Thanks everyone for the feedback, on and off list.
We did the blog primarily as a means to convey more thoughts and encourage
discussion. That's the content part. We'll see later how that works out.
The medium part is orthogonal, but interesting. For this stage we thought
that an IETF-server based web system would work nicely, even if we could
have done all on pure e-mail mode as well. I do have a question mark on
how to handle comments, however. It seems that open blog commentary on web
system will invite plenty of spam, so where does that leave us? Ask for
comments to be sent on this list, i.e., e-mail commentary? We seem to be
in that mode already... Or should we implement some specific spam
protection scheme that will save me and the secretariat from manual work
in checking postings? A tools-login required for posting comments? Or
something else, what?
Going further, you asked about social media and material on external
systems. This is not on the agenda for the current blog experiment (except
in a small way, see below). But it is something that we should find an
answer to eventually.
I am of the opinion that long-term, the IETF can not stay away from the
collaboration and discussion tools that majority of the Internet users are
using, including social media. But we need to control how this happens,
and I do worry about being able to own our own content and providing
everyone an equal access to it. I'd like to make a separation between
spreading information from the IETF across multiple media, hosting that
information in the external medium, and making an external medium the only
way to participate. I think we should stay away from the latter two
approaches. But the first one is benign, I think. As an example, we were
planning to send out a tweet from the IETF tweeter account about the
creation of the blog, with an URL back to the IETF site. (If I had even
the beginnings of an Internet connection I could check if that went out. I
also don't know if this e-mail will go out.)
Jari