The worst blogs blunder along as badly written diaries of debate, despair, delight, and desire.  The best blogs are true e-journals providing intelligent information, analysis, and insight.  Wikipedia dominates the e-encylopedia.  When I first saw Metwiki about a year ago it was an embryonic wiki devoted to metallurgy in mining.  Now it is commercial site with no content and a block on leaving except by turning off your computer. 

My-space is a collection of personal pictures and news; my daughter posts pictures there of my grandkids for me to see.  I confess I cannot navigate its complexities.  A long time ago, TechnoMine had discussion groups.  I am told they were closed due to technical problems resulting from infinite do-loops of automatically generated I-am-out-of-the-office messages.  We still send out an e-newsletter as do most respectable businesses.  I read all those e-newsletter I subscribe to.  I have recently asked three respectable engineers to write blogs for TechnoMine.  They have all recoiled in horror at the thought and proceeded to bombard me with long e-mails explaining their refusals—now I have enough material to post a month’s worth of blogs from their replies. 

Thus arises the inevitable question:  what new e-format will provide the mining technical community with the place and facilities to create a truly mining-focused public e-space where we may discuss deep technical issues, disseminate new findings, and interact with peers?

Personally I favor the conference as the best way to interact with peers and find stimulation re technical advances.  There never will be a substitute for gathering with peers and exchanging ideas and perspectives.  I suspect the instinct to sit around a fire and talk is deeply embedded in our genes (however you define them.)   I learn more faster taking over beer, than reading ill-prepared written materials.  Yet I must face the fact that conferences are for the favored and moneyed, and that is not everybody in mining.  Of course it helps to live within reasonable travel distance of said conference. 

On TechnoMine we regularly post lots of new material.  But the reality is that we will never capture all mining technology at the rate it is generated.  So we dream of wikis, blogs, e-fora, discussion groups, more technical papers for our library, and your solicited and unsolicited contribution by letter, fax, and e-mail. 

I notice that the largest groups of bloggers are IT professionals, housewives, and those with passion about politics (well maybe also porn.)  Maybe there is something inherent in the very character of those who work in the mining industry that we eschew the blog’s vicious nakedness and its too frequent inanities.  To my mind that is something for the industry’s workers to be proud of.  Maybe miners are just working too hard to write a blog or to follow the twisted by-ways of typical blogs.  I confess to writing pieces branded by my peers as blog material; but I confess also that the only time I have read blogs is by way of paid employment researching the questions I write of here.  I confess to a devotion to Wikipedia—it is always my first stop on any enquiry—and I recommend it as a great platform to jump into arcane, out-of-the-way topics. 

The point and purpose of this BI (blog item) is to initiate debate and discussion on the question of mining-related blogs, wikis, and all the rest.  Please send your opinions and thought to me at jcaldwell@infomine.com