Last time I put it down was when Stephen Wraysford's thoughts turned to the pain of abandonment as something he had feared all his life. When I read that I felt I now understood why Faulks had chosen to write a James Bond novel.

Abandonment as the source of pain had been a major theme in The Girl at the Lion d'Or too, so if that is a recurring theme for Faulks the author it makes sense for him to pen something Bondly. The character James Bond is not only someone who is a loner, he is lonely. An orphan, essentially raised by the British government to work for them in his adult life, the most stable connections he has are friendly colleagues. Any closer connections he forms die or betray him. Loneliness and the pain of abandonment are easy enough themes to work into a Bond story.

Looking at the brief bit relevant on Wikipedia it seems this may well be what he did.

Recently I came across a discussion about constructing a website to serve as a resource for a community and a nexus for social interaction within that community. One of the possibilities under consideration was providing hosted blogging for community members.

It seemed likely to me that most members of a community (or social subset which could potentially form a community?) who were inclined to be blogging would already be doing so. I think as bloggers often create commentary and dialogue communities of their own, that in addition to providing a platform for new community members to blog if they wish, it could be beneficial to a fledgling community to ask established community bloggers if they would be willing to integrate their blog with the community site.

I suspect that would be a fair degree of technical challenge, since beyond merely syndicating the existing blog to the community website, I am also envisioning a unified comment thread, so that comments made at the blog's primary location would show up at the community site, and likewise comments made at that site by community members would also show up in the blog's own comment stream. At least to me that seems likely an effective balance between attempting to build local community, soliciting the contributions of established community members, and not asking people to uproot the niches they have settled themselves into.

As I said, I suspect there would be a fair amount of technical difficulty in doing such a thing, although I think previously the Bad Astronomy blog has been integrated with the Universe Today forums, so it seems possible and the increasing prevalence of OpenID might make it easier. The variety of blogging software platforms available I suspect makes the problem a lot harder, maybe entirely impractical.