First, some background on where I would like Bicycles.SE to go...
In my opinion the Bicycles.SE site should, in time, become an excellent resource full of the advice that you would normally only get from a bike-shop mechanic. In fact this advice should be better than that because of the variety of opinion, short-cuts and tips that only come with experience, all distilled with the voting system into quality answers.
There is also no financial reason to give answers that 'cost more money', e.g. on a recent question on straightening out handlebars, in a retail environment you would sell the customer the bars, fresh tape and go for the novelty bell, hopefully to get a good chunk of the customer's wallet, leaving them with a big job putting their bars back together.
However, on SE you can say 'get a big bit of wood and try straightening them out' - potentially a five minute task with no money changing hands. To suggest this in a retail setting to a customer is potentially a sackable offence as saving customers money is morally wrong.
Given the above example, I see Bicycles.SE as hopefully becoming the de-facto place on the web to learn everything and anything about how to fix/repair a bike, a 'virtual mechanic's brain' where the 'virtual mechanic' has wisdom of the crowds and is never too busy to help out.
As for the blog idea...
I dislike the existing bike sites that 'cater' for cyclists. In the UK I particularly dislike the 'BikeRadar' effort of 'History Publishing' - it smells of car-driving-out-of-preference-types that just ended up in dead-tree publishing and their attempt at trying to put something together that might catch the cycling crowd. It has no soul, it talks down and second-guesses.
I have little or no interest in the 'pro' cycling websites (outside of the three weeks of July Tour de France when I read all the gossip I can get). Given how many pro websites there are I think this segment is catered for adequately.
Mountain biking specific websites/magazines/blogs get my goat a bit. I see the whole MTB craze of the 90's as a reaction to the motor-mania of the last century, although great fun, going off-road is admitting defeat on using bikes for regular transport. We don't have to do that now, we don't have bikes 'just for fun', they are transport not-just for children and people who got nicked drink-driving.
The sites I do like are things like the cycle-porn-in-Copenhagen stuff, the reviews of cafes-by-bike website and that sort of stuff.
What I would like to see in a SE blog is coupled to what SE is primarily going to be about, which is Q+A, which is 'virtual mechanic'. I may have misunderstood this 'mission', however, it is compatible with what a lot of other cycling orgs are trying to do.
The people doing outreach, the people into tours, the people into culture and products, all of them could do with some add-on reference for the 'how do I do this' questions. Venerable organisations such as the UK's Cyclists Touring Club (CTC) should give up on their own forums and CMS and direct the questions to Bicycles.SE, just because it is the superior platform for that kind of stuff.
So anyway...
I would like to see the blog be put together with contributors from outside Bicycles.SE, for example, Louise from http://www.patisseriecyclisme.co.uk/ could write something fantastic, not really to plug her site but to nonetheless get more traffic. Next week we could invite someone else to put together a guest post, the Copenhagen Cycling Chic -guy.
Again, a thinking-persons essay without any of the commercialism, patronising 'you-must-wear-helmet-obey-motorist' attitude, 'I ride bike style road/fixie/DH MTB/my-tri-bars-are-bigger-than-yours' snobbery.
Invites to guest write for the Bicycles.SE blog should be a core part of the blog start, however, I think we need to be able to summarize our mission so that people see what we are trying to do and are therefore keen to write quality articles.
The blog could also be a place for nurturing quality writing talent. I know some people can write their journey to work as an epic tale of struggle against adversity with beginning, middle and end. I also know some people that can go all the way around the world and have nothing to say about it. So the subject is sometimes secondary to a good read.
The blog can also be a place where questions that were particularly well responded to get re-posted, to not get buried. The 'editors picks' as it were.
As for bike reviews, I think these could be really good if people are talking about the pride and joy they just bought, as opposed to salesman speak or depressed-journalist-speak.
Rarely are blogs made from lots of guest posts, nobody even thinks about guest blogging for somewhere. It would be good to have something that bucked that trend.
To conclude
Let's decide what our niche is, who we are going to reach and how it is going to relate to the Q+A site.
