Yesterday I reactivated our "Winds of War" feature, after a short hiatus following the collapse of Saddam's regime. With the CNN complicity revelations et. al. and Passover on the agenda, we had other fish that needed frying. It's back again today, but here's a provocative question, and I'd love to hear your answers:
Should it come back at all?
Do you read Winds of Change.NET mostly for that collection of links? Would we still be a stop on your blogging journeys without it?
Is that feature an important aspect of what makes this blog unique, or something you already get from other sources like Instapundit, Agonist, LGF, et. al.?
If we keep it, any suggestions on how to keep Winds of War going as a high quality offering without inducing burnout...I love being able to recognize more good bloggers, but I'm finding the time and focus required prohibitive for one person. My current colleagues have other foci, and I'd like to do more analysis pieces. So, I'm wrestling with what to do.
Is the daily "Winds of War" feature still important to you? If not, please be honest and say so. If it is, tell us that - it's important for us to know how much effort is justified in preserving it. Any thoughts to add on how we might keep it rolling?
The Comments section is all yours!
It's served its purpose. Phase it out.
Hope you keep other features up, as long as you have the time and energy, because your site is excellent.
Keep it. There's more to this war than combat, perhaps not as riveting. We will be over there in force for some time to come. Even after most forces leave, its just the beginning. Less and less attention will be paid by the mainstream media, and we need all the information we can get.
Keep it.
This is a 100 years war, it's not likely
to be over soon.
On burnout problem -- group blogs are the way,
individual blogs, with very rare exceptions,
can't sustain high quality and attractiveness
for the reader over time.
I think you should keep them, but do more of the kind where your write the link into a sentence or short graph. It's a bit better than Instapundit, and more focused on a set of issues. It's also shorter than Command Post, which requires more reading. Your format's a good balance between the two extremes.
You don't have to post them as often if you don't want to. I copied your format a few times posting "news digests" of my own, but not every day, and only when I couldn't think of something "long" to write or there were two many threads to pursue at one time.
Not sure if any of this helps you at all or not.
Winds of Change is one of my favorite sites. I think your commentary, links, and coordination of information is well thought out and contributes greatly to clarifying the news in the country and the world. Terrorism is with us for awhile. It goes beyond Iraq (unfortunately) -- Winds can be a good source in filtering out all the news, much of what is either missed or ignored by the print and TV news media. My vote is an emphatic "yes" in continuing this great site.
Keep it I say, I enjoy the analysis, and as a previous poster stated, this issue is just beginning, not ending. KEEP IT PLEASE!
If I have to choose...?
Commentary, please. That's uniquely yours; other sites do quick linkage just fine.
Winds of War is great, and I strongly recommend that you keep the briefing section, but yeah, I can see that the daily slog to find those links could be a burden. Winds of Change is too valuable a resource to lose to burnout. Save WoW for when things get hot.
Like someone else said: phase it out. There's no need for it anymore, and I'd certainly keep coming back without it.
You want honesty though? Get a better color scheme!! :) Or am I the only one for whom black text on white background on a computer monitor is a sure-fire way for one's eyes to glaze over? :)
But yes. Winds of War was a neat and useful feature when it was needed (and after the Agonist's little scandal, I tried to stay away from there), but it's served its purpose. Time to gracefully retire it.
Or maybe just give it new monicker (Winds of Peace?) to keep track of developments during the reconstruction...
That's my (rambling) two cents.
PLEASE no light on dark text - I rarely read blogs with that color scheme - too hard to read.
Joe, anything you guys do is fine by me - I've been reading WOC for about a year now.
Joe,
I enjoy your links, especially when you link me. But I like your own essays the best, and that is what I hope to find when I visit.
you guys do whatever you want and I'm going to read it
Your linkage is most often quite different, so it is still needed. MB likes the idea of 'Winds of Peace'.
As to the color scheme, see what's the very lightest shade of grey you could put behind the black text; that is most effective for cutting down the 'flare effect' that pure white induces in the visual processing center of the brain.
I have just recently found this site. I like it just the way it is. I don't have a lot of pc experience, so I do not know how much work is involved in keeping the format going. But, I like what you have now.
Really liked the piece on the 10 plagues of Iraq.
May the Lord renew your strength and give you rest in Him.
It doesn't mean much to me.... I'd rather see the original writing and link to something I won't find elsewhere...
