The Rockefeller Center unveiled its weblog at the beginning of Spring term, promising a new forum for student discussion, but despite the efforts of enthusiastic webmasters, the site has failed to generate much response.
Rocky Blog has not seen more than three comments per post since its inception, with a strikingly large majority of the posts generating no response or only one comment.
Weblogs feature postings arranged on a web page in chronological order. Most also provide space for a particular blog's audience to leave comments, as is the case with Rocky Blog.
The site's webmasters defended their project.
"Rocky Blog is still in its infancy," said Ryan Abraham '04, one of the student webmasters, who predicted that it would take time to develop a group of committed posters.
Susan Napier '04, the other student webmaster, said many students are too busy to check and respond daily to a weblog, she added.
Rocky Blog is also competing with several other politically oriented weblogs on campus, including the Dartmouth Review's dartlog.net, the Dartmouth Free Press's freedartmouth.com, and the Dartmouth Observer at dartobserver.blogspot.com. All three blogs have been around for about two years.
The Rockefeller Center originally brought up the idea of a weblog as while revamping the center's website last summer.
"The whole notion of rockyblog.org was in response to student input and student request," said assistant director of the Rockefeller Center Jeremy Eggleton, the blog's administrator. "This was clearly a vital sector in the media and the idea made a lot of sense."
Rocky Blog is supposed to be a nonpartisan weblog that facilitates discussion among, instead of within, different political groups, according to its creators. In this way it differs from other blogs on campus, Napier said.
Some students challenged this logic.
"Because [Rocky Blog] is nonpartisan, there's less to say about it," says John Buckholz'04, a frequent contributor to Free Dartmouth.
Buckholz prefers to contribute radical opinions to Free Dartmouth because he perceives the weblog to be a "forum for self-validation."
"Studies have shown that students' political opinions coalesce as they go through college," said Buckholz, "It's important to have dissenting opinions."
Chien Wen Kung '04, webmaster of the Dartmouth Observer, explains that a successful weblog requires a committed group of people who provide "intelligent criticism", expressing their views in such a way as to stimulate debate rather than clamp down on it.
"[Rocky Blog] is more an anonymous blog that doesn't give its own opinions," said Kung. "However, [opinions are] what blogs are about."
Rocky Blog's webmasters may be hesitant to offer their own opinions, for fear that they be construed as the Rockefeller Center's opinions, Kung said. He suggested that there should be a disclaimer explaining that the posted opinions do not represent Rocky's viewpoints as a whole, only the opinions of the webmasters.
Although participation is currently low, Eggleton does not expect Rocky Blog to be discontinued.
"It took some money to establish the weblog," said Eggleton, "but maintaining it costs virtually nothing."
Eggleton, Napier, and Abraham all hope that the weblog will be kept going for quite some time, in the expectation that it will eventually grow in the future.
