- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Ok, I'm just brainstorming a bit, so bear with me.
The first thought I had was that of Slashdot's moderation feature which seems to work fairly well for a user-controlled system. Reading one of the other articles about editorial picks and how it doesn't help much when looking at a dozen pages consisting of hundreds of letters, this kind of system would tend to help the casual user but in practice, it tends to hurt someone looking for a letter that makes a specific point.
The thought crossed my mind about OKCupid.com and the way you can create your own surveys -- in brief, each question can affect the score on up to 4 variables of your choice, and categories can be created by dividing the resulting scores on each variable into ranges. Thus, with 2 variables split at some specific value, you get 4 categories; with 3 variables, it's 8 categories; 2 variables split 2 ways and 1 variable split 3 ways yields 12 categories.
Perhaps editorial staff can clump letters into categories. Kind of a twisted threaded discussion method where editors pick the threads. By summarizing the letters, you can divine variables like "amount letter agrees with opinions of article", "hystericalness" (ok, maybe "intensity") and "writing quality" as well as give a brief summary of the points covered as keywords/key-phrases -- "brainstorming", "suggestions", "Slashdot", etc.
Ideally -- and judging by strings of letters I've read, in all likelihood -- the letters clump into common categories. Editors can define the categories and organize the letters that way, or perhaps people can take a "survey" to let them define their own categories and let the letters be filtered into various categories. It might even be good to let some letters appear in more than one category -- for instance, a letter might be in response to another letter, but its content would put it in a category.
It might even work to start by showing a few letters at the centers of various large categories and let people hone their search -- often I'm looking to find if someone has already expressed my ideas. Perhaps links like, "show me letters that disagree more with the opinion in the article" or "show me letters that deal with brainstorming".
For that matter, the editors can have some kind of priority about setting categories, but the readers can nudge variables and create their own keywords/key-phrases. From there, these categorizations can be ranked by popularity and by editorial opinion -- a category that's both used frequently and identified as "high quality" by editors would be among the highest-ranked categories, giving readers a fertile starting point.
A system like this might equally apply to a self-publishing journalism site. Perhaps adding variables like "quality of citations", or "political bias" would help too.
That would be pretty cool: what if the editorial staff at Salon were bolstered to handle many submissions and work to define the broad strokes of categorization for us so we can build our own home page?
Now just watch Google release a beta of exactly what I'm talking about next week. :-)
