Support Your Local Blog Club

In response to a general summer slowdown in blogging (or is T&S just sucking the life out of the rest of the Bloggernacle?), plus a couple of specific requests to pull out of a club, I have dropped a few sites and consolidated the remaining sites into one streamlined club/list. Please update your lists accordingly. Ongoing highlights: I think Clark's book club-type discussions of Mormon theology books at Mormon Metaphysics is turning out to be very interesting. This Liberal will have lots of things to talk about as the election rhetoric heats up. Our Thoughts adopted a spiffy new template. A Motley Vision continues to be the only site I know of producing high quality commentary on Mormon film and fiction--in fact, I find the weblog more interesting than the film and fiction it reviews! College bloggers Imagination's Fool and You Too! will no doubt be joined by other student sites this fall. I think every student should have a blog. This is a good thread for Blog Club feedback, comments, and ideas, as well as requests to join. FYI, here's a link to the most recent Blog Club FAQ.

Comments

[Kaimi]

Sucking out the life? Well, I don't think we particularly _try_ to suck the life out of the bloggernacle. I try to inject as much life as I can, linking to other bloggernackers when I have a moment (maybe that's not a good strategy?). Perhaps it's time to change the motto: "Quite possibly the most vampiric, yet life-depleting, onymous Mormon group blog . . ."

[clark]

URandom(4) Thoughts appears to be dead and has been for a few weeks.

[JL]

Hi Dave,
I'm back in the states! And even though I'm homeless, I have computer access again so I'm back to bloggernacking too. What's up with the club? Back to having only one again?

[JL]

*sniff, sniff* ...you deleted my link. I guess I'll get over it, someday.

[danithew]

If you continue to list me in the blog club, that's cool. I'm less strict about visiting all the sites on that list and I tend to go after the ones I've got on my Bloggernacle Choir links list. I think all the sites are included so it should still work. Like you, I've noticed a slowdown.

I don't know if T&S sucks the life out of the Bloggernacle or not ... but I often wonder how often people actually venture out from their own blogs to visit others ... and the number of people who actually visit other blogs and leave comments seems to be even less.

[Dave]

Thanks for the comments, folks. Kaimi, by "sucking the life out of the Bloggernacle," what I really meant was "being a marvelously successful forum for online interaction," it just came out wrong. And highlighting individual weblogs posts at other sites around the Bloggernacle (as you do regularly at T&S) does help maintain a productive two-way interaction between the Bloggernacle's center and the periphery.

There's an old corporate trick to clearing out distribution lists: stop sending out a monthly report and see who calls up looking for it (those are the people who actually read it or use it). So JL, aka the Bonnie Lass from the Emerald Isle, is back on The List.

[Jenna Andersen]

Thanks for the mention, and thanks for keeping up on the Blog Club's info. I am in the process of trying to recruit more people I know to start blogging, but it is really time consuming and they havent quite caught the bug like I have. I have noticed one good side effect to all of this, after starting my blog, my dear cousin has finally decided to go to BYU!

[clark]

I have noticed that there were a flurry of new blogs the last six months. Most started heavy but then started posting more infrequently. Now most of the blogs listed at T&S either haven't been updated in months or else aren't even there. It's understandable. I think partially it was simply trendy to write in blogs. And it can take time - although I personally find it is useful to tie your blogging to your personal study. i.e. ask *why* you are blogging and *how* you are integrating it into your overall life.

Way back in the mid 90's when I did the equivalent of blogging (basically a personal online journal) it was primarily to keep me writing my family and friends. Sort of a bi-weekly newsletter of my adventures. (I usually was off every weekend having some sort of wild adventure - something I don't get to do now that I'm married and have a kid on the way) But it forced me to record what I was doing and now, looking back, I'm fairly glad I did. I kind of wish I did it more since I'm not a journal writer by nature, despite all those lessons at church.

My philosophy stuff, beyond trying to keep my mind active, also tries to keep studying the scripture *active*. i.e. to keep it interesting enough so I do it.

[Kaimi]

"Now most of the blogs listed at T&S either haven't been updated in months or else aren't even there."

Yes. I guess we need to update the sidebar. I don't read all of the blogs we have sidebarred. I read many (most?) of the Mormon themed blogs. I really don't read any of the political blogs. And I read very few of the journal blogs. (Celibate's and Danithews I look at pretty regularly, with occasional forays into Arwyn's or Jan's).

[Arwyn]

I've been slow this summer because Microsoft has sucked out my soul.

I plan to be more active in the blogosphere these next three weeks, and as soon as I get back to school (the first week of September), I'll be back up to 5-6 posts a week (or more!) over at Imagination's Fool. Look for commentary on the political atmosphere on a predominantly liberal campus and the beginnings of lots of worry over my honors thesis. ;)

[no]

if any of you need a specific mormon book and aren't sure which to get i suggest that you read the book reviews by Jeffrey Needle. They are very thorough and accurate. they have helped me a lot in picking out books that introduce my children to the mormon lifestyle.
thanks
norma g.