Now open for business – The Kitchen: How to Cook a Weblog. The brainwave of Shelley Powers, here’s what it is:
The Kitchen: How to Cook a Weblog is a two-week clinic on weblogging and related topics for bloggers and those who read blogs and even those who don’t but still manage to use the web without stumbling all over us. The focus of the clinic is on community participation, contribution, and benefit.
The clinic starts today, 25 October, and continues until Friday 5 November. Each day features a different topic for discussion (see Clinic:Schedule), which forms the basis of the essays contributed that day. Topics can range from CSS style guides, to scripting tutorials, to the ethics of flaming, as well as being a garden blogger.
Essays will be written to the blog (http://itkitchen.info), and general comments and questions, notes, and annotations, will be written to the wiki (http://wiki.itkitchen.info/).
Now and during the clinic, the wiki is open to allow spontaneous contributions on the subjects, as well as incorporation of clinic essays into the main topics. This includes adding links to weblog posts on relevant topics. After the weblogging clinic, this wiki will remain as the Wikipedia for Weblogging.
More detailed info: Clinic Overview.
Shelley has done a terrific job in setting up the whole infrastructure to enable this social connectivity experiment. Not only has she created the blog and the wiki, she’s created the blog in five additional language versions – Italian, French, German, Norwegian and Spanish – as well as English. All the blogs were created with WordPress, so I’m looking forward to getting to grips with a collaborative editing/publishing platform that I haven’t experienced yet.
So far, more than 40 people have signed up as contributors to the blog, and nearly 40 for the wiki. If you want to be part of a great experiment and contribute your thinking to a dynamic work, sign up today.