Blog/Blorum/Forum Update

Had a chance to respond to an observation made by A.E. over at Soob concerning recent developments at D5GW.

A.E.:

“I find this blorum business a little odd, but experimentation is always necessary. without we can’t come to greater things.”


CGW:

[re-edited to add links, images, and styling]


“this blorum business”

Heh, AE!

It’s still in the fairly early experimentation stage, although for better or worse I intend to keep it going for at least as long as D5GW continues.

At present, there’s a sort of hybrid, missing-link sort of combination; I’ve lately had to refer to the “Blog/Blorum/Forum” creature currently taking shape.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the exact shape will remain what it is unless more participation occurs. Primarily, this means registration at the Forum, a request to become one of the “Explorers” rank (D5GW Blogroll members automatically pre-approved), and posting by non-D5GW main contributors to The Blorum thread, which will publish those things as the Blorum.

So the grotesque hybrid right now is sort of shaping up to be a tripartite system, with:

• D5GW blog: regular 4 D5GW Contributors
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The Blorum: D5GW Contributors + Forum “Explorers”
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The Forum: All of the above plus everyone else wanting to participate on the Forum.

The Blorum only has one post at present, by yours truly. As I mentioned to the regular core of 4 recently,

I wonder if the Blorum might serve as a little bit of the iterative processing I mentioned in the PC post first exploring the idea of a blorum. I.e., when someone posts an intriguing and thought-inspiring post at the D5GW blog (as Arherring has, with his Hammes post), considerations of those posts can be made as posts to the blorum. I don’t think that should be the only Contributors’ use of the Blorum; but my recent follow-up on Hammes there has reminded me of a desire I’ve always had: for a method to post updates, alternate thoughts, footnotes, etc., on posts, without always needing to update posts (possibly multiple times, expanding them to gargantuan lengths) or creating new posts on the main blog to reiterate and re-explore posts (in which case the threads may become jumbled, especially for those stumbling onto the process somewhere at the beginning or middle.) Besides, I didn’t want to steal the focus from Arherring’s post.

But ideally, even those who hate the D5GW approach to 5GW theory — who have their own vision of what 5GW will be, different from ours — might post entries to the Blorum, as “Explorers.” Think: John Robb or even Hammes. (Okay, I know that’s only dreaming.) I.e., ideally, the Blorum would take shape as a place expanding in every direction necessary for developing the theory.

But the “tripartite” nature would mean that rebuttals, alternative interpretations, etc., etc., would occur in the two areas responding to the third in the Blog/Blorum/Forum. Kinda like the U.S. system.

Soob: sorry for the long comment. This has obviously been on my mind quite a bit lately.

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Addendum: On that last thought. Actually, I would suppose rebuttals and alternate visions and mild corrections and so forth would occur within each of the three as well as between them, although I also suppose that static increases with the increase in openness, or open-sourceness: Blog —> Blorum —> Forum.