[Menydh]

I think that you two are missing the point. Please, bear with me for a moment while I share some ideas.

First of all, a blog is *not*, by definition, a professional editorial publication.

If the blog editor is a professional of the media, or if he is an academic, that blog will be different from another blog from someonone who is just logging his travel experiences, details of his everyday life (or weekly, or bi-weekly, or whenever he feels like he has something interesting to note down on the blog), or someone who wants to show off the marvels of his country and people (and so he can make categories: monuments, sightseeings, people & traditions / ethnology, historical events, you name it). Or someone who has an amateur knowledge of some trade, science or art, and he wants to share or to broadcast it.

Or someone who has personal thoughts of a philosophical, social, political or other nature. And so he writes down these thoughts, and comments on news or social events from around him, etc.

With respect to Stirpes, at present we are building up a community of people who already share their views in the form of forum discussions. But I'm sure that most of you will sometimes have felt that a discussion thread becomes a little chaotic to express a certain idea or view of your own, around a given subject. Often I feel constrained by the 'rythm' of the discussion.

Here is where the forums-integrated blogs offer an advantage over the more usual full-featured blogs: you already have a potential audience for your blog, both from the community of members and from the guest visitors.

They also offer the advantage of being hosted in a site that you already visit with a certain frequency. You don't have to visit a different website and log into it.

There are other small advantages. For example, from time to time I do some search engine and search directories optimization. This is commonly known as SEO, and it involves a number of techniques and tricks to improve the indexing of Stirpes in search engines or its inclusion in web directories. Part of this work is already done. We get a fair number of visits of spiders from google, msn, yahoo, askjeeves, and others, everyday. And there are engines and directories for blogs too, which I'll do my best to call in.

As a summary:

The blog is personal. If you are going to use it with a political purpose, a personal, or both, it is your decision alone. The only thing that is requested is that it is not used to go against the principles and the objects of the community where it is hosted.