Letters to the Editor
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doesn't work with safari
Survey doesn't work with safari (10.3 OS X, latest safari update, cookies enabled but not shared between sites.)
You should allow readers to vote on which letters to the editor are voted "editor's choice" (of course, this would necessitate renaming "editor's choice.") Right now, it works pretty well, but I would prefer that the editors not be in charge of deciding whose letters are better than others.
Let us decide!
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I have some suggestions...
Reader response to articles is a great new feature. You can inprove it by making the responses threaded (like slashdot), that way the flow of response is not only reader to article, but reader to author, and reader to reader. Find a way to limit the threads so they don't go off in all directions. Right now the reader response is interesting, but with 100 responses to sort through it gets cumbersome.
You could also consider allowing readers to start their own blog under the Salon.com masthead. Blog content with high readership can be ported over to the salon site.
Consider adding more media types to articles. Instead of relying on an illustration and some copy, adding video and photo galleries and audio samples etc... could help a story.
Vote for the article we want: Users submit article concepts. These are narrowed down to one through polling/voting. Salon hires the appropriate writer to pursue the concept.
Thanks for even asking. Most news sources don't even have any way of responding at all and no interaction with it's readership.
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Selecting or rating content
Regarding another comment, I find the current editors choice system to work well for finding some good letters quickly. Editors are a natural choice to select for quality writing; that is a component of their job. Trading the editors choice feature for a readers choice feature doesn't appeal to me, perhaps partly because I've seen the results of reader moderation at slashdot.org. However, if there is sufficient interest in readers choice ratings, how about having both editors and readers choice selections?
On an earlier item about editors choice, I am with the many people who don't believe "signing" letters with a full name should have a bearing on whether or not a letter is selected. The content is what matters, and being able to see other letters written by the same author tells me far more than knowing the name of a stranger who I will probably never meet. For that reason, I can see weighing whether a letter is anonymous as a factor, but not whether the author uses their actual name, a fake but real looking name, or a handle.
Thanks for the survey, which I did take. It did only take a few minutes. A site like described in the survey sounds interesting, but my key concern with it would be how one can quickly find the best content. Having tried Table Talk and having limited time, I know I won't be a frequent visitor to an open forum that doesn't have features to separate thought provoking content from background noise.
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*rollseyes*
Just what the internet needs, yet another www.narcissisticidiocy.com web site.
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This is a good idea
Lots of people have interesting things to say, but very few people have enough to say that I'll make their individual blog a regular destination. How many "sorry I haven't been updating my blog" blog posts have you seen?
Various kinds of aggregation are part of the solution to that problem, but some editorial filtering would really improve the aggregate. Also, I think a focus on slightly longer pieces would bring out a lot of cool stuff. On a blog, my attention starts to wander after a few paragraphs, but if I know beforehand that I'm going for something longer, and if I know someone is filtering out the dreck for me, I'm much more inclined to read an essay.
The editing doesn't have to be terribly labor intensive; some kind of community moderation would be great by itself.
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Neither does the survey work with Linux + Firefox
My first suggestion is sticking with standards so that it doesn't matter what technology your customers use to access your product.
But really, I've been disappointed with Salon since the UI redesign. I feel that I get less information when I land on the home page. Too much real estate is wasted and repeated. I find that I'm spending a lot less time on the Salon website than I used to.
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Letters On One Page Please
I wish I could get all the "Letters" following an article onto one "Print" page so I could put them on my Pocket PC and read them during boring meetings. If there is a way to do that already, please let me know. Thanks!
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salon interactive suggestions
Give the writer/readers a topic for each month. See www.witchvox.com for an example of how this works, although that is most of their content, rather than a news website.
Question - do the writer/readers own their own content or does it become the property of Salon.com by virtue of being published there?
Pay the writer/readers a tiny honorarium or some other compensation through a page view or other rating system, or facilitate a voluntary pay pal donation system for the writer/readers.
Use a visual map of the general topics covered by the writer/readers to allow a way to see the whole picture and how the topics link together. See Etsy.com for an example of how this works, use the search by color or one of the other visual maps of the content on the site.
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Salon Gets (Moar) Inner Active
DON' DEW IT.
WHATCHES EWE DOES BIG BREOTHER.
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Brainstorm
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. :-)