I enjoy the more original content!
Hag Sameach
I think this site is not "fair and balanced"
The war helped me discover the blogosphere, but I'll keep coming back even though the fighting has subsided. I've tapped into a resource I never knew existed, and it's an invaluable one for me now. It's your "slant" I keep coming back for, regardless of the content format. I also get the WSJ's "Opinion Journal: Best of the Web" daily email, which is very similar to "Winds of War". I enjoy both. You certainly provide interesting links I don't see anywhere else. I'll come back regardless. If something strikes your fancy, share it, but don't feel the need to sustain the "Winds of War" on a dialy basis if the content isn't out there.
Keep it. The war is not over. It will not be over in our lifetimes. In Iraq, the war will soon move into the Occupation phase, but plenty will be going on there which we need to know about and which the media will utterly ignore.
But the war is bigger than Iraq. It is a big as the whole wide world. What have our special operations forces been up to lately in the Phillipines? Just for example.
So let the focus of the feature drift away from Iraq, link less frequently, put less work into it when things seem (relatively) quiet, but keep the feature alive.
Your balance of link and commentary is exactly right.
You have a great blog here. Whether you keep the feature or not I'll keep reading.
Peace in our grandchildren's time.
Ivan
I like the feature, for its selectivity. I can get a raw dump at Commandpost. The (visible) pace of events will decelerate again now, so there will naturally be less volume, and less need to post every day. Ivan's right, the mass media will lose their focus, they are already moving on to the latest bleat. Blogs can and should counterbalance that lack of staying power.
The efforts that are invested in Winds of War are greatly appreciated. Other bloggers do shed a lot of light, but this site has quality and would be missed. Many thanks for your work to date.
I don't know whether "Winds of War" itself is something you need (for now, sigh) but it'd be really interesting to have your site keep following the issue of WMD in Iraq. I think coverage of that issue has been pretty poor on both sides; the Right wants to forget that we were supposed to be looking for them, and the Left wants to claim ideological victory (i.e., since we haven't found them in a week, clearly they were never there!). Real coverage of this by actual adults would be a Good Thing.
Generally the site rocks; keep up the good work!
I'm greedy enough to want Joe to write more analysis pieces, and to keep up the linking, both. But if it comes down to a matter of time, I'd take the analysis pieces.
I'm doubting 100 years, but this war will certainly go for a generation. The Iraqi campaign was just a short part of that. I think that the Winds of War fosters a kind of general discussion that is not present elsewhere, and the comments to these posts are a very valuable part of this blog. That said, with the current campaign essentially over, perhaps you could take it to a once-a-week, rather than once-a-day, post. At least until the next major campaign begins to heat up.
-jeff
I like it - but realistically it probably is time to deep six it as a daily feature, or scale it way back to 3-5 links instead of the 10 or more you were doing, or just do it MWF, or whatever.
More from me:
You should keep the feature. Judging from the number of click-throughs I'm getting from a little tiny link, there must be quite a few people reading it.
First of all - be pragmatic. Can you keep it without suffering burnout? I read Winds of Change mostly for your commentary. The links are nice because they generally go to bloggers who have something interesting and relevant to say but who are not simply regurgitating the news.
The links will be missed but if the greater cost is to have the blog go down in a few months out of burn-out, I'd say to stop the feature.
Anyway, it is not as if you won't still be providing good links...
I vote to keep it, even if it is not done every day. This is a long war and Iraq is only one facet. The links provide access to important information that would otherwise be hard to find. Other than that, all I can say is keep up the great work!
Joe:
Keep it an an occasional series. As the need arises you can put the comments, links under the rubric
xavier
Make it weekly, perhaps, if scaling back to weekly will avoid burnout. Like many of those above, I value both WoW and the analysis pieces, but if I could have only one, I'd rather the analysis.
I would like to see some intelligent pieces done on what it will take to bring a lasting peace in the world and about restructuring the United Nations rather than throwing it out all together. I don't know how to search beyond google (give me a break, I am a grandmother of 10 who is teaching English in central China) but have found some interesting reading on peace and recommendations for restructuring the United Nations. These links are a lot of reading but well worth it for me.
http://www.bic-un.bahai.org/95-1001.htm
http://bahai-library.org/published.uhj/world.peace.html
I'm chinese people.I want to know how many people sarsed in the china.Who know plase back me.Thank you!!