Welcome to MediaCommons Blogs!

No doubt this announcement is going to seem redundant on the face of things, but it’s actually a pretty radical update for MediaCommons: user blogging is now enabled! What this means is that any registered user can begin blogging on the site — and thus developing new published content — immediately.

To get started, make sure you’re logged in, and then click on “my account” in the top menu, and then “view recent blog entries” on the resulting page, followed by “post new blog entry.” (We’ll simplify this ASAP, I promise.) Write your first post, and submit!

We’ll be reading all new blog posts as they appear, and will be regularly promoting posts that we find particularly engaging or compelling to the front page.* We’ll also be developing a range of new blocks on the front page that will help represent the activity taking place on the blogs. Feel free to use your blog to repost material you’ve published elsewhere, or to begin drawing out ideas for longer projects.

We’ll look forward to seeing how the blogs develop. Be sure to tell us about new features or functions you’d like us to add — or even better, that you’d like to help us add. Help us make MediaCommons the active publishing network we know it can become.

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*This seems like a reasonable place for me to note that MediaCommons is in need of a good terms-of-service statement. Until one has been developed, I’ll simply note that we reserve the right to delete spam blogs, link farms, or anything that violates reasonable standards of scholarly behavior. That last phrase is a mighty sweeping one, and demands real definition, and I hope that drawing out that definition and the other terms of use for MediaCommons is a project that we can take on collectively.