Huh? Are you actually saying that in regards to this forum it is, "not our objective to bring more people to this forum in an effort to promote wider information exchange and understanding."?!

EDIT: just posted, saw your revision, and will adjust my post accordingly....


I am going to go with the assumption that you simply expressed yourself unintentionally, despite your re-edits, and you in fact meant to say, "is it not our objective to bring more people to this forum in an effort to promote wider information exchange and understanding?". If so, I'm in full agreement with that, and am doing my part to help. I would be more than happy to link to the guild from my blog, providing the guild will reciprocate by linking my blog this site in some fashion. quid pro quo is the way to go.

And then you wrote a further astonishing comment,

"The blog is an excellent personal endeavour but somehow the value of this might well be lost if it exists in isolation to the on line community"

How does it exactly exist in isolation to the on-line community, being that the blog is on a public site, visited by diverse millions of people, daily, far more than are ever going to peruse this site, and thus exists to serve to spread a message about traditional craft to a far wider audience? If you want relative isolation to the online community, then look no further than this forum! I'm on half a dozen different discussion forums, and is one of the slower ones I know of, especially my little corner of it. I have things to say and things to talk about, and seek a wider audience. Not too many guild members so far seem to want to engage about Japanese carpentry and architecture in this medium, so what's a guy to do?

If you want isolation from the online community by the way, the thing to do is to create a private group on Yahoo, or not have any sort of group at all.

I intend to interlink with other like-minded craftspeople and specialty suppliers of tools of the trade, on my blog. If you go on my blog you can already see who's following it, click on their links and read their blogs, thus the reader has the power of forging new connections with people. You'll see one guild member among the group already, a fellow into the more traditional side of the craft.


People can subscribe to a blog and remain abreast of what happens on it - I already have a solid group of subscribers in fact. I expect this to grow by the day. People can post comments/questions and the like directly upon the blog.

Lots of people blog these days Ken, even timber framers - it's called 'freedom of speech and expression'. Some blogs are well written and interesting, some are not. Some blogs are diverse in subject matter, others are highly specialized. Some blogs change hourly, some don't have new posts for months and months. The reader can decide to read what is of interest to them, and if I start boring them, or losing them in technical minutiae, they will go elsewhere I'm sure. Its the same for newspapers and magazines of course. Blogging can only help promote that wider connection you mention Ken, and if it doesn't, then the message is obviously too narrow, or unappealing in some other way to most readers. Again, I'll let the audience decide. I want to connect with them, and a blog is an effective way to do that.