User blogs go live on road.cc

Since the staff blogs went live on the site there's been a lot of interest from you guys: many of you no doubt think you can do better than us, and you're probably right. We've been asked to set up user blogs, so we have. Here's how it'll work for now...

First things first: it's not blanket access. We want to make the site useful, relevant and inclusive but we do reserve the right to pick and choose who we give a blog to at the moment.

There's a couple of reasons for this. First, road.cc is young and we want to maintain a balance between eveything that's happening on the site – the types of content: forum, news, reviews and blogging – and a balance between all the different types of road cycling we're trying to cover. We don't want one thing to dominate the rest of the site, and that includes blogs. We'd hate to let a situation develop where people just stayed in their own little spaces talking mainly to themselves instead of getting out in the forum and talking to each other.

Also, the road.cc team is small (some would say skeleton) and we don't have the time to manage a big blog section while we're doing all the other stuff we have to do. Like eating cake, and arguing about stuff.

That said, if you have something to contribute that's going to be useful, relevant, entertaining and hopefully inclusive and you think you can abide by our really long list of rules and stuff (well two) you're in. jimmythecuckoo could and you can check out what he's got to say here. Blackhound has also decided to bite the blogging bullet - pop on over to the user blog section and hear what he has to say.

Those blog rules in full…

1) You have to be a member of the site for a minimum of four weeks, and you have to post to the site (forum topics and comments) a minimum of 25 times. That way we can be sure you've had a look around and you understand where we're coming from.

2) Email us at info [at] road.cc and tell us you'd like to have a user blog. Also, tell us what your main themes will be. Are you a racer? A commuter? A tourer? As we've said we'll be looking to get a good balance. Include either a link to other stuff you've written, or a sample piece of about 200 words.

And what do you get? well, somewhere to have your say! We'll link to the user blogs from the home page, and all the user entries will be in the big blog feed.