Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Blog coaches & memories of Cafe Utne

Sabrina Pacifici pointed out in today's beSpacific column an article in the Wall St. Journal that happens to mention blogging coaches. She also happened to link to blog coaches Wigley & Associates. I was quite excited to happen upon this. The principal, Griff Wigley, helped Utne Magazine start up Cafe Utne about 10 years ago.

I was one of the original volunteer hosts for Cafe Utne so, in effect, Griff was my "boss" at that time. It was an extensive discussion forum on all subjects behind a passworded area. It was a lot of work since we had to keep up with how to use the software on an advanced level, keep existing discussions going, keep people "playing nice" with each other, and plan new subjects for discussion. I remember the book club especially being a large time-consumer as there was a book to choose and read, proper questions to pose, and the need to keep people interested in the discussion.

It is great to see Griff has leveraged on that experience. I wanted to blog this so I could go back and look at his blog a little more closely later.

No comments: