Back in March we announced a new program we started and changes to existing services, now we can finally reveal why the blogs are (or will be very shortly) being completely OPENED up to the whole community now. Our application team is in the process of making the changes now and in the next couple of hours they will be completely in place.
We've been concerned and focued on quality in the blogs now for several months and with the last change we saw considerable improvement, we also a saw a very cool area of open up.
We added an entirely new section called...
These are invitation only, when you've earned 100 points or more you will be receiving an email invitation to create your very own Profile. This process does not change, but starting Monday this area will NO LONGER have the ability to write "blog" entries. I must apologize now as the blog entry feature there was never really supposed to be a long term process, more of a test on how the community responds and it has done well.
Starting Monday you (everyone) will be able to go to the Blogs page and in the bottom left corner choose "update blogger profile" by doing so you will be approved as a Weblogger in our system (we got rid of the "Junior" title). Please be sure to add good information to your profile as this is how your fellow community members will be able to determine the value of you verse the content you are providing and thus give credibility to your writings. So what happens after you do this? Well being approved will give you the ability to begin writing blog posts, these posts will then be entered into a queue for the moderators, that's right you heard correctly all our moderators have been given the ability to moderate forums, wikis and now blogs as well. They will review the content for their area and provided no problems are seen they will then publish your posts as well as assign points to it. The point value remains the same 0 to 120 points.
Our promise to the community is that we will continue to monitor the blog content to ensure that we remain at this higher level of quality as in the past and that we will be quick to take action if the quality issues should arise again.
With the help of the moderators we hope to bring back the focus of "content" to the community!
With that we also ask for understanding in the community, each topic area is essentially it's own community these days and within each community there could be variations in "what's expected" in terms of blog content, wiki content or even forum content and it will be up to each of these individual communities to begin to determine what it they expect to see. With that said we ask that those who perhaps read a blog and do not agree with it's content remember this and think twice before posting a comment calling into question the motives, content or validity of that content.
You'll also notice over the the next several weeks additional topic areas popping up which may not be 100% technincally focused or even business focused but more along the lines of thought leadership, strategy, research and so on.
We thank you for your patience and understanding over the last several months while we have investigated and debated various scenarios and solutions and we especially thank those members of the SDN Advisory Board, SAP Moderators and the SAP Mentors for their time and involvement in working through this.
