Community Rules (!)

Hello Followers.  Hope you’re having a great week.

Well, there’s been quite some talk around Cougar street this past week about “Community Rules.”  So, if any of you out there want to read my thoughts on the subject, then read on.

Followers, let me be VERY clear about this.  We do NOT have rules on this blog.  Instead, we have two basic pledges–Each of which I am asking you to make now (and then fulfill from this point forward).

Pledge #1 (repeat after me):

“I, faithful follower of the WSU Football Blog, do solumnly swear to continue to post comments on this blog even though the new comment system makes it nearly impossible for me to do so.”

Pledge #2 (repeat after me):

“I, faithful follower of the WSU Football Blog, do solumnly swear to continue to read Sutra’s posts even though he hasn’t figured out how to post pictures since the Penguins changed the Joomla template about a month ago.”

So, now that we’ve gotten the whole pledge thing out of the way, let me get to the next aspect of this post:  YOU.

And, since we’re talking about YOU, let’s start our little discussion with a you tube video about the importance of “Followers.”  Its about three minutes long, but I think you’ll find it informative–assuming you haven’t seen it already.

Anywho, there’s lots of implications that can be derived from this piece.  But for this here blog, here is the takeaway:

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

As many of you know, Four score and seven years ago, SeanHawk, myself, and Rooster founded this blog because we were getting in trouble at work for e-mailing each other 3,000 times a day.  So, SeanHawk–who is ALWAYS WAY AHEAD OF HIS TIME when it comes to technology–knew about this thing called “Blogs” and started this thing up on blogspot.com

So, we posted on this thing for a couple of years and got enough attention that Sean was asked to start writing about the Cougs for AOL–which he did for something like three years.

In the meantime, since Sean wasn’t able to write for the WSUFB for at least part of that time, and since Rooster was busy as all heck doing something called “Engineering,” the day-to-day duties of the WSUFB were left to yours truly.  And so I wrote my slanderous trash every few days with a basic objective of trying to humor myself since, at the time, I thought “who the hell reads blogs?”

So, I was pretty surpised  one day when SeanHawk told me that (a) he had added this thing called “site meter”  to the blog; and (b) a few people were actually reading!

Of course, it wasn’t just a “few” people who were reading….

It was TWO people who were reading. 

And those two people were: 

P-Town Coug and Longball.

A year or so later, Longball became a member of the staff.  A few years later, another commenter, LucasCoug, became a member of the staff.  And now, a host of really talented new writers have come on board.  (and man are we GRATEFUL for them).

In any case, over the past several years, our first Followers have clearly grown to more than two; and now we have more than just a few.  (and man are we grateful for that).

And with that, both SeanHawk and I have noted that our comments have changed over the past year or so.  That is, while sometimes the comments “of the few” are directed to the post at hand, on other occasions, the threads seem to take on a life and/or topic of their own.

And the reason for that emerging habit/trend is simple:  The Blog has become a setting for a new community. 

And while this community certainly would not have occured without the initial “leadership” (watch the video) and stewardship of the Blogfathers, it just is not about us anymore:

It is now principally about you–

because communities are not  about their “leaders,” communities are about their members.

And, as we’ve seen on this blog, communities which have strong ties and norms often don’t need the threat of sanctions to behave in appropriate and/or acceptable ways.  And so, with few exceptions, you all have done a great job of self-policing our threads, and you also banter about pretty darn respectfully and intelligently (with the exception of me, of course).

So, with much gratitude to all of you, I hereby declare that, in 2011, the State of The Union is strong on the WSUFB!!!!!

I just wish I could say the same thing about our Hoops team:

Arizona 75 WSU 63.

Enjoy Your Week.  And Go Cougs!