactive Salon blogging community. For one thing, we could do better than the recently updated page at blogs.salon.com. This page is like weblogs.com, in that it’s just a list of updates, and it is a good way to see what’s been posted lately, but now that both Radio and Movable Type do trackback, it’s possible for everyone to (manually or automatically) ping my Salon bloggers category (formerly ‘Salonika’) whenever they update, which would create a list like you see at blogs.salon.com, but with titles and excerpts from each post.

Kind of a Salon community today at-a-glance page, linking back to everyone’s individual blog.

But back to the how I’m trying to invite more participation in RFB. Finally, I would like to find a small crew of people who would be interested in joining the editorial/writing staff. If you’re interested in doing this, drop me a line, show me some of the writing about weblogs, or nanopublishing, or any of the other topic you see here in Blogistan, and we’ll take it from there.