This is what getting Dugg looks like. I've seen other graphs-- getting Dugg appears to be more pain than value, unless you are monetized out the wazoo on CPM advertising. You are a a content site, everyone comes to look at that one bit of content, then leaves never to return. Two weeks later, the large scary hosting bill comes.

Meanwhile, you pick up a handful of new readers, but the needle doesn't really move. There have been a number of articles about how StumbleUpon delivers the goods over time far better than Digg, but not often they point out that StumbleUpon, unlike Digg doesn't usually cost you money because the increased traffic is spread out over time, so server boost required. I suppose your could make a viable business out of it if you could get Dugg regualrly, thus the "digg this" widgets. I wonder how often that works for folks who aren't the New York Times.

That said, we've come up with a policy at PublicSquare where we don't charge you for getting Dugg -- a one day spike doesn't change your costs. No one should have to suffer just because they get popular for a day.

From the brilliant blog.pmarca.com

I have removed all comments. I just don't have time to provide the level of moderation needed to ensure a respectful and relevant conversation.

And why should he have to? Why not use reputation and flagging to allow the community to moderate itself? I hate to see yet another example of "conversational media" go broadcast only just because we have immature tools. Time to switch to PublicSquare

Redcanary is the latest site to move to PublicSquare. It's gorgeous, and truly a showcase of what you can do if you roll up your sleeves and get in the templates... plus it's chock-full of wonderful information for tech professionals! Check it out!

1. Publishing does not belong to publishers. It's a fundamental activity that belongs to human life; it's communication. One-to-many has irreplaceable value. Blogs are published diaries, newspapers are there to tell you what's happening in the world, magazines to distract, entertain, educate. But in between those extremes we have a rich, fertile land full of publishing.
   • Businesses publish. They have to buy coffee, and they have to publish. Newsletters, comapny reports, status updates, brochures. You have to communicate to your customers and unless you plan to call each one up by phone, you are going to publish.
   • Professional organizations publish. You gather with other nurses, or IA's, or engineers, or accountants to get better at your job, and the way you do that is to share what you've learned. From peer-reviewed papers to emailing lists, teh professional organization exists most to exchange knowledge.
   • Hobbyists publish. There is no delight on this earth that is as good as when its shared. Do you love fishing, knitting, lawn bowling, origami... doesn't matter, your love is always better when you share it. Like the professional organization, everyone strives to get better but now you are broadcasting out of personal pride.
   • Enthusiasts Publish. From spec miatas to organic produce, everyone has some funny little thing that lights them up inside. And those people can't stop looking to read more about it, and eventually when they run out, they start sharing what they know. Because its that great. And everyone should know its that great.
   • Schools- all school publish, from 'zines to newspapers. It's good for the kids.
   • Localities- The Mountain View Voice is a newspaper, but still rooted in its hood more than the world, the Barron Neighborhood Association is a jumped up newsletter and every coop seems to have their own "what's happening" publication.

2. Blogging is less satisfying *and* less effective than being with a group. I had coffee with Shel the other day, and he admitted that many bloggers he know were seeing their numbers go flat or drop. But groups have always out performed individuals, no matter how august the individual. Take my baby, Boxes and Arrows. The (arguably) four most prestigious IA's can't touch B&A's numbers.

   (Note: mapped it a second time with peterme, and he's in the pack with the rest of us little fellows.)

   And the same holds true for A List Apart and its very famous founder, Jeffrey Zeldman
   

   It would be silly of me to even bother mapping a mommyblogger to parent soup or babycenter. Groups do better. Every member is also a writer, a fan, a marketeer a copyeditor a bugtracker-- there is power in the people, and more people more power.
   

3. 90% of publishers are currently ignored. I'd like to argue that the vast majority of publishers are having to jury-rig the current set of tools to their use. Some are hacking blog tools, some hire a programmer to decrappify open source, others try to make Dreamweaver play nice with their team. Many cobble something together: basecamp+wordpress+dreamweaver+a wiki. If the vast majority of publishers are publishing as a secondary activity with other people, how come the tools so rarely reflect this? They are hard to use, expensive, missing features... it's a mess. There should be a happy place between typepad and interwoven. And yet... and yet.

4. The online world of publishing has segmented into the towers and the hoards. The towers are impermeable; from the small business's website down the street to the New York Times herself, the readers are ghettoized into forums where they content with chaos. But what is the alternative?
   Digg? Take a look at yesterday's headlines: money making scams and insults. Is this the shining future of citizen journalism?

   There is a rising backlash against the lack of trustworthiness found in current citizen journalism; i.e. bloggers. Previous posts capture some of the frustration against un-fact-checked, biased, half-truthed, corporate shills and the rest of the rubble that makes ordinary people's lives actually worse. I've also blogged about the mess anonymous comments and posts can create from spam to trolls to actual cyberstalking. It's time for responsibility and reputation.

   What if there is a middle group? What if we can combine editorial insight with the collective wisdom fo the crowds? Do these two really have to be opposed? I think the future will take the best of old media and new, and create a far more participatory and engaging BUT trustworthy generation of publication, and in the best scenario that will also include Karl's Printshop down the street allowing his customers to give each other advice on how to make chapbooks and posters.

5. Finally, and this is the most difficult for me to articulate, I believe a new economy must emerge to support these folks. Maybe Karl the printshop is good for awhile longer yet, and small businesses like him can consider their publishing a cost of doing business or even a loyalty play. But the bloggers are begging for a way to make a buck doing the thing they love, the thing that eats up their every waking hour. The enthusiasts, the hobbyists, the schools and the rest may not have much hope for making a living doing this anymore than folks who help a garage sale once a year thought they'd go pro before ebay showed up. They deserve to make a living doing the thing they love best. I think we all deserve that.
   

That was the subject line of an email that came ot me this morning from pal Brad: "Mario Batali and Michael Bauer need Public Square." If you know what a crazed foodie I am, you know that hit home.

Reading Batali takes on bloggers

I am in Batali's camp when it comes to anonymous comments by unknown parties. I've taken many hits on my blog from people who accuse me of certain things, and it's hard to know how to respond. However, if someone who uses his or her name, I take the comments more seriously.

Well yes, we can help with that. Personally I think anonymous comments should just be stricken form the web-- bloggers shouldn't permit them. It allows for drive-bys and *ssholes to not even have to raise a finger in the effort of perpetuating their drivel. Moreover, a content reputation system makes it easier for tired bloggers and publishers to enlist the help of the readership to weed out the armchair critics.

Great article The WCM Renaissance(pdf), and particularly gratifying is this quote:

Web 2.0 is also exposing cracks in WCM space. Much the same way that WCM specialists accuse ECM vendors of "not getting it," many WCM tools that only recently added blog and wiki functionality suffer from complicated interfaces, unfriendly URLs, and other un-Web 2.0 shortcomings.

In particular, the prevalence of sexy Ajax interfaces on the public web makes traditional WCM contributor interfaces seem very outdated. Vendors point out that re-engineering their product UIs is not a trivial matter.

Growing interest in user-generated content (UGC) has also created architectural challenges for integrated WCM packages the same way that the rise of the web caught many document management vendors flat-footed. In enterprise settings, most web-content management services and repositories live in a protected zone behind the firewall, and don't naturally lend themselves to authors coming in from the public web.

To be sure, most enterprise customers don't know yet what it means to "manage" user-generated content, and important questions are stalling some initiatives. Should we put UGC through an approval workflow? Do we need to archive it? Do we expose our internal classification scheme so we can cross-reference internal and user content? And so on.

I couldn't have paid someone to better explain the PublicSquare approach. USG is a gruesome acronym, mind you, but the idea is crucial: publish with your audience, not at them.

The publications that willingly erase the line between "them" and "us" will charge ahead. While we see plenty fo pure-play user media companies, such as YouTube, and some cautiously inviting the audience to help out like US Today's digg-like new features, I wonder where the future hybrids are coming from? When will we see a reader byline on the New York Times? When does the audience get to help write and edit? When do the sandboxes start to share sand? okay, bad metaphor, but still..

in any case, I may not know when, but I can tell you how: it's PublicSquare. We have built a system -- you see it now on Boxes and Arrows and on Found|Read -- that allows the readers to write. Any smart comment becomes a story acorn, any blog post can be trackbacked into the idea pile! then off to a happy editorial process where it can be fact checked and grammatically corrected and become digestible by humans like you and me. And we did it with a sexy Ajax interface.

I don't want to sell you; don't get me wrong.

I want to gloat.

We built something cool.

Matt haughey rules my world. From Some Community Tips for 2007 on fortuitous

If I had to give a reason why most newspaper blogs are filled with cranky screeds posted anonymously, I'd have to say having a generic blank comment form is key. Most every community that I contribute to offers a comprehensive user profile/history page, letting members customize to their hearts content and allow their profile to reflect their personality. When I think of mainstream news, TV, and newspaper sites trying to solicit comments from readers, I've yet to find something close to even a basic community site. The New York Times requires me to register to read most stories, but their blog system gives me a blank generic comment form when I want to comment on a blog post.

Another reason I love what I do.

Monday I listened ot a pretty terrific forum, a radio program on my local PBS station. Because their site behaves in a way I can best describe as erratic, here are the relevant links:

The show discusses the lure of "the dark side" with Philip Zimbardo. What makes good people do bad things? Where is the line between good and evil, and where does this line become blurred? Can we curb this seduction to commit immoral deeds?

Philip Zimbardo , professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University, creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the author of "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil"

Listen (RealMedia stream)

Download (MP3)(Windows: right-click and choose "Save Target As." Mac: hold Ctrl, click link, and choose "Save As.")

I've long been fascinated by the Stanford Prison Studies, and the effect they had on research, but more so on the learnings they gathered so very quickly and so very deeply. In this talk, one thing I couldn't help but fixate upon was the details-- his choice of military-style outfits for the guards, including reflective sunglasses, or the hospital-gown style uniforms