Thanks for the kind words bangkok.
As to whether blogs help? IMHO They're not the best vehicle for community collaboration, knowledge management or FAQs and I'd prefer an alternative mechanism to contribute. Blogs are best suited to help people and organisations seeking to position themselves as experts or orators - most blogs say "come to my place, listen to me (and often, "oh and while you're here...)"
The forum and user lists are great for informal peer-to-peer community help - and contain great information - but:
• Information is fragmented, of variable quality (lots of "yeah, me too" statements) and not necessarily true or up to date. There is no quality control, so the user must filter for relevance (often through trial and error);
• Accessibility is limited to search criteria, which is why many users resort to new postings to get a human to help define the search criteria or locate answers. This means similar questions get asked over and over, exacerbating the above fragmentation problem;
In short, forums are best at peer-to-peer communications amongst 'us down here', blogs are best for top-down communications and moderated wikis are best for converging best practice - just think of wikipedia.
Fortunately, there is just such a community wiki initiative, being driven by David Bovill, which may help the situation. I'm sure there will be news in the next few weeks via
http://blog.livecode.tv/
Best,
Keith..
