My point is mainly regarding usage. I believe that DalianDalian is a useful site which has potential for much more if there was a bigger community generating content. As a not-for-profit website I have no problems putting my content here as it connects me with a wider audience than my own blog (and flickr photo stream). I would feel differently if, as in the case of Dalian Xpat, somebody was profiting through a business strategy, from something that I devote my spare time and energy to. On the flip side to this, I do understand that hosting costs money, and there's plenty of other (free) sites that I can write, post pictures, mp3s, videos etc onto. It's a case of being clever about it.

I can understand why others, like yourself, who already have websites want to keep that content on sites that they maintain themselves and use as an online expression/example of what they can do and have done in the past. This is something that I consider myself regarding my own content. I syndicate my (personal/Dalian) blog across multiple sites, to make it as widely available to different communities as possible. It's rss-ed from blogger into facebook notes, for my lazy friends who can't be bothered to visit my blog. Through facebook into xiaonei, so that my students can read what I'm upto, my opinions and get some cultural exposure to a geeky British guy living and teaching in Dalian. I'm rss-ing it here so that the content is more accessible to people searching for info about Dalian, and as a secondary aim to support Alex and what he's doing. Apart from anything else, I just like to know that my stuff's being read, and It's not like I'm Chaucer, Shakespeare or Dickens, I'm not going to make money from it, so I like to see that it's benefiting somebody somehow.

I'm not suggesting or asking the community give anything back. The main thrust of the question (and not clearly stated by me) was why more people don't use DalianDalian, because as stated, it's not-for-profit, it has some cool functions, its accessible and in my opinion useful.

We've highlighted the differences, but I have to come back to the core of this question. The point about Shanghaist and ShanghaiXpat is taken, but I'm asking why it is that the (more obviously) forum has a higher level of user participation?

I'm not so interested in this quasi-popularity contest as you put it, but in seeing more use of a good tool, that even with a a couple more regular bloggers could be much more diverse and interesting. I'd like to see DalianDalian be the place to come to read and post blogs about Dalian, because there's not much by way of search that can provide that in a convenient way at the moment. Google Blog Search provides lots of TEFL and ESL teaching forums and blogs.

So it might be down to lack of familiarity with Drupal is causing a problem, just being unaware of DalianDalian, an unwillingness to syndicate their blog, laziness or resistance to change to a new platform/place. But whatever the issue, I'd like to investigate why this is and whether or not DalianDalian gets more traffic than DalianXpat, it can still be improved by more contributers.

What I'm thinking about is maybe a weekly email that includes summaries of that weeks top 5 voted blogs, and some text at the bottom saying... If you'd like to contribute, login and add your blog here.

Or it could be done more directly with an email to people who have blogs about Dalian, to see if they'd like to contribute. But maybe this is less preferable. If it was me, and I hadn't heard of the site, I might question the motives. If it was stated that DalianDalian is not-for-profit and achieves this through having no revenue, I think my doubts would be much reduced.