My attitude towards forums and messageboards is terribly narrow and negative, I accept. My problem is I see them as very inward looking and closed off from the rest of the web. And they don’t have RSS feeds. In order to participate you have to make a point of spending time there on a regular basis. Blogs, on the other hand, reach out into the web which I see as a more positive activity. At the end of the day they are very different things, so much that I wouldn’t like to class them together. I prefer mailing lists myself because they come to me, but then I’m old school like that.

Bob: I think you were wrong to assume bigging up your mates would be detrimental to BugPowder. Assuming you mates were doing relevant stuff, who else was going to promote them? If everyone was promoting their friends then it would all balance out in the end. It’s inevitable that you’ll write about people you like more than those you don’t – better to embrace this than try and fight against it.

I’d be intrigued to know (if you can find the time), Pete, what you see as the ‘stake’ the contributors have in some group blogs that are actualy out there (or which of your three categories they might fall into).

And I don’t think fora/messageboards are so particularly repulsive. I’ll grant you that a fairly large people who use them are, but not the things themselves.

I was going to join up for Bugpowder but thought better of it as I knew I couldn’t resist bigging up myself and my mates as that’s the only comic news I get around these parts!