Can we imagine a form of peer-review bloglets on focused themes for fixed durations that would be around multimedia and humanities computing? Here is the idea I put to Steve.
I have been playing around with blogs. Lian set up Movable Type for me on strange.mcmaster.ca and I have been reading about them. It occurs to me that we could have a regular bloglet feature for T.T.Online. It would work like this:
1. We would advertise regularly (once a year?) for bloggers in humanities computing. Proposals would include the following:
1.1 A theme for the bloglet that is interesting and suitable for a bloglet.
1.2 An example of what the first couple of posts would be.
1.3 A short biographical statement
1.5 A commitment to regularly post to the bloglet for a fixed amount of time on the theme
1.4 And a bibliography for the bloglet.
2. We would peer-review these (and probably invite some too in order to get it started.) We would encourage people to choose themes that are research areas/questions they are working on. We would look for bloglets that run between 2 weeks to a month with a post ever two days.
3. Two or three times a year we would run one of these invited or peer-reviewed bloglets. They would be “live” research explorations of a theme that would allow someone suitable to work out an idea in community.
4. We would turn commenting on so that others could comment as the bloglet runs. This would both provide a dialogical dimension along with giving the blogger feedback on the ideas.
5. Before each bloglet runs we would advertise heavily to get people to subscribe. Part of the trick is that these would run for a limited time and be run by interesting people on neat ideas. Thus it would be like subscribing to a short term focused discussion list.
6. There would be a clear IP statement that allows us, at the end, to repackage the bloglet (including comments) as an archive on TT.Online.