It's inevitable that there will be disagreements in a heterogeneous group, especially one as wide ranging as a group that supports diversity. The Autism Hub represented blogs by parents of children on the spectrum and individuals on the spectrum, as well as some professionals' blogs.
It was a fairly exclusive club, compared to the hundreds and thousands of blogs related to autism that march on in relative obscurity. Don't believe that there are thousands of blogs out there related to autism? Do a google blog search for the last 24 hours and you get 13,400 hits. In one day. Expand it out: one week 36,300 hits on blogs related to autism. The hub barely touched the surface of bloggers talking about autism. How many wonderful voices out there have been missed because people only looked at the hub?
This past week saw events that led to the hopefully temporary shutdown of the hub while members work to figure out how to best go forward. Since the ladies of RFID were not members of the hub, it's not a discussion we'll be privy to or part of, and we're okay with that. We know and are friendly with almost all the hub members or have at least visited their blogs a time or two. Many of their blogs made it on my blogroll, and that shortcut for me the need to go to the hub to keep track of the new posts. Many other blogs I found through looking through other bloggers' blogrolls. I added the ones I felt an affinity for to my blogroll.
Now, truthfully, if I disagree with most of the content or found the blogger objectionable, I don't add it to my blogroll, whether I ever visit the blog or not. It's easy to notice on Countering that I visit AoA frequently, but you'll never see it on my blogroll. I think we have the right to link to whom we feel compatible with and to avoid or denounce whomever we feel morally, ethically, or factually counter to. It's a right and a privilege that I think we should be reluctant to give up.
I think that there can be great advantage to having a collection of links to various autism-related blogs that is easily accessible on google searches, but if it's an exclusive listing in which one has to agree to tailor one's content to fit the list, it's a list I'm just as glad to say no to. Freedom of speech, especially when one blogs out of an intense personal desire to communicate and does so freely (as in there is no financial inducement for doing so), is too important to sign over to an arbiter simply to be able to be on a list of links.
Say what you will about autismo hub (and co-opting the autism hub graphics is probably not the best way to handle it), it has a wide sampling of autism-related blogs, many of which are run by individuals whose positions I find at the very least highly objectionable. But the important part is that in one location, a wide sampling of positions are available to interested readers. This is not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing to have segmented lists, either. It can be helpful to have a list of blogs that hold various positions, but that do not require an agreement of allegiance.
The wonder and beauty of free blogs is that anyone can do what the individual(s) running autismohub has done; open a blog for free, choose a name that makes it most likely to be on the front page of a particular search, and then use that blog to provide a list of links to autism-related blogs. Or, if they really want to venture out, then do a google blog search for autism and see what you can find. If you find something grand, add it to your blogroll so others can find it!
If what others want is community building, then I think if we take a look at our blogrolls on our own blogs, we'll see we've done that already without the need of the hub. Find one good blogger, look through their blogroll, and no doubt you can find dozens more. Add them to your google reader, to your blogroll, favorite them, whatever you need. Read their blogs, start commenting, and watch relationships grow and build and a community be formed.
Maybe the hub did that for its members. What I know is that it can be done without the hub and in a more expansive way that avoids the squabbles that led to the hub going on hiatus. People can link to whom they choose, ignore whom they choose to, and demands to choose sides can be ignored or paid attention to, as the individual so chooses.
A Call to Action
