Thanks for the comments.. sometimes one gets so close to something, you hardly know what to say.
PublicSquare helps the little guy publish like Big Media, by getting the audience involved! Is the next Thomas Freidman or WIlliam Shawn lurking in your audience, waiting to be discovered?
oops-- already too many obscure references.
Okay, geographicaly dispersed, asyncronous collaboration tool...
bleah.
Outgrown your blog? Hate yoru CMS? Try PublicSquare, and get wrting!
sounds like I'm selling detergent.
One thing we tried to do as often as possible was not reinvent the wheel. Lars took the intiative to contact Shopify, and they let us use their templating language, Liquid. This allows users to enjoy the ability to fully customize their look and feel (our attempted at all-css design already chronicled in Are We There Yet).
One big lesson (in fact a life lesson): when you think something is dumb, try doing it yourself with the same contraints as the creator.
You'll learn.
"I too have had the sense that much of the discussion in the IA/Design community was dangerously close to a conference of virgins talking about sex."
So: let me show you some decisions we made that were different form CMS's and Blogs and all that. (Oh, these screenshots represent a moment in time; things will look differently when we launch.)
I remember a long time ago reading about the New Yorker's slushpile. This is a place where they put all the unsolicited manuscripts, and then once and while they'd send an intern in to dig through them and find the next John Updike. Well, in PS we made the slushpile public, and now teh audience can not only see an easy path to write for a given magazine, but they can also comment on ideas and rate them. This saves editors a lot fo time, and keeps them in touch wiht the reader base.
What's nice about ratings and comments, is that sometimes a contraversial story idea will look lackluster in the ratings, because the positives and negatives cancel eachother out. But if you see a ton of comments on an idea, you the editor know to take a closer look. Contraversy is good for communities, and good for magazine sales/pageviews.
BTW, I'm declaring a spell-check free zone while I'm trying to get these concepts out of my head. Just letting you know.
Our dashboard is designed for the editorial staff: its designed to tell you where all the stories are in the process, and if there is anything you have to attend to. Too many dashboards just give you some navigation you have anyhow in the tabs-- what's the point? Except they don't know what to put on this page.
Note also the status messsages are not just custom to the publication; they are free-form text. Use them as you need, then color them red, yellow or green ( I think most folks know what those colors are all about!)
Okay, more in a bit....
When I describe it, I say
"PublicSquare is a collaborative publishing platform."
But of course that is a bit jargony. It's kinda basecamp meets blogger. Most blogtools don't do what small publications need, becuase they don't support workflow, scheduling, maintence of many staff memebers and even more contributors.
But CMS's are confusing huge messy monsters. I'm a bit nerveous to compare PS to them. I've tried Mambo, and jamba, and many others -- I used drupal for quite awhile-- and PublicSquare is just way more lightweight, easier to use, easier to get started. I htink it's because it's designed for one problem,a nd unlike the others I mentioned, it's really not made to be used for everything. It's not a blogging platform, nor is it for a giant corporation to run its intranet on. Not to say you couldn't, but we're trying to avoid the whole built-for-everybody-so-nobody-is-happy problem.
Okay, let me walk you thorugh a couple of the core concepts....
Magazines need to open their doors to their readers. Instead of thinking of writers and readers as two separate communities, magazines need to realize that they really only have one community: the people who give a shit about their magazine.
Hello blog readers. I've noticed there are a bit more of you lately since I've been baring my soul and all that, so I thought maybe I'd try to take advantage of you. I'm rushing to put together the PublicSquare website, that will introduce folks to Cuina Media's first product. I used thinkature (a really cool ap.. no, a really cool WEB 2.0 ap) to do a loosey-goosey IA. Now for the part where I make you work:
So in otherwords, maybe you-all can help me figure out how to explain this nifty thing to the public, and why it is different. Up for it?