According to J. Glenn Reynolds, author of the Instapundit.com blog, the key to a successful blog is to “post regularly, find topics that interest you and track them steadily.”

That’s exactly what I intend to do. But only with a bit of help from all of you. Yes, you.

Time magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year was You. Recall that 2006 was the year when user-generated content was embedded into our online psyches as a lasting reality rather than a passing phenomenon. Web sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Digg and Second Life crept into our Firefox bookmark toolbars. They’ve since been re-imagined as iPhone apps and Google widgets.

User-generated content has infiltrated the world of journalism. You, we, us, common citizens. Journalists – who pride themselves on professional attributes such as accuracy, objectivity and credibility – now have citizen colleagues. We now have the ability to announce breaking news and commentary on anything and everything, sometimes before the 24-hour news stations. Consider this: last year a blogger reported the earthquake in China an hour before CNN broke the news.

When I consider how I want to make the Record unique this semester, you come to mind. I want you to help generate content.

But how? In order to continue to effectively manage this publication, editors must retain their influence on what stories get published. That’s only fair.

My conclusion: create a collaborative Record blog. Sounds post-modern, eh?

My vision for this bit of online real estate (thankfully Web site mortgage rates aren’t too volatile), is to collaboratively create the content. E-mail me links to articles, videos, podcasts, etc., and I’ll post them (with some discretion). The Maple Log is a space to learn what you – the students, faculty and staff of Goshen College – are thinking about.

I hope that come Thursday afternoon, my inbox is flooded with links. Remember, Reynolds said that the best bloggers “post regularly, find topics that interest you and track them steadily.”

The Maple Log is not my blog. It’s our blog. I maintain it, but you contribute to it. To adopt from Time magazine, I present the Record Person of the Year: Us.

Check us out at record.goshen.edu/category/maple-log