LA Times series - Agent Orange vs Toolio

[mihai]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-dustup-jan07-11,0,1331464.storygallery

The sheer amounts of (mostly) constructive comments is amazing.  I do recognize a few characters here and there, but they mostly seem like average joes who may read LA Times but not necessarily troll the MRidazz forums.  Am I wrong to assume that?

A new community has to spring up, something more mature and better organized than the MRidazz forum.  I would love to spam those articles w/ URLs, but then again, after reading mostly intelligent comments, I don't feel like posting a link to mridazz would be appropriate.  We gotta keep these people talking. 

And more importantly, we need an organized way to communicate with cyclists in other parts of town, I wanna know about the beef in Pasadena, and folks up there should know about the bullshit in S. Monica.

[Franz]

Isn't that what CICLE and LACBC are supposed to do.

[mihai]

Agreed, they do have all-city news stories posted and that's great, but Cicle.org's blog isn't that lively (2-6 comments on a story at best), and I can't find a comment box on LACBC (labike.org) anywhere.

All I'm saying is that a forum that requires a login/profile allows users to get a communication going most efficiently.  The SM Critical Mass forum is nice (ability to post video clips), but it's not viewable by those that aren't logged in, so I bet that scares off a lot of potential signer-uppers.