Hello :)

I've started reading chess.com blogs some time ago (and also started one of my own) and I've got a few ideas how it could be more enjoyable for people here. This is not a feature request, I am not a premium member, I am just thinking out loud (brainstorming, let's say) :)

I've noticed that:

- blogs are in different languages and a significant percentage is not in English

- blogs cover different topics, not all of them are about chess (and some annoying ones are about religion (at least annoying for me, since I don't think this is the right place to discuss such things))

- blogs are given as a list in a chronological order and one has to go through the list and dig for something interesting

- in general, unless you're a featured blogger, it is very difficult to get any attention (and I guess it is mostly because the things are left highly unstructured as they are now)

So, some simple changes that chess.com could do (if they are willing to and find the time) could be:

- there exist automatic language detection tools and I guess some of them must be for free (I am doing machine learning/data mining myself, so I work with automatic text processing quite often ;)) and you could automatically tag each blog post by its language, so users could filter the blog list to show, for instance, only blogs in English

- you could add a few simple predefined tags (also for filtering when browsing through the list): {openings,game,puzzle,historical,chess_general,other} - or something like that, there are many ways to divide the topic space... and the blog authors could choose one of the tags when posting the blog

- apart from filtering, you could add :like:-s, so that well written / interesting blogs can be shown higher in the blog list (this is also a rather simple tweak)

As I said, I'm just thinking out loud and I guess someone must have already discussed similar things before :) Neither of these things are in any ways necessary, but if some of these features ever get added, it would make the blogging experience at chess.com a much more pleasant one and everyone would benefit, IMHO.

I agree with this.

I see that this is obviously not a hot topic :P (lol)

So, come on people - what are your opinions on blogs? Do you read them? Rarely? Frequently? Do you write them?

What bothers you, what are you looking for when searching for articles?

I mean, I know that the best stuff to read on the site are GM columns - but some nice ideas, opening discussions, game annotations, etc. - can also be found among the 'other content' - which doesn't have a VIP label - and there is a lot of such content 'out there'. .. So I think it would be cool to find some ways to increase activity there by making it easier for readers to find what they are interested in and for the bloggers to become 'visible' to more people (get more reads, comments, feedback, etc.)

So, let's brainstorm about it :)