DON' DEW IT.

WHATCHES EWE DOES BIG BREOTHER.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Just what the internet needs, yet another www.narcissisticidiocy.com web site.

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.

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.

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!