In the wake of the demise of the Lit Blog Co-op there have been a few noteworthy posts (at Ed's and Dan Green's) on the nature of that particular collaborative lit blogosphere effort and beyond that on working together in other similar projects. I did enjoy parts of the LBC and took part in a round table discussion last year of Nicola Griffith's wonderful novel Always, but it was from observing the LBC that I came up with a different idea for the Summer and Winter Blog Blast Tours. (And just a note - we are hard at work on the '08 SBBT right now and it will go live in May - more info to follow as we interview various authors.) One thing I disliked about the LBC was that if you didn't like the book choice then you stopped visiting the site - and once you stopped going you were less likely to remember to check back a few months later when the new round of book choices was offered. Another thing was that the site was only active during the book choices - so again you forgot about it (or at least I did).

When we put together the first SBBT one of the main things I decided to do was not develop a separate site but have the interviews work through everyone's existing blogs. This meant that we got all the regular readers from every single participating site. One of the key elements of that plan was that every site had to link to all other interviews taking place that day - so if you were only a regular reader at Chasing Ray, you would read the interview I had up and see a link list to all other interviews in the group. This makes it easy for my readers to move around and read the interviews they are interested in. And throughout that week even on days each participating site might not have an interview up, they still linked to the others - again making it easy for my readers (for example) to see what is going on.

And to really make it easy for readers, I run a master list for the week here that is continuously updated with direct links to each and every interview. So you can show on Friday and see every interview that has taken place and jump right to the one you are interested in. Or, if you are from a site completely unrelated to the group but still wanted to link to what we were doing, it was easy to just link to the master list (and a lot of sites do this).

What we did was come up with an incredibly user friendly way of doing a series of interviews with two dozen authors (or more) across more than a dozen blogs over the course of a week. Further, the participants are posting to their own sites, which makes it easier for them - they don't have to do extra work elsewhere on top of maintaining their own sites. That I think is one of the problems the LBC faced as participants became too busy; they had time for their own sites but not another one. In developing the SBBT and WBBT one of the main things we all knew from the outset was that we needed to be posting to our own sites.

Guys Lit Wire obviously doesn't fit this individual site model - the goal there is to create a site that is specific to the audience (in this case older teenage boys looking for lit news and recommendations); we couldn't have them running around on a daily basis from one site to another. But I knew that if we tried to build a site that people had to actively worry about on top of their own sites that it wouldn't work - everyone would be excited in the beginning buy gradually GLW would turn into a grind and fall by the wayside. What we have done there is come up with a monthly schedule that includes 23 different posters, each of whom will post on a single day a month. One post a month is no big deal - and if folks who have their own blogs want to copy their single post to their personal sites they are welcome to it. Most importantly though is how very different those 23 posters are - men and women, all different ages, all different experiences and all different opinions on genres. We will also have teenagers included in the mix with their recommendations. It's an experiment that has already begun a bit with Readergirlz but Guys Lit Wire is not an exact match of that site. We aren't doing monthly issues, but daily blog posts. This is another way to do a web site, and we look forward to seeing it succeed. (First post will go up June 1st.)

I guess what I'm saying is that the LBC broke some significant ground and provides valuable lessons both on how and how not to create a collaborative web project in the lit blogosphere. The most significant thing I have learned from the projects I've worked on is how critical the active participation of the bloggers is. You can't make something like the SBBT or WBBT work unless everyone who says they are going to do an interview actually does it - success is all about follow through. As the LBC retires, I hope there are more round table discussions across the lit blogosphere and more mutual discussions of books and authors that many readers find appealing. The best thing about these efforts is bringing attention to titles that might otherwise not receive it and that is something that we all need to keep doing.