Talking Biodiversity at the Huffington Post

New post on biodiversity, at The Huffington Post: “What the Heck is Biodiversity? And Why Should We Care?”

There is one typo. Can you find it? 🙂

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Who Should Blog? Assembling the Most Important Voices in Environmentalism Today

The following is a reprint from comment I left on Huffington Post this morning, in response to their call out to bloggers for some input on future of their Green section. By the way, thanks Nadine, and Ian at NRDC blog for your kind comments about La Marguerite blog.

Olivia,

There are three very important aspects of blogging that I would like to bring up in this discussion:

First, is blogging as a vehicle for the building of a vibrant community of passionate people. This has been the most rewarding part of my involvement with La Marguerite blog. In order for it to work, your team needs to play the role of moderators, responding to, and connecting all the folks that honor you with their visit. Most of the major green blogs follow the old model of blogging as just writing, and interact very little with their readers.

Second, is blogging as a channel for problem solving and activism. Sooner or later, just talking about things cease to be sufficient. One natural progression is for clusters of people to want to take it further, and start implementing solutions discussed in the blog. This is happening on my blog, where several groups of readers have spun off into offline discussions, leading to several green initiatives. What I would like to suggest, is that you incorporate a more formal structure for such initiatives.

Third, you may be interested in Mark Klein‘s Collaboratorium initiative at MIT, regarding new ways to structure blogging discussions, so that they become more productive. For more on this, I invite you to read post I wrote a while ago, including discussion with Mark Klein‘s comment towards end of the thread: https://lamarguerite.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/mit-collaboratorium-wants-to-organize-the-climate-change-debate/

Marguerite
More on Environment
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

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