Ross Notes

Previous drafts of this entry tried to mix some complaints about Pennlive Weblogs with my vision for how it could be done right. It felt uneven because I really only had one substantial complaint (a closed sign-up system? bleh). I’ve cut that part out.

So, here is the Ross Karchner version of how an old media/new media combination (in this case, The Patriot News and Pennlive.com) can best nurture community participation. It centers on two things: a centralized “Respond & Share” tool, and an editorial aggregator.

**Respond & Share**

Right now, if you want to respond to an article, you can:

* Comment in the free-form, topic-organized message board.
* Email the author privately.
* Write a letter to the editor.
* Post to a blog somewhere else, or on Pennlive if you are one of The Chosen.

The first three things are all done in different parts of Pennlive, and no support is offered for the fourth. Lets put them all in one place, and add some new toys.

Every article will have a link to a “Respond & Share” page, where from a single interface you can:

* Post blog-style per article responses (comments).
* Send private respones to authors (eliminating the need to publish authors email addresses).
* Post public or private letters to the editor (of which some will be published in print, but *all of the public letters should be available online*)
* Post your thoughts to a Pennlive-hosted blog (creating that users blog in the process if it doesn’t already exist) or external blog.
* Share an article with friends via email.
* “clip” an article for easy access later.

It also has to be easy for users to post new blog entries and letters to the editor that aren’t associated with existing articles.

What about the newspaper? Every print article will have a “Respond & Share” code at the end that you can enter in a little box at Pennlive to jump to all the tools listed above.

**We have a thousand bloggers, now what?**

Hey, that’s cool, but in order for all that writing to be useful and accessible it needs to feed into an editorial aggregator. This means that a human editor will review the raw set of posts and decide what gets featured on what sections of the site. Over time, editors will learn that some bloggers are reliably good enough that they shouldn’t require manual review, and some are reliably useless. Editors will be able to set up email-style rules to automate those situations.

While your at it, let the editors add outside feeds to the aggregator.

I’m not going to pretend all that is particularly original or earth shattering, but I’d like to see someone build it.

What would you add?