Why do we want a blog?

Well, before we jump in with both feet: what's the purpose of the blog? Some I can think of are:
- to facilitate conversation between Alachua County 4-H members
- to have a place to desiminate information about upcoming events
- to have a place for County Council committees to record and discuss ideas

Blogs are pretty good for chronological stuff - usually used like a diary. The nice thing about a blog is that, if it's set up that way, anyone can comment on a given blog entry. Blogs are not good ways to keep information, in general; to find specific information you have to search on a keyword or hunt back through the archives. The Stars & Stripes blog seems to be mostly a club scrapbook - the pictures look really neat. Are we just making a spot for a County scrapbook, so to speak, or do we want more?

Another possibility is a wiki. A wiki allows you to create, edit and link to websites easily. Like a blog, you have a group of 'admins' who can actually make changes; unlike a blog, there's no place for comments from people not on the list. Here's a wiki I'm using with a group of homeschool students who are doing Chemistry labs with me: treetown chemistry You can see it'd be easier to find stuff because you can make different pages for different things - we could have a Youth Fair page, a page for County Council meetings/events, a Horse Club page, etc.

No reason we couldn't use both, actually. We could use the blog for discussion and then when details on an event or whatever are decided, someone put's 'em on the County 4-H wiki. It'd take some coordination until we got the hang of it. It's not that I'm anti-blog - it might be just what we want. I just think we need to discuss just how we'll use it before we establish it.