Team Blogs

I want the new site to provide a window into the experience of iGEM as it is happening, and I think the wikis last year did a poor job of capturing the "instantaneous narrative" of each team, although to be fair, that was never an articulated goal. Nonetheless, I am sure blogs would do a much better job than wiki pages. My intuition is that even if their usage won't be any more familiar to team members than that of a wiki, their purpose is much more clear. What I mean is that the very concept and structuring of a blog suggests a certain kind of information that a wiki, even a page called "team blog", wouldn't because of the associations with openness and flexibility and revision wikis usually have.

That said, even if we provided a little dialog box for team members on their team portal page to update their team blog, would anyone use it? It's hard to say. I hope that they would, and meagan and I want to set a good example and have a registry blog running by the springtime. The purpose of the blog is for the teams to share their experience with the community, and we are going to provide a central aggregation page showing the latest posts for all of the teams, as well as the ability to Digg or Promote the coolest posts to the Community News Feed on the front page, as well as offering RSS feeds for everything. Hopefully this will provide enough of an incentive for at least someone on each team to post to the blog every week or so.