MLQ has started a new topic, but I still have a few things to say about the first one (American influence in Philippine politics) and also some housekeeping points to list down.
Let me, for now, write the following notes on this "work in progress."
We welcome comments, of course, but unfortunately they have to be moderated. My own idea of a public square is approximated by an unmoderated comment thread, with the occasional offensive or obscene comment deleted after (if possible, immediately after) it is posted. But as Joey Alarilla has made clear to Manolo and me, the comment thread is also available by RSS feed.
... once a comment is posted, it's already been sent out via RSS even after we delete it, plus our readers might already have been exposed to something very offensive.Registration is also required, but that seems to me to be a reasonable tradeoff: convenience for content (or at least that is the idea, in discouraging anonymous feedback). Of course, we also need to follow the Inquirer.net template; we understand the need for Inquirer.net's growing family of blogs to, well, retain a family resemblance. As for the "type face" being hard to read, as reader Francis suggested, we're working on increasing the size of the main text (and reducing the size of the block quotes). At the moment, our blogroll consists of only two blogs: the personal blogs Manolo and I keep. It will not stay this way, of course (as a look at our respective personal blogs will readily suggest). We're working on how to properly categorize the blogs we will include -- again, in a way that allows us to follow the Inquirer.net template. This blog, as you can see, is still very much a work in progress. Next up: A response to some of the content-related comments this blog's first readers were kind enough to leave.
