Hang on. What’s all this? Well ‘Blogging’ is finally about to arrive at Salford’s famous old rugby club.

Now you are possibly of the camp that know and embrace the theory of everybody has an opinion and a right to state that opinion no matter how offensive it may be. Now as marvelous an ideal that may be, it really isn’t practical for a professional sports club where emotions sometimes run high.

We were one of the last remaining sports clubs in the UK with a message forum and to be honest, other clubs thought we were a smidgen mad. “It’s a lawsuit” waiting to happen seemed to be the cry and eventually we had to agree. The net has matured and no longer are clubs in a position to allow potential libellous comments pass them by in this age of litigation. So at the end of last season after three very successful years, we pulled the shutters down on EVE, our message forum, and personally I breathed a sigh of mini-relief in a way.

Being at the mercy of any potential keyboard warrior from any club, especially with the season we were having, meant extra vigilance, especially on a match night to make sure no errant posts snuck through in the early post pub/club hours.

That left us with a dilemma and one that I believe this new section will go some way to resolving. We’re a family club - a close-knit bunch and the last thing we want with the move on the horizon is to lose touch with the people who have stuck by us through thin and thin. So here come the blogs - somewhere a little less formal to hang out and read opinion and also get a little more familiar with the people who work here.

To host them we have registered a new domain as the more beady-eyed may already have noticed, and this is something we hope to grow as sime marches by. Over the next few weeks more staff will join in as well as celebrity faces, some more unexpected than others. Most importantly perhaps we have given voice over to the fans. For starters a couple of key faces from Forever Reds have been approached and you can already read King of the Shed’s first musing but we are by no means against taking more views on board. All we ask is that they are considered, thoughtful viewpoints, spoken from the heart, but remembering what may be a throwaway statement to you could damge the club in a big way.

We are tweaking the look and technology behind the current www.reds.co.uk site as well and pretty soon posts from these blogs will appear in truncated form on there, to make it easier to spot when something new is worth reading. It would have been nice to get all this in place for one mega launch but as ever the clockhas caught me up and it’s kick off time, so watch this space.

Along the sides we have gathered local RSS feeds into the one page, I believe making this page the essential spot on the internet to find out what the press are saying about us. It will also be a place where you can find out any little useful bits of information that our various departments are up to. We’ll also be uploading all our images week in week out to our new Flickr resource and you’ll see them appear here. You can even post the articles on here to your Facebook acocunt or take part in regular polls. Personally i think it will be ace

If only blogs were the only thing I had to talk about it may not be so bad, but it’s half past midnight and time for my beauty sleep now so next time I’ll fill you in on my new radio show on Salford City Radio (Weds 6-7 94.4FM time fans!) and what you can expact from that.

I hope you enjoy what we are about to try here. As ever, we like to think we are up there at the forefront of net technolgy when it comes to sports clubs online.

Thanks for listening to the ramble.

Paul