Salon Magazine is joining the crowd and trying to get its readers to create blogs. They call it Salon Blogs, but there isn’t much detail about how the community is going to work… It mostly looks like a partnership with the blog publishing system called Radio Userland, but you still have to pay for the software after a 30-day trial.
Will this « community » be enough to give Salon the boost it needs? A year ago, I had decided to pay for a Salon membership. I couldn’t stand the idea of reading the magazine with big ads popping up and I thought I would encourage what I considered to be great writing and editorial. I had been reading their online magazine since the very beginning, when they were just another start up, right next to my office in San Francisco. I’ve always loved their movie and book reviews but they seem to publish less and less of them now. I don’t like the direction the magazine has taken since September 11th, and their attempts at raising money have been more desperate than inventive. My membership is expiring in a few days. I wonder: should I renew or not?
