Perhaps it's best to openly state the issues first, rather than the solutions. We can formulate proposals later.
Our history
We started up, to be honest, as a reaction against shoddy blogging and troublemakers, an issue at that time. The first fifteen members, including the steering committee, were all aware of those issues and so we seemed to have our mandate to begin.
Then new members started coming in, for various reasons, until we hit our first exclusion, then we had an internal problem with one blogger who left and then a second exclusion. By this stage, the group was taking on its own slightly austere but smooth character and we began to attract business blogs and people from interesting walks of life. The perception outside Bloghounds were that we were a bit 'nose in the air', which is not so and that we were actually doing nothing, this latter having some truth to it. As we hardly ever posted anything as a blogpost, some thought we were up to nefarious things behind closed doors. Quite amusing.
Now we are almost one year old.
Issues
1. Visiting. One requirement was that we visited a significant number of our members' sites more or less regularly. There are reasons why that is impracticable. We don't have time - no one does, not even me. And frankly, no one is going to visit blogs they feel no common bond with and the usual way is that a quarter to a third end up in our personal blogrolls and the rest are occasionally visited, if at all. This is life and it is human nature.
So we come to a major issue - do we require the full blogroll to be carried or not? We're agreed, of course, that our badge must appear in the sidebar - that's our intellectual capital in there. But do we insist on the whole blogroll being displayed and what do you do with people like me who carry no blogrolls at all on the front page ?
2. Blogging. This one seems far more immediate as an issue. We are all busy, we have our vicissitudes and it's coming up to the summer 'silly season'. Right - we can't expect too much. I do think the whole point of you being a member in the first place was that you actually ... er ... blogged. Being enormously elastic about it, one would surely be fair in expecting a post from you every few weeks.
This is one area we have to tighten up on, moving some members to 'sleeping', after we've agreed on a formula.
3. Logo or badge. We had copyright issues with the 'hound by the fan', good though it was. Now we have a hotch-potch all over members sites. Cherie and I are going to ask Wolfie if he could mock up a 'pawprint' design of 173x173 and a larger 250x250 version for those with wider sidebars. Once we have this [and we both think it's a priority], we can then put them in our sidebars, perhaps to be carried with a small two line blurb below.
We urgently need this logo and if you have graphics skills or know of a copyright free image, please tell us.
4. Purpose [I hesitate to say common purpose]. We should be standing for something in a more active way. Cherie and I feel that, politically [and she and I are on opposite sides of the fence] , we should at least be more vocal about the threats to the blogosphere, especially in other countries and should be pro-actively seeking to lend our voice to blog freedom and resisting the hand of Big Brother.
Let's face it, even though we differ on many political issues, we'd be agreed, would we not, that the situation in Iran is deplorable, that the Usmanov affair was terrible and so on. You might say that you don't need to be a member of BH to speak up about those things. No, you don't but if forty members of a group carried a statement and drew in our non-BH blogger and MSM friends as well, that might give a momentum to the issue which the rest of the sphere might pick up on. It's not a question of the initial numbers.
Agreed - none of us have time and yet carrying a graphic in our sidebars takes next to no time and is a good start. So, tell us what you think.
Policies
Wolfie once said, 'We don't have many rules in Bloghounds but we do expect those we do have to be observed.' We needn't get all bureaucratic about this but some ideas of direction from you would be appreciated.