Today we're putting some of the finishing touches on the blogging system here at indieWIRE, but like many things "alpha" we won't get everything launched today that we would have hoped. Of the 27 blogs in the initial run, 14 of them are live currently and another 8 of them look like they are getting close to prime time. By the end of the day, though, we'll have more of this public, hopefully just in time to answer some of the questions floating around out there.

First off, my apologies to the fine David Hudson (one of my favorite reads) for not closing the loop with him on how much we love GreenCine Daily (but we promise we talked to Jonathan.)

Second off, I'm sending Greg.org a bill for a new keyboard (as I spit up coffee on this one just now reading his "Breakfast Club" rendition):

HERNANDEZ
I've been thinking a lot about what this company, this community, this movement needs right now. What challenges are we facing? What's holding us back, keeping us from reaching our full potential?

Heh heh ... well, the actual transcript of the meeting would read a wee bit differently than that (and probably starts with discussion of whether Jason Calacnis having indieWIRE founder Mark Rabbinowitz blog about independent film meant that blogs were competition or not -- by the way, they aren't.) And the discussion heads more in the direction of having participants in the industry blog, you're just seeing the staff ones first because ... well, because they made good test subjects.

A bit more scathing criticism this week from Pullquote;

"Forgive me. The cinetrix is always suspicious when an established media outlet mentions 'highlighting' blog content. It smacks of 'we're getting suckers to generate copy for free!'"

Youcha! Clearly, I've got some explaining to do (although we all got a chuckle here at indieWIRE for being mistaken for an "established media outlet" by anyone but hard-core cinephiles and independent filmmakers.)

"Generating copy for free" is exactly what we aren't trying to do with, but since I haven't explained further yet (something I'm working on now that hopefully cinetrix won't find so funny as my first draft at explaining what a blog is.)

In indieWIRE:Daily (the email publication indieWIRE publishes) we've had a long tradition of summarizing a few stories that are independent film related in other news sources like BBC or Variety (those also get archived in our Focus section.) Instead, the staff is now putting those items into the Insider joint blog, and we'll start picking items to highlight from the blogs in that section instead. Sometimes that might be an item very similar to what used to be there, at other times it might be something that one of the bloggers wrote.

We'll also be doing that same thing with blogs that we don't even house: from our perspective, abstracting and mentioning an article in "Pullquotes" (like the fact that cinetrix noticed that Elvis Mitchell reviewed two unrated films this week) is no different than highlighting something in a blog we're housing (except that the people that are blogging at indieWIRE didn't have blogs before.)

For us, helping some of the interesting people in the community figure out that this "blog thing" isn't as intimidating as people think it is the real value indieWIRE will get from this: we're not getting free content, we're not getting new advertising ... we're cementing our bond with people in the community.

Speaking of which, back to grindstone for the next layer of the launch.