Open thread: Lunch with Mrs. Q

Blogging is great, but one of the downsides is that this is all my content and it’s one-sided. I put something out there and then readers comment. With comment moderation in place, most discussions rarely get much traction. I think we have created a decent-sized community, but your voices are constrained because I control everything on my own blog.

Let me backtrack a second and tell you about a conversation I had with a couple tweens/teens in my husband’s extended family who visited us this summer. They couldn’t stop talking about Nerdfighters. I’d never heard of this quite large and pretty cool social movement (doesn’t mean much that I hadn’t heard of it because I’m not very savvy about tween/teen interests). I looked into it and found Ning. Ning means “peace” in Chinese and they help people create social websites.

I’m launching a social network called “Lunch with Mrs. Q.” The URL is http://schoollunch.ning.com/

The perks:
1) You can start a discussion
2) You can write a blog post
3) You can comment freely
4) You can upload a photo or video
5) You can interact directly with others
6) You can chat online with members (and me when I’m online — I’ll go online most nights when I’m drafting blog posts).
7) We can create events or pre-planned times to chat online.

NOTE: Anyone can join but you abuse it and I will delete your profile, banishing you from the community.

Lunch with Mrs. Q has the possibility of being an amazing way to interact freely or a spectacular bust, but I wanted to give it a whirl. From now on, I will direct all open thread posts to the lunch community…so what is today’s open thread topic? Well, that’s up to you… see you over there later tonight!

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8 Responses to Open thread: Lunch with Mrs. Q

  1. Readera aka Sarah November 7, 2010 at 1:45 pm #

    I'm a nerdfighter as well as a follower of your blog Mrs. Q. The interests do overlap.

  2. Joy November 7, 2010 at 9:58 pm #

    Great idea Mrs Q. I have been part of a different Ning and it is a great platform!

  3. Anonymous November 8, 2010 at 1:26 am #

    I'd prefer not to feed the ego of you or your sycophants.I cannot wait until your blog fades into obscurity in 2011.

  4. BlackDog November 8, 2010 at 5:13 pm #

    Have you seen this: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/us/07fat.html?pagewanted=1&ref=general&src=me

    (It's about cheese.)

    I can imagine that the government will "discover" that a "great way" to get more "nutrition" into the little ones might be to feed them more of this cheese that we now apparently have too much of.

    More generally, my mum taught school for 35 years in our state's poorest district. She maintained that the two great evils there were standardized testing and school lunch…neither one of them, she says, is conducive to anyone learning anything.

  5. HenrysMom A2MI November 8, 2010 at 7:12 pm #

    Mrs. Q,

    This is off topic. Have you read about the 2 researchers at Cornell who were just awarded $1M from the Dept of Agriculture to do research into the psychology of the the lunch line? I would love to have a Q&A with them, or read an interview you do with them — you probably have insight for their project that hardly anyone else has!

    http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Oct10/SchoolNutritionCenter.html

  6. Kim November 9, 2010 at 12:05 am #

    Responsibility for the federal school lunch program needs to be shifted from the USDA to the U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services. The NY Times article linked in BlackDog's comment above discusses the USDA"s conflicts of interest. They're in bed with Big Agribusiness and they oversee the funding of our nation's school lunches. School kids will lose that competition every time.

  7. Anonymous November 9, 2010 at 5:14 pm #

    to anonymous @ 7:26 – you could just stop reading now, no one is making you read the posts.

  8. Robin January 4, 2011 at 6:23 am #

    While I do enjoy Mrs.Q and her blog, I must say that #3 above (You can comment freely) is not practiced here. I truly understand the need to remove some post's in rare occasions, but it seems to be the norm to stop a informative, and many times friendly conversations with "New post's are no longer allowed..or some such thing.

    Many times it looks as though the blogger does not want to read each post and discontinues any conversation due to lack of time as opposed to lack of interest from the commenter's.

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