There's much more to come on this in the coming months, but we're going to be making some major changes to how we engage our readers on bakersfield.com and elsewhere in what we call the Bakosphere ("Where Bakersfield and the Web collide").

Those changes include a next-generation Opinion site to come that will require real names to post and comment, new strategies with our popular bakersfield.com blogs, and more engagement with local people outside of our network of websites.

You can read more in the BdotCOM blog on bakersfield.com, where reaction understandably has has been mixed.