This was at the beginning of the October 15 chat. I was asking about how and whether to save the chats. It's worth preserving thoughts about why and how these are collected and saved.
Life isn't perfect.
Sandra Dodd: I'm torn about the value of editing chats for later reading. Any opinions?
Life isn't perfect.
Sandra Dodd: I'm torn about the value of editing chats for later reading. Any opinions?
Sandra Dodd: Some of them are wonderful.
Sandra Dodd: http://sandradodd.com/youngchildren
Sandra Dodd: partly because of additions of links and videos and such.
Sandra Dodd: And I like that.
Sandra Dodd: But can there be just too much material?
Sandra Dodd: I'm thinking of my site as a library. Do we just stick with 500 books we know are good, or go on into the thousands?
Sandra Dodd: I have over 2000 pages on my site that are google-findable. A few hundreds of them are about the SCA, or things not for everyday reading (obituaries).
Sandra Dodd: I don't don't have a philosophical foundation for what the hell I'm doing.
Sandra Dodd: "
Sandra Dodd: Collecting helpful material might have a stopping point (other than death).
heathermbooth: Do you want them for you to look back on or other people to read?
Robin B.: I sometimes find it hard to read through a chat, especially if I'm trying to find that nugget I'm looking for on the topic. If I've been *in* the chat, though, I can sometimes find it fairly quickly because I know how the chat progressed.
Sandra Dodd: Both, Heather, maybe.
Sandra Dodd: I edit harder than Marta does (which is fine). I chop out more chit-chat.
Marta Pires: You do. Sorry. 
heathermbooth: Can you tell if they are being read? I think if it's becoming a chore to do you can take a break from doing it without any harm done. If you never go back to doing it, you do have 2000 other pages for people to read and get information from.
Sandra Dodd: So… partly I'm wondering whether the two hours or so it takes to edit a chat (sometimes longer) is a good use of time.
Jill Parmer: 
Sandra Dodd: That's a good way to look at it, Heather. Look at what's done without worrying about what wasn't done.
Marta Pires: I have a hard time deciding if something is valuable or not. So I let it stay, just in case. 
Sandra Dodd: I'm not sure whether the number of readers would be the important measure. Back to the library analogy, sometimes only one person is going to use a document, but it will make a big difference in his research or understanding.
Marta Pires: One of the things I like about the chats is that they're very much up-to-date.
Sandra Dodd: What if, Marta, we publish what's on the blog and just mark it as unedited until/unless it's edited?
Marta Pires: Sounds good!
Sandra Dodd: So that they're available raw, and maybe the edited ones could/should be moved to my site (some, the ones we want to add more links and video to)?
Sandra Dodd: We need to remind people, though, then, that these are available later.
Marta Pires: And before we do that, if there's anything that's better to take out before publishing, we can always do that, because it wouldn't take much time.
Sandra Dodd: So don't anybody write anything you don't want other people to read. Perhaps the word "Duh" should be one that's good to eliminate, but… Duh! Already there are people here you m ight not know or ever meet, and your worst enemy could show up any second now (assuming anyone other than me might have an enemy)
Sandra Dodd: Hi, Serah! (Not anyone's enemy; I know Serah.)
Jill Parmer: I'm imagining the chats and your website like your house...the museum with lots of interesting nuggets to find.
Sandra Dodd: The blog was set up because the code it uses keeps the colors of the names. For a while I was putting in code to make people's names different colors. That was a LOT Of work.
Marta Pires: I think the chats are really valuable, but I can understand your feeling of not-managing-to-do-everything-on-your-to-do-list.
Sandra Dodd: If we edit within blogger, though, and then I lift the whole code for a webpage, it keeps the color.
Marta Pires: So your suggestion seems like a really good one to me.
Sandra Dodd: Marta has tried to help me keep my to-do list going, but it's too much to do. Things fall through the cracks. There's too much good writing. COOL! And it's healthier for me to stop trying to collect every great scrap that ever flows by.
Marta Pires: I'm so like you, Sandra!!!
