What Made Robert Powell's Blog Great... (1435 hits)

And the Significance of Its Death.

Catchy title eh? Well now I've got your attention, let me say first that this is not about Robert Powell per se. Rather, it uses his blog, and the killing of it, to illustrate two key points about the structure and running of Black in America. It could also be titled "The Message Board vs. Modern Day Social Networking and the Blog". In addition, it illustrates why the new feature recently implemented by BIA administration is not a significant improvement in terms of what is needed to make Black in America a better forum.

Robert's blog was the most successful, since the time I've been a member here, for two reasons. First, because it had a specific topic: The deleting of member comments, which is based on the premise that the blog poster is the owner and moderator of the blog posted. Second, because of its longevity. Of secondary importance is the creator of the blog, Robert Powell, though he, of course, was one of the principals that gave life to it.

It's death was due to Black in America's policy of not policing its ranks, but allowing its members to freely express themselves without interference from administration. But in the end, this policy collapsed, because the members demonstrated they could not police themselves, and administration went to the opposite extreme, and deleted the blog in its entirety.

So now I will show a better structure, one which administration would find very difficult to implement. Basically, it would require a complete makeover of the site. Nevertheless, I will illustrate it because it is a superior type of forum, which seems to have been forgotten in this new age of the social network.

Here is the site I will use as my example. It was originally started as techstocks.com, but is now known as Silicon Investor. I will provide several links as we proceed, to save you the trouble of navigating the site yourselves. It is a site I joined in 1995 or '96.

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At the bottom of the page is a link, About Us, (non-working link removed by ADMIN) which tells us:

"Since August 11, 1995, 516,230 registered members have posted 26,839,595 public messages on Silicon Investor. Each of these messages is available either by browsing the topic-specific Subject message boards, or by using the Advanced Search feature available to Premium Subscribers."

Now go back to the main page and look on the left hand side for the link, Boards. Go to Boards.

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You will see a long list of Forums, and the number of Subjects in each Forum. On the right is Coffee Shop. Go to Coffee Shop.

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In this Forum, near the top of the list, you will see a Subject titled: LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE - Tell us a joke.

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Here we see the rules of the Subject, a Moderator, and a link to the 3 members that have been banned from the Subject. The original creator of the Subject is no longer shown, though I remember who it was. But we can navigate to Reply #1, and see the date: 09/10/1996 12:10:00 PM. Thus I can go all the way back, 14 years this Subject has survived, and I can see anything that was posted in those 14 years it has existed, minus the deletions. 14 years is a long time, would you agree?

Now, does anyone see the advantage here, over the modern concept of a Blog? Posted By: Adam Fate
Wednesday, September 22nd 2010 at 12:32PM
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