The rotation/roster idea might work if we could get enough volunteers so people only have to do it (say) one week in six. We already have Nicholas and myself as volunteers on that basis (well, Nicholas atually said once every two months but I’m sufre he’d do it every 6 weeks at a pinch). I’ll also interpret Paul Mitchell’s comment above as a volunteering offer as well. Helen Dale also volunteered to assist previously, as did Darlene Taylor with the arts side at least.

If each of the above is prepared to tackle Missing Link once every six weeks, and we get just one more volunteer, we might yet keep the feature going. Moreover, it would then have more of a blogging community self-help co-operative endeavour rather than just a solo effort. Obviously there would be differences in style, approach and selection between volunteers, but that isn’t a bad thing. It will mean that over time readers would gain exposure to the blog reading tastes of various editors, and may therefore find blog writing they really like that I would not personally have selected.

Logistically, co-ordinating such a collaborative endeavour should be fairly easy. I could simply make my Google Reader logon available to all 6-8 volunteers, so we’re each working from the same resource/database. We would need to agree on a roster, but presumably would often/usually be able to swap weeks with another team member if work or other commitments made it impossible for one of us to stick to our rostered week. Moreover, other team members could even assist with tagging (or rather yellow starring) promising/outstanding posts they happen to spot even when it isn’t their rostered week, not to mention adding new and worthwhile blogs to the subscription list. The whole thing could actually work extremely well, but only if we can gather a team of 6-8 volunteers willing to put in the time for one week every 6-8 weeks.

As I observed earlier, my experience to date is that it takes around 6 hours in total to put together each Missing Link post. Moreover, I think we would need to leave it at not less than 3 Missing Link posts per week for the project to be workable, otherwise the number of posts to review for each edition becomes too overwhelming. Fortunately the work of “starring” promising posts and then culling and short listing them can be spread out to some extent over the couple of days before publication, but it’s still going to take around 3 hours (and possibly a little more) to write and compile the Missing Link post itself on each day of publication. Of course, you can start the compilation task the night before if needs be, to fit work commitments.

Anyway, I’ll email Nicholas, Helen, Darlene and Paul separately about this, but any additional volunteers would be most welcome. Either indicate your interest here in the comment box to this post or contact me via the sidebar “Contact Club Troppo” facility.

Thanks for the hard work Ken. I guess it was unrealistic of the Oz blogsphere to expect/rely on one mere mortal to bring us the highlights – twice a week, no less!

I’m happy to volunteer to do one week every couple of months. Perhaps volunteers could share a Google reader ID and that way catch up with where the last one finished off.

As for Missing Link, it did strike me as something that would suffer when the new academic year got underway. Not least because of the lurching, crisis-to-crisis nature of CDU’s adminstration.

For what it’s worth, I would trade a dozen Missing Links for one of your law posts any time.

I’ll make that beer I promised a carton of your choice when we do eventually meet.

Just a thought – was the university effectively paying for the Missing Link?