About Writing Comments

2008-12-05 15:59:58.000 – Brian Clark,  Observer

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Today’s comment is about writing comments. I know, that may sound strange, but bear with me here.

The summit staff makes every effort to write a new comment every day. Sometimes, as perhaps you can imagine, that can be difficult for a number of reasons. Some days it is not particularly easy to come up with a topic to write about when not much is happening on the summit (weather related or otherwise) and then other days are just so busy that it is tough to simply find time to sit down and write a comment. Also, none of the summit staff are professional writers, in fact most of us are scientists. Despite this (or perhaps in spite of this?), I think we have some pretty good writers on the summit. I will be the first to admit however that I am not one of those people; just one of the reasons that I started my undergraduate education at Penn State as a meteorology major and never looked back.

So why do we bother writing these comments every day? First of all, we want to keep people up to date with what is happening on the summit. We know there are a lot of people out there that look forward to seeing that a new comment has been posted and also rely on our posts as a sort of “connection” to this mountain that so many people (myself included) are very fond of.

Perhaps the most important reason however, is to get new and relatively new visitors to our site interested in our organization and the mountain. Those people in particular probably do not realize that we are a private, non-profit, member supported organization. Unfortunately, the common misconception is that we are some sort of government supported entity when in fact we rely on the support of over 4,000 members as well as generous support from our corporate partners to continue our operations (this website included). If you frequent our website and enjoy the comments, webcams, etc. consider becoming a member so we can keep on doing what we’re doing. There are a bunch of great benefits to being a member, which you can check out here. If you are already a member, as I am sure a good number of people reading this are, we thank you and are very appreciative of your current and continued support.

Actually, a recent update and redesign of our website not only made the things that people love about our website better and more accessible, but also made it even easier to help support what we do as a non-profit organization in ways beyond general membership.

So there you go, that’s a little bit about how we write comments and our motivation behind it. If you ever wondered.

Brian Clark,  Observer