Trust

There was a stir on the classblogmeister list when David Warlick recently explained that, because of server load issues, classblogmeister blogs written prior to May 31, 2007 would not be available. Well I was shocked, I pleaded the case for all the reasons you might imagine, and I was incredibly discouraged.

Words came back to haunt me. Someone blogged a while ago, "Blogmeister is great, but when David gets tired of it, it will be gone". When I read that, I said no way, he'd never drop it. I stuck with it when things got a little rocky...

But when I read that old blogs would not be available, I saw it as the end of an incredible run. I wrote briefly to the list. A few others did the same. I was depressed. In my mind I composed more emails to the list or personally to David - but I never sent them.

I had always hitched my wagon to the Warlick Star. It had come through every time, getting better and brighter. I decided to wait. My gut told me to. My heart asked me to.

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Today David let us all know he's adding another server, so classblogmeister will be faster and back to where it was. And all those old blogs will be there. Way back to the beginning. Incredible relief!

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Some reading this will shake their heads and wonder what all these classblogmeister teachers have been smoking. Why put all the eggs in a single basket, carried by one person?

Trust is a scary thing sometimes. You have no choice when you're driving down a street and have to trust oncoming traffic to stay on the other side of the road - or when you climb aboard a plane and are in the hands of a person you only hear through a bad sound system.

Right now there is no other choice - not if you want the state of the art classroom blogging tool with the strong educational core of classblogmeister. When you get something for free like classblogmeister is, you don't really have much leverage. When you sign up to use it, there is no guarantee of service.

All you're left with is trust. Trust is something I want to have. I want to trust people. We've all been burned when somebody we trusted let us down. That's part of life.

But when you trust somebody with things you care about so very deeply about, a bond can form. When that trust is rewarded by coming through, over and over and over - a community can form that is very strong.

That is what has happened with classblogmeister. Call me crazy, but I'm real happy I've hung in there. There is still nothing else like it. Thanks, David.