[rmfo-blogs.com]: About

Some have asked what this place is all about, so I figure it’s worth spending a little time discussing what the service is and is not.

An Experiment in Community Weblogs

Some people might fear the word “experiment”, thinking that [rmfo-blogs.com], being a FREE service, could become a non-FREE service. That’s just not true.

What [rocksmyfaceoff.net] has been about since its inception is building community. We’ve done this in a variety of ways:

1. The Rumor Forum was the first big community effort. Based around the [caedmonscall.net] Rumor Mill, the Rumor Forum was originally a place to discuss Caedmon’s Call that was a technological improvement over the Guild forums. Bryan put a lot of work into building a community around more than just the music of the band, asking off-beat questions as conversation starters. Today, the Rumor Forum is, in many ways, the backbone of the community.
2. [rmfo-pics.net], our collaborative community photo gallery, allowed us to share personal and shared memories through photographs. We do this much in the spirit of the title track from Andy Osenga’s Photographs: “Take a photograph / if you’re wanting this to last”.
3. [rocksmyfaceoff.com], our collaborative concert photo gallery, allowed us to share our concert photos.

The experiment in community Weblogs is just a reasonable extension of this concept. Also, I was tired of seeing people use what I consider to be substandard logware. Also, aggregating Weblogs in one area allows us to keep up with everyone more easily. Having your own RMFO-Blog allows you a certain command of the floor that you really can’t get in a Web forum environment; here, your voice dominates the conversation on your Weblog.

FREE v. free

I’m personally a bit of a zealot when it comes to data ownership and such truck. Not only is [rmfo-blogs.com] FREE, but it’s also free in the sense that the words are yours and that you own the data. I also chose WordPress for this project because it is both FREE and free; we are protected under the GPL from proprietary code and data lock-in.

RMFO-Pro

That said, server resources really aren’t free. That’s why we offer a hosting option for people who want to host their own domain with us and use it for a Weblog. That’s what the RMFO-Pro system is all about. It’s certainly not a requirement, and it’s not as if we have a ton of Pro users to balance the server costs of the non-Pro users, but really, it’s not about the money at all. If it were about money, I don’t think [rmfo-blogs.com] would have ever come to fruition.

The Future of [rmfo-blogs.com]

In the future, I see us going forward and further weaving together the community of Weblogs through technological support. One planned piece of information architecture is a Web-based front-end that acts much in the same was as Wondergeeks.net does for some friends of mine and me—showing who has updated the most recently, and with what. If you don’t use a syndication feed aggregator to keep up with Weblogs, this is a good substitute; also, a front-end like this will quickly show people what we’re saying. I think that’s key.

If you have questions or comments about the service, fire away in the comments.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2004 at 12:56 pm and is filed under FAQs, Site Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.