Thanks for the shout out….

I think one great supporter of everything happening in the sphere is Christine Lu at The China Business Network ( http://thechinabusinessnetwork.com/ )….She backs anything that has merit…She even gives free radio snydication to anyone that supports our dreamblogue project in a major way…and the quality of her shows are amazing….

Great list….:-)

There is a huge industry in trade magazines – magazines that people outside that industry would never even know about, but are hugely popular in that industry. Then, there are also widely read generic magazines that have only a mild focus (Time, People, etc.). I think both server a purpose and visitors tend to have different reasons for visiting them.

Personally, I like websites that are focussed. They have good quality content, reputation, often an insider or expert’s perspective. Basically, I know what I’m going to get when I visit. I visit CLB for interesting writing about Law/Business, I visit CFM for excellent insight into Chinese economics, I visit Shopgirl for… well I don’t, because her focus is in an area that I’m not much interested in.

Which is why being everything to everybody may not be a great idea. There are ways to filter, navigate, etc, but my experience with DalianDalian.com is that as a website becomes more complex (we have blogs, forums, photos, news, listings, reviews, all collaborative) navigation and providing a site focus becomes really quite hard. Pleasing someone looking for a review, to someone wanting to browse some photos, to someone looking for background information on the city, all on one front page and keeping everything obvious and a minimum of clicks away, is tough. And with just one city so far, we’re pretty focussed.

It’s tough. Collaborative sites do get more traffic I suppose because they get more content. Yet filters at the same time, like haohaoreport, go a great way towards getting good content recognised.

Great ideas all, but think about the implementation of them and keeping them useful, obvious and easy to navigate. What’s obvious is on a website for a web-savvy blogger may not be appreciated/realised by a random punter. And it’s all quite time consuming!

Running a blog doesn’t take too much time, but you definitely get more exposure to your ideas by going with a community site, unless you have already put in a bunch of leg-work.

Hopefully all of us can get a bunch more interesting stuff going that many can participate in.

My problem is time. Already writing travel reviews and offering advice for another website as part of their community. I did have my own site but closed it down as I didn’t have enough time to run it.

I’d be happy to contribute some stuff to other sites/projects given half a minute and I’m going to check your project out now.

I don’t want to see blogging become prescriptive though… (not suggesting this is what you’re saying) just that if I need my space here just to tell things as they are (which is kind of what I need it for) then that’s OK too.

Ryan, I’m definitely up for contributing to worthy causes when it gets off the ground.

The beauty of blogging is its freedom, so let’s keep posting….

@Everyone: Who has a skype account? Collaborative Podcast show, anyone? (My skype: pandapassport)