Zunaira, you brought back so many memories when you sent me the link to this blogsite. I used to have a blog up here that I kept for a month and then never went back to visit (having since moved to desiplanet and put up a regular journal there!). So I copy/pasted my old blog from Nov 2002 (circa London times). Tres excellent.

I find blogging to be at once a therapeutic and cathartic exercise for angst-ridden artists; a space for intellectual exhibitionists to flash themselves; an exercise in community building; a space to build knowledge and share information. So I'll ask you, what's the point of the Spider blog (when it goes public?) -- what is it trying to achieve?

I'll refer you to our fave site -- the guardian -- where they've archived hundreds of personal and work related blogs and they even held the Best British Blog Contest no. 2 recently (or they're about to) as I'm sure you know. So I'd recommend, that if Spider puts up a special blogspot, that you have a number of them themed accordingly e.g. TechBlog (various ones under that); CyberDate (will end up being the most popular); CyberLoveAdvice... basically transferring the various things that you're trying to achieve in the magazine onto the internet, to build up a community of die-hard blogger Spider fans. Maybe even a section on what they'd like to cover (in terms of tech) in upcoming issues. And over time you'll get more ideas from this brainstorm exchange.

Having said that, if this takes off, you'll have to employ someone to read through all of this on a daily basis (or you can set up something maybe whereby certain words get highlighted -- like a search engine -- and you can definitely read those blogs). Then again, you could get die-hard volunteer bloggers who could read through blogs and offer their 10 best suggestions for the month or something. Just shooting arrows here.