Hope for Sustain'd

For the benefit of some family and friends who read Small and Simple but do not venture into the LDS web log community I would like to briefly describe Sustain'd. Sustain'd is a web site that ranks posts according to sustaining votes. One can go to Sustain'd and see what posts have been sustained and how many times they have been sustained. It seems a neat way to catch the highlights of what is going on.

Some may have noticed a 'Sustain This!' button on the bottom of my posts here. This is an easy way to sustain one of my posts and thus recommend it to other readers. If you click this button you will be asked to type in a user name and password of your choice, and then you can click on the word sustain in a small blue/gray box to add your sustaining vote. So I would encourage you to click on this button anytime you see it on a post that you like - here or elsewhere. It can be a great way - in addition to giving comments - to support your local LDS blogger. It is a bit of a Taboo for an author to sustain their own posts. I did this once mostly to make sure that the button was functioning properly, but I most likely will not sustain any more of my own stuff. I will leave that to the reader.

Now for what I hope Sustain'd will do for the LDS web log community (bloggernackle).

I hope that there are a lot of people out there who are a lot like me who have more time to read blogs from all over, and that they will 'sustain' the good ones in this way. This would be a great help to me. I am certain that I miss a lot of good stuff out there.

I also hope that this will keep good posts alive for a long time. I sometimes marvel at how quickly good posts fade into oblivion. Like stories in yesterdays newspaper they become discarded. A good post with lots of sustaining votes can stick around for quite a while it seems.

I hope this goes a ways towards removing some of the clannish nature of blogging. It appears to me that the bloggernackle is loosing some of it's community feel. It is getting quite vast. It seems to me that something must bring it together in some way or the term bloggernackle will loose any meaning whatsoever. I am not really sure that sustain'd or anything else will be able to do that in a long-term and meaningful way. But I am hopeful.