Forum vs Conversations

My definition of correct using these above mentioned places of cpod: Lesson conversation= lesson related comments (questions, etc...) Forum = anything related with chinese(/ -pod) conversation section Posts : chinesepodrelated and other usefull mandarin(learning stuff) Lesson suggestions can be left at the lessonsuggestion topic at the forum. I hope that helpsyou :-)

I don't think there are any hard and fast rules. People have a funny way of organizing things to their liking. They will try a few new things, see how they work out, and ultimately settle on a routine. I also suspect Ken & CPOD know this. We're their petri dish and they are, no doubt, fascinated watching us grow, saving occasional nudges in the right direction only when absolutely necessary.

I just go where the people are. Like Ken realized, his blogs really died when V3 came out and we could just post our own blogs (that is essentionally what these "user conversations" are...just blogging about anything). I would use the forum or Ken's blogs had we not had "User blogs" (as we should probably call them) now. I use them because that is where I know I will get a response. Even though I have added the feeds for both ALL CONVERSATIONS and for the whole FORUM in my Google Reader (I still recommend this as the best way of getting an overall view of what is going on, not through the "My Conversations" and "All Conversations" pull down menu), the "ALL CONVERSATIONS" feed gets my main attention. Adding individual user feeds to Google Reader is also an interesting way to see the activity of a user (such as Amber or John, or Jenny who has averaged about 5 posts a week if not that... :( ) and their answers to questions. I guess my post isn't doing much help. But I do recommend using Google Reader (or an equivilent, but I don't know of such since I haven't tried others, happy with reader.google.com) to get a better bird's eye view of everything and to catch the new posts. Don't read a whole thread with the Reader though, just click on the topic's header in the entry and it will take you directly to it in the forum or here in the conversations. And Ken, I never was found of blogs being taken off of blogs.chinesepod.com and made into a blog site for your umbrella of language podcasts. I prefer to stick with chinesepod.com and not get too far away. -Rich

大家好 I like to have a look at blog.praxislanguage.com, every so often &am Glad that it's seperate, i think everything is well organized, compared to the rest of the internet - where everything is hard to find - and the search enGines has become OvercrOwded with ad-taGs and bad or LosE tags.

I find the whole site confusing sometimes. There is so much going on that I always think there's something I'm missing out on. Maybe a weekly show about things users are writing/blogging/asking about?

Well, as a blogger for the site (your friendly neighborhood Newbie blogger, at your service), I'll be the first to tell you that audience is everything. Prior to V3, Ken was blogging almost every day, sometimes several times a day, but if you look at it now, all of the bloggers (myself included) will go days between posts. There's not the same impetus to post when you get the feeling that nobody us reading! :-D The new conversation area is where the action is, so I spend more time here. It's also fully integrated into the site and my lessons are a click away. That makes for mighty attractive web surfing. :-) For myself, I also hang out here to see what interests other learners. It helps me decide what parts of my own journey to talk about on the Newbie blog. I have to confess that I only check this area and the blogs. I have never liked the way forums are set up. Their organization and navigation simply annoy me. (That's not at all restricted to these forums, by the way. I feel that way about all forums.) In the end, I think FuDaWei nailed it. They're watching us to see where we go. They create the content. They're looking to us to see where to put it.

wow, great comments. I think I'll look into to Google Reader to see if that helps me stay on top of things. I was beginning to feel like Maxiewawa - unable to stay keep up with what's going on in the community because there are so many sources of community content. I still miss the feature on the main page of V2 which fed both lesson comments and ken's blog comments to the front page. While I'm certainly used to V3 and like many aspects of it, there are still too many clicks involved to get to what I want to see. But, I suspect things will only improve! I really like Maxiewawa's suggestion about a weekly show related to community content - similar to the Saturday Show, but stronger focus on the community. Even a weekly/monthly newsletter would be nice. Maybe I missed it, but is there a way to search the Conversations content?

I think something like the lesson search for (user blog) posts would be a great thing but you would need an extra option to choose between the postdates like today, this week,... because otherways the hitlist would be to hughe to find what your looking for. :-)