A lot has changed here recently, so I wanted to steal a slice of your time for a quick update.

The site’s new dual identity, so to speak–the blog you all know and love plus the still-new discussion board–seems to be working out very nicely, even if not for the reasons that drove me to add the board in the first place.

My plan was to use the board as a test, to see how much of an ongoing discussion and, dare I say it, a community, it could kick start before I went through all the extra hassle and expense of setting up a Scoop site, like Daily Kos or numerous other virtual hangouts. So far, that goal has been annoyingly elusive, and I’ve basically given up on the dream. I don’t know if I’ve managed to attract too narrow a group of readers by beating up on both the Cornucopians and the Apocalypticons, or if all youse guys are shy, or what mechanism is at play.

Much to my surprise, it no longer bothers me. That’s not apathy, but a recognition that by splitting the site into the blog and the board, I’m suddenly free to dump the one-line news item things, the stuff I used to post in mashups, on the board, and save the blog for longer, more well developed oieces. In effect, I get to have it both ways.

Best of all, this breakout allows my writing for the blog, which in some ways is similar to my monthly column for Windows Magazine from long ago, to attract more readers. Between visitors to this site plus readers seeing my work in syndicated form and on The Energy Collective, I have a considerably larger audience than I did just a few weeks ago. I’m still making diddly in the money department, although there’s finally some progress on that front, as well. (Now if I could permanently screen out the spambots that keep trying to register fake ID’s on both systems, everything would be just peachy.)

To summarize:

I will very likely continue in this dual-track mode for the foreseeable future while I see how high I can push my readership and what kind of other opportunities it opens up.

I would still love to see more reader participation. (OK, maybe the dream isn’t quite dead.) Leave comments here or on the board, or best of all, register and start your own topics over there. I know I can learn a heck of a lot from you people, and I bet you’d find each other interesting, as well.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled enviro-energy-econo geekery….