When I was thinking about setting up vee8, I felt very aware that one of the major drawbacks would be the fact that I am not in a position to post as often as many of the great F1 blogs already exist. Most importantly, I don’t have the time to dedicate to it. I have two other blogs to maintain on top of a stack of “real life” commitments.

When coming up with ideas for vee8 I also toyed with the idea of setting up a forum, as many F1 blogs do. I have found that often the best ideas for topics come in the comments, and it is a shame to have these ideas hidden away in the middle of a huge comment thread. But there are already plenty of forums out there, and it wasn’t clear to me that many people would be up for participating. Plus it would probably be a lot of work for me to moderate and so on.

But I have always felt that the differences between blogs and forums are purely cosmetic. They are essentially the same thing, except that a blog displays the first post of a thread on the front page and the rest of the comments are hidden away. So I have decided to unite the free-form openness of forums with the design and approach of blogging.

I am inviting all readers to contribute posts to vee8. You can sign up straight away using the ‘register’ link at the top of the page, just below the search box. Or click here to go straight to the registration form. Fill in your details and start writing your post!

A couple of notes though. I said that I was bringing the free-form approach of forums to vee8. This isn’t strictly true. When you write a post, it won’t be published straight away. There’s nothing sinister about this. I just want to read over the post to make sure it is well written and so forth. For that reason, I might edit the posts slightly in the same way that newspapers edit letters, but it is just to keep the standards up.

Apart from that though, there are absolutely no barriers to posting. You can write as many or as few articles as you like. Just make sure that it has something to do with Formula 1 (obviously) and try to avoid writing about a topic that has recently been covered. If you have something interesting to say about a recent topic, feel free to leave a comment on the relevant post.

To be honest, I am not sure how much people will participate in this. It is an experiment. It might fall flat on its face. But I’m hopeful that the readers of this blog will have some interesting things to say when I don’t have the time to dedicate to it.

I have already roped my brother into signing up. He is the person who originally got me interested in Formula 1, so that makes sense. Hopefully he’ll pop in and say hi soon. Ollie at the excellent BlogF1 has also signed up after I dropped a hint in an email conversation, so hopefully he’ll contribute something soon as well.

For more information, the how-to page is here.