Do we want a community blog?

Question

Is it possible to create a blog for space.SE. When i discussed this with our chat room I came to know that we don't have a blog. I thinks it's the right time for us to create a blog since we need more users and we have lots of good question and nice answers.

Do we really need a blog for space.SE(what the community think and your opinion) Please answer this question to indicate your opinion?

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It's possible for a Stack Exchange site to get it's own blog provided we follow some steps to prove a couple things:

1. We want it
2. We can make it happen

Beta is not too soon to blog, but we do need an active community to keep the blog going. So you know, the community will take part in posting and vetting the articles, and we'll try and nail down the following before we actually get it:

1. The Scope
2. Who will contribute (tentative, we're not locked in to only certain people contributing)
3. The schedule

Remember the Blog can be more than a "greatest hits" of our questions/answers. We can also use it to share interesting opinions, findings or whatever as long as it's related to the topic (or our community).

Is a blog something we want? The next step would be to define what we want the blog to be about, first I want to know if the support is there. Please vote to indicate your approval and if you have any good suggestions, make them in an answer for when we start the next steps. We'll also need to know who's willing to write and what we want to write about.

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Note: Shamelessly borrowed from the Workplace meta blog post

Answer 1

I'm happy to see this brought up. My opinions:

• Something about this site seems to fit the concept of a blog
• If we have a small number of people enthusiastic about maintaining it, it should totally get the green light
• I am not sufficiently enthusiastic myself

The site dynamics look like they work better for a blog than other SE sites I've seen. Physics, for instance, has people and topics all over the place. It's not so easy to post something knowing that others will be interested in it. On the other hand, I see a lot of interest in space fitting in the "space advocacy" category. That noun might not describe everyone on this site, but for the majority I don't think it would be bad. Not to mention, there already exists a blog circuit for space advocacy. Making a blog based on content here adds something novel to that community.

Within that context, it's not as hard to produce a blog post topic for which there's great shared interest.

Another reason a blog makes sense is the series of questions that often appear. It's not uncommon for people to ask followup questions here, often from another user's question. At first I was surprised by this. With the majority of questions coming from curiosity (as opposed to utility), it seemed like it didn't quite fit what I thought was the objective of Stack Exchange sites, but if that's what people are interested in, why not? When there's a "cluster" of questions based around some common curiosity, that would make for an obvious blog post. Take this week's topic of medial, posted in meta, for instance. For the blog, just repackage that content, and send it out the door.

But does this actually help the site? To the best of my understanding, the site's problems are:

1. Low question activity
2. Too few users

A blog would not directly assist with #1. I think the justification would be #2, basically as an advertising mechanism. It's not a bad idea, but you can't know how it'll go until you try it. Along these same lines, building a social media presence might help. I think the idea is that people interested in space exploration are out there, but you don't know what medium they use. Ars Technica does a weekly roundup for Stack Exchange topics. If you got exposure there, you'd hit more people. These days, with the failure of Google Reader, the prospects for RSS look bleak. You really need some outlets to push your content, but that might just be an automatically linked Facebook, Twitter, etc.