To blog or not to blog! That is the question?

We have been keeping the blog updated on a regular basis now and hopefully passing on useful information to those of you who come back regularly? One of the problems is the amount of time it takes to keep the blog alive. We seem to get lots of people coming back manytimes to view the content but have little to no responses to the content from those users? Is this because the content does not deserve response or do people simply not want to spend the time to comment?

I recently went to a local User Group meeting where I had the opportunity to speak with Trevor Perry about his Blog and how he has simply stopped posting. His problem was the responses he got, for those of you who have not seen Trevor in action he is pretty much an in the face type of guy. This has created many bad feelings to creep into his postings and responses which has put Trevor in a position which isnt making him want to keep the blog alive. Blogging takes up a lot of time and effort, you also get a lot of unwanted attention, we are constantly being pounded by trash comments and spamming! The trash keeps coming regardless, this is additional work which takes even more time to filter through and weed out the idiots who seem to want to send me thousands of emails which promise me cheap meds, software, or any other kind of idiotic scheme! Yes I do get angry with these clowns as it puts many off the benefits of a well intentioned email campaign. You also get the person who will subscribe as a user, post a comment full of links and trash, luckily most gets stopped by the software but you still have to go into the site and clean up after.

We are now at the stage where we are considering how best to get the information out to the users without the pain and inconvenience being suffered using the Blog. Perhaps the best way would be to add only comment to the blog and have a subcription method to pass on the code and instructions to those who really want to see it?

We dont want to stop helping where we can and we do have a number of users who come back and email outside of the blog (probably dont want to chance the possibility of getting the emails from the spammers?) so we know people do appreciate the comment. We do however need to cut down on the time and effort being spent on the management of this without reducing its usefulness.

We will be looking at the alternatives and looking for a solution. If you have any comment on what you would like to see let us know.

Chris…