Our blog is interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments...it is this interactivity that distinguishes a blog from other static websites. Here you will find articles describing recent hikes, Chapter news and other items of interest to members. We hope you will find this new communication method both timely, useful and even entertaining!
Besides this blog, another important communication tool used by PATC - Charlottesville Chapter is our webpage, which is where you will find our most up-to-date hike schedule. Please make a point of visiting it often, as new hikes and changes will be posted there. Hint: be sure to bookmark the webpage (or save as a favorite) so that you will be able to navigate to it regularly to check the schedule.
Why a blog?
PATC - Charlottesville Chapter has produced a newsletter since our earliest days. The format and frequency have changed many times over the years. As new technologies arrived (electric typewriters, photocopiers, word processors, computer printers, email, the internet, etc.), we tried to take advantage of such capabilities. Yet, though we adapted the newsletter to those technologies over the years, we essentially continued to follow a traditional model of assembling and producing a mini-newspaper on a scheduled basis. This is a very labor intensive process and demands a significant amount of time and effort on the part of those responsible for writing, assembling, formatting, producing and distributing each issue. Essentially, our methods of dissemination progressed with the times, but it has eventually lead us to a situation of producing an archaic format via far more capable channels.
Thus we have come to the point of asking ourselves...what is the goal here? What is the purpose of the newsletter? The fundamental answer, we believe, is that our purpose is to communicate Chapter information in a timely and effective manner with our members and friends. For years a newsletter format has been the method we used to achieve that purpose. Yet the time has now come to step back from this routine and evaluate if a traditional newsletter format continues to best serve our purposes in a world where the flow of information is undergoing a revolutionary shift and newer methods may far better serve our purpose.
What has caused us to relook the concept of a newsletter? Besides the time and effort issues mentioned above, the timeliness of a scheduled newsletter is a significant weakness...particularly when it is only published on a quarterly basis. By the time an issue "goes to press", much of the information is already months old...we weren't just producing "yesterday's news tomorrow," but "yesterday's news two months from now." Besides reporting on the previous three months of Chapter activities, the quarterly publishing frequency also demanded that we attempt to schedule future hikes up to three months in advance. This has been a continuous struggle, as hike leaders have found it difficult to forecast their availability for leading hikes so far in advance. Preparing a complete hike schedule on a quarterly basis has thus proven to be a major obstacle to producing newsletters on time. Producing a more frequent newsletter addresses some of these issues and has been tried over the years, but the increased production frequency greatly increased the workload of the editor to the point of being untenable. We believe that moving from a traditional newsletter to a blog format can address many of these issues in a satisfactory manner.
Fundamentally, we believe that the internet has evolved into an essential and pervasive communication platform for the 21st Century, similar to the ubiquitous adoption of the telephone in the mid-20th Century. The rapid and continuing evolution of the internet has caused a seismic shift in information access for the entire planet, while a second generation of web technologies (Web 2.0) has introduced a participatory environment which empowers everyone to become not only a consumer of information, but a participant in the production of information as well. Our intent is to take advantage of these new tools and methods to achieve the goal of more timely and effective Chapter communications with our membership.
We believe that a blog format can provide a more than satisfactory platform for disseminating Chapter news and other pertinent information. One of the most obvious advantages is the immediacy of a blog. When an article is written by an author, it is immediately published to the blog page and becomes available for everyone to read...no more waiting three months to get the information out! Imagine being able to read a hike report, including photos and maybe even a video, the same day the hike was made!
Blog posts are published sequentially in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent news items appear at the top of the blog. Layout of the blog page is much simpler, with adequate tools for formatting and even spell checking included within the blog application. This makes blog posting significantly easier than editing a newsletter. The fact that the publication process is done one post at a time cuts down on the effort of assembling and editing a larger compilation of news articles all at once. Photos and even video can be included at the discretion of the author. The blog software application is accessed through one's web browser, thus all potential contributors have access to the authoring platform...and at no cost! Older blog posts are archived and are always available for access...no more digging through the closet looking for an old issue...and the entire blog archive is searchable.
Besides the benefits of easily posting articles in a timely manner, the blog format also introduces the interactive capability of allowing readers to comment on posts. Did the author overlook something of importance in a hike report? A reader can add a comment to provide the missing information. This also allows for the possibility of open discussions on a topic that can be shared by all. We hope that Chapter Members and other hike participants will feel free to comment on our blog posts in order to develop a more vibrant and interactive communication capability.
Currently, we envision using the blog to post news items, hike reports and other similar information...we don't currently plan to post the hike schedule here, so that blog readers won't have to sort through the chronological list of posts to find the last published hike schedule. Our intent at this point is to continue to utilize the Chapter website to post the current hike schedule.
This is just an introduction to our new Chapter blog. In future posts we will not only report on Chapter activities, just as we have always done in the newsletter (that hasn't changed!), but we will also introduce techniques for you to gain additional utility from the use of the blog format to make it an even more effective and timely communication platform. We look forward to the challenge!
Welcome to our brave new world!
The blog looks great! It will be good to see it continue to develop. I hope I can make a hike soon so I am mentioned.
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