WordPress.com offers 24/7 support via email to anyone who signs up for a blog. Automattic views customer support as essential to building a community. Happiness leads directly to using the product more.

Few ways of getting feedback from your community:

• focus group
• usability testing
• going to events to hear what people are thinking

Nacin: “The vocal minority is a bad thing in many cases.” You shouldn’t allow them to guide the course of the community.

Google recently launched a feature in search that supports recipe metadata from publishers. WordPress.com saw an uptick in support tickets from food bloggers requesting the feature to be added.

If you’re building a community, you need to think about the needs of each facet. Designing for a monolithic majority leads to poor results.

“If I was a fresh reader to The New York Times and wanted to start following stories on X topic, where would I start?” asks Spittle. WordPress.com has an email address anyone can email to and receive a response. Nacin argues against email as a way collecting feedback because it’s unstructured and most news organizations don’t have the support staff to respond quickly.

Setting expectations with your community if you want to build a relationship with them is very important, explains Spittle. If you offer an email address anyone can send to, the expectation is that the community member will receive a response.

According to Nacin, “if you want a thriving community, it comes down to engagement. If you aren’t willing, don’t bother.”

Blogsmith, a blogging tool used internally by Aol, has a terrible commenting system. Engadget, controversially internally, switched to Disqus and saw the quality of engagement go up significantly.

Pivoting to a conversation about user experience lessons we can take from software development and apply to news websites. Nacin reflexively types in nytimes.com every time he opens a new tab. Ideally, this is the attitude of every reader. You want to be the homepage.

Question: How can news organizations shift from publishing information to inform, to publishing information to be used?

Nacin: “Readers should be more than visitors.” We need to think of more compelling reasons for them to stick around. Facebook centers the user experience around the user. Personalized recommendations increase relevancy. What if the headlines on nytimes.com were determined based on your past reading history?

Lastly, when you’re tracking data, you should define what “success” is beforehand. It’s much easier to figure out when you’ve hit it.

We’ve just launched an email newsletter for The Local Fort Greene-Clinton Hill. I hope to report on how it’s going as time goes on; we think it will be a useful tool for deepening engagement with the community.

The setup is a combination of Wufoo and MailChimp. The call to action in the C-column opens a signup form in a pop-up asking for full name and email address. When the user submits this first form, they receive a confirmation email thanking them for signing up and asking them to take a short reader survey. This survey asks for:

• What type of coverage they’re interested in or would like to help produce
• What they want to see more of from The Local
• Their address

The idea is to go Public Insight Network-style and build up a database of The Local’s readership. Right now, this data is just stored in Wufoo but we’ll eventually set up another Highrise account for the reporters to use.

Of course, all of this can be A/B tested, generates trackable data, etc. Let the experiments begin.

Every morning, the headlines are sent out at 7 am.

Happy Cog has a new commenting system on their Cognition blog. Keep your comment within 120 characters and tweet a link to the post, or write a response on your own blog and report the URL. Drives brevity and accountability. Intriguing experiment. (via Mike Monteiro)

On Friday afternoon, I had the chance to connect with Susan Mernit of Many Hats, Inc. for the very first time and Cornelius Swart of the Portland Sentinel and Portland Media Lab. I’ve been invited to work with Cornelius on the Portland Media Lab; our very first meeting is tomorrow, Monday the 15th, and I thought it would be worthwhile to talk with Susan about what they’ve learned in the several months the Public Media Collaborative has been developing in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The goal of the Public Media Collaborative is to educate local communities, non-profits, and grassroots movements on how to use a lot of the social media and publishing tools that are now available to empower people and build democracy. In Susan’s opinion, this is a bit different than the mission of the Portland Media Lab, but both Cornelius and I agree that tools training is at least a half of what we’d like the media incubator to be.

Our conversation with Susan about both projects is the first thirty minutes or so of the audio. We cover the origins of the Public Media Collaborative, what type of training it has accomplished thus far, and Susan’s community news startup of the very new future, Oakland Local. After she leaves, Cornelius and I talk a bit about ideas for the Portland Media Lab and what the future of journalism might hold in general.

As a note, I started editing the first fifteen minutes of audio before I realised how much I want to be a production engineer. If you find any major kerfuffles, let me know and I’ll update the production value.

David Cohn pegs a newsroom as a cafe where people can hang out and, through food and drink purchase, provide an alternate source of revenue for reporting. Twenty percent of every coffee you bought might go to reporting in your local community, or something like that. For Steve Outing, the newsroom as a cafe is a place for your people to connect so that you can have greater access to your community. Both of these are pieces of a bigger picture that’s been stewing in me for a couple of months; dessert and beer at the Pied Cow on Belmont last night provided a photograph to illustrate my idea.

It’s not just about using a different industry to add to reporting revenue, but rather repositioning the news organization as the information hub for the community. The newsroom as a cafe should be an 18th century salon, or space for the leading discussions of the day to take place, ferment, and spawn action.

Mark this idea as incomplete until I can start working on it. At the moment, I think it would include:

Realtime data streams about the community on the walls. Twitter, Flickr, and every other service that expresses data against geography in some regard. The reporting work done by the news organization and stringers would come in realtime as well; see the reporting as it happens. You could build an app that visualized the trending topics of the aggregate of those services.

Editorial meetings that are open to the public. Highly-engaged members of the community can come in and participate in the process to decide what gets reported on each week. All of the possibilities are generated beforehand with a kickass web app where authenticated people help identify all of the things that need to be reported on in the community (i.e. information that needs to be generated).

Workshops for community youth on hacking new tools to mash up regional data. Part of the attendance requirement would be that they then have to give a presentation back to the community on how they did it.

Equipment rental. Members can check out audio recorders or digital SLRs to cover the local city council meeting.

Chai, but not the spiced kind. Just straight up black tea, milk, and sugar.

Upgrading newsroom culture is one part of it, I believe, but the right tools have to be in place first so that participants in this new culture shift doesn’t run into barriers of frustration. I think strides can be made on both the frontend and backend of a news organization website. As a part of the user experience, comments shouldn’t require user registration but rather should be able to “sign in” with Facebook Connect or OpenID, or leave a comment with an email address to be verified once. If someone wants to add information to the discussion anonymously, I think that should be a submission form separate from the comment thread. The web is a global commons where news organizations should be facilitating intelligent conversations.

News Mixer has taken radical steps in regards to how the format of the comment, or contribution more accurately, shapes conversation. “Quips” encourage commenters to keep conversation sweet and concise, and “Questions” and “Answers” help define the quality of the article. I think it would be valuable if the community also could build on top of the information presented in an article by clarifying with their own perspective or submitting links to related context. News Mixer offers the ability to respond with questions and answers to specific paragraphs within an article; it would be sweet if someone writing a blog post could link to unique grafs within an article too as a way of building a more specific map of conversation. I also appreciate how the New York Times has “Editor’s Picks” which help distinguish signal from noise. Reporters and editors on a news website should be empowered to curate comments as a way of facilitating conversation.

Part of improving commenting will come from better tools on the administration side too. Comment moderation should be more granular, meaning that, instead of having an “Online Editor” who manages all conversations on the website, each reporter should be responsible for owning the full spectrum of discussion about their beat. WordPress, a publishing platform I’m quite familiar with, only one email notification option. Instead, reporters should be the ones approving new comments. In addition, it would be sweet to have a commenting system that recorded and presented more information about the respondent, including the number of times they had already left a comment, the topics they most commonly leave comments on, and any profile or background information either from what they’ve entered in the system or their Facebook Profile. Reporters and editors would be able to leave private notes about the commenters for future discussion moderation, and privately rate the perceived “quality” of the contribution. All of this information about the community’s contributions would be stored in a CRM database to provide value to the reporting process too.

There’s a lot of space for cool improvements in commenting systems. It’s just about building it in iterations and then experimenting.