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Several people have mentioned that we should note significant answers to common (or interesting) questions, for example here.

I think a community blog could serve several great uses:

  • Discussing interesting topics in chemistry outside the scope of question-and-answer, like news of Nobel prizes.
  • Highlighting notable developments in recent chemistry research
  • Highlighting chemical education topics
  • Highlighting awesome answers and interesting questions.

I think the key components would be defining the scope and getting 4-5 people to post regularly (e.g., 1-3 posts per week).

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SE isn't starting any new blogs at the moment:

We've learned a lot by creating these per-site blogs for any site which asked for them. However, we at Stack Exchange have not been doing enough to make blogs work - neither for the contributors nor for the communities that are associated with them.

On our network, any site will have generated some amount of valuable content; it's what we’re set up to do. But ours is a platform that promises an engaging community, one that responds. We strive to eliminate those cases wherein someone finds a question they need solved, only to discover that it was posted 4 years prior with no response. This is why we shut down sites in private beta, and even public beta. Blogs aren't Q&A, but the spirit remains the same - a blog with content but no updates is a promise unfulfilled by our network.

Right now, out of the 22 community blogs on the Blog Overflow system, only 10 have posted within this year, only 4 of which were within the past 3 months. 6 more posted something most recently within 2013, and the remaining 6 posted last in 2012. This has caused the image of the blogs on our network, internally and externally, to be viewed as inactive and disused in general, drowning out those few who remain dutifully active.

Much of this is our fault: we never successfully integrated blogging into the normal experience of asking and answering questions. We may someday find a way to do this, but it won’t be tomorrow - and it’s not fair to anyone to keep encouraging participation in a broken system; their efforts would be better served finding ways to share their knowledge on the main sites.

Many thanks to everyone who participated in this experiment thus far - I do believe we’ve all learned something along the way. Existing blogs will continue to be hosted and supported as long as doing so is feasible, but no new ones will be created.

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    $\begingroup$ Well, that explains why it's not obvious how to create a block. It's disappointing though, since I think there's a need. $\endgroup$
    – Geoff Hutchison
    Commented Mar 16, 2015 at 15:22
  • $\begingroup$ @GeoffHutchison From my observation, SE blogs don't work very well in most cases. It is much harder to get enough content regularly for the blog that most people imagine. The visibility of the blog posts and integration is also pretty bad. $\endgroup$
    – Mad Scientist
    Commented Mar 16, 2015 at 15:27
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    $\begingroup$ Sad.... But a correct thing to do. But I'm not saying I'm not in favor of making a blog. $\endgroup$
    – M.A.R.
    Commented Mar 16, 2015 at 18:46
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    $\begingroup$ @GeoffHutchison Well there is always the possibility to create such a blog outside of the SE network and let it be maintained by us, but there would not be an easy official way to integrate it with this site. Except perhaps that for every posted article we create a hot meta post referring to it. That should work. I think the problem is more that we need to find regular, skilled maintainers of the blog than (you would be excellent ofc.) than integration/hosting problems. $\endgroup$
    – Jori
    Commented Mar 28, 2015 at 14:29
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I'm all in favor of starting a community blog. It's in the spirit of "we're graduating and we're a major site" and will allow discussion of cool chemistry news that doesn't fit into the Q&A format.

I'm definitely willing to post about once per week, and I'd keep the topics indicated above.

Here's the SE page describing community blogs.

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    $\begingroup$ IT WOULD BE AWESOME TO CREATE A BLOG! OK, this is one of those instances when I think I wanna do something cool and right, but I'm not allowed to. $\endgroup$
    – M.A.R.
    Commented Mar 16, 2015 at 18:48
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I think there should be a community blog. I don't think I would be able to write for it, but I would definitely read it, comment, and share it around.

  • Our site has a lot of interesting questions that we could expand on and create an interesting blog post on something that a most people don't think of.

  • Historical pieces (lots of just crazy stuff in the history of chemistry.)

  • There's newsbytes: nobel prizes, drug discoveries, synthesis.

  • There are always awesome looking reactions.

  • There's new methods of getting ideas across in the classroom that could be covered.

I think a community blog would really bring the site to life and potentially make chemistry fun and accessible for students struggling to really see "the application" and also serve as a place for people who just like to browse chemistry.SE to kind of park when they don't find a question they feel they can suitably answer.

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    $\begingroup$ I really like the sentiment of this answer, and I agree. Unfortunately this is not possible at the moment as stated by MadScientist. But since it is on record here it is a good thing, if ever the opportunity comes along. $\endgroup$
    – Martin - マーチン Mod
    Commented Oct 28, 2015 at 18:00

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