Idea: make it easy for readers to submit their comment as a guest piece based on its length (e.g. suggestion interface after it passes). Like YouTube offers video responses, dedicated community members should be able to work their way into more empowered publishing positions.
The Blogfather. Awesome Willamette Week profile of Matt Haughey, founder of MetaFilter.
Your Community Is Your Best Feature. Gina Trapani’s talk at CodeConf.
Let’s just say it’s very similar to what I’ve done in the past, but in a brand new context.
‘Color’ is Primal and Kind of Brilliant. I was hating last night too, but Cody nails it.
A post on Xark! today discusses why newspaper website comments suck and what might be done to “unsuck” them. The synthesis of why they suck is that newspapers don’t allocate enough time or staff resources to participating in the conversation and, when they do, newspapers take the wrong approach to community management. In short, there is generally a lot of room for improvement.
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.
From an email conversation earlier today, I think it would be sweet if News Mixer, a Knight-funded open source commenting project built on Django, had the ability to generate a unique, static URL for any bit of content in the content management system. I really like the things that News Mixer is doing to take commenting forward because, all too often with the “normal” types of threads, the diamonds are lost in the rough (especially when the comments number in the hundreds and thousands). News Mixer is experimenting with the radical changes necessary for comments to be useful again. Being able to generate a unique URL to a paragraph or sentence would allow the community to respond on their own blogs in direct response (and make trackbacks more granular).
On another note, I believe we interviewed Rich Gordon for tomorrow’s edition of This Week in CoPress. I was out in the field doing research, but am definitely looking forward to hearing about his future plans for the project.
Steve Mital, Sustainability Director for the University of Oregon, recently sent a call for ideas to help guide a Sustainability Conference tentatively planned for the 23rd and 24th of October, 2008. It is being organized by Sustainability Directors at Portland State University, Oregon State University, and the University of Oregon, and the second day will reportedly be “entirely devoted to students and sustainability.” My suggestions for the conference, written in full on the Oregon Direct Action blog, revolve around these ideas:
