Sunday, January 4, 2009

Why have a SpiritFire blog?


If you have spent any time surfing -- over even swimming -- in the blogosphere, you already know that a blog can be a powerful tool for promoting an on-line community. If this is your first exposure to a blog, however, you might well wonder why SpiritFire should have a blog and what it can do that the Yahoo discussion list cannot.

Discussion lists provide a great medium to allow list members to post questions, thoughts, ideas, or even links for other list members to see. Conversations can emerge and community can grow. On the other hand, conversations about particular posts can get lost amidst multiple threads, causing discussion about a thought-provoking idea to lose momentum just as it is building up a head of steam. Multimedia, such as pictures and video clips, can only be made available as links rather than as embedded images. Plus, only people who are subscribed to the list can access the discussion, which limits the spread of ideas and philosophies.

A blog offers solutions to these challenges. Although individual threads can only be started by people who are identified as blog “authors,” anyone at all can comment on a thread and join the conversation about an idea, announcement, or question. Comments on a post or comments that have already been made on it are associated with just that thread, so responses as well as the author's own follow-up thoughts and replies don't get lost or disconnected. All threads are archived and are therefore easily found again. And authors can embed both pictures and video in the same post.

So welcome to the SpiritFire blog. Our intention is for this to serve as a forum for talking about the aesthetics, agreements, and philosophies associated with SpiritFire, as well as the ways in which the transformative experience of the fire circle can and should be manifested in the rest of our lives.

There are no special rules for posting comments beyond the ones we use on the Yahoo discussion list: (a) treat each other with kindness, and (b) don’t use the blog as an announcement board for non-SpiritFire related events. Visit the blog often, as it is our intention to give you all a lot to think about for the coming months.

Now … let’s go swimming and see if we can be ready for the deep end of the pool by the time late July rolls around!

Love to you all,

Steve

1 comment:

Akoma: Ghanaian Culture in VT said...

Thank you for beginning this discussion, Steve! I look forward to seeing how the seeds grow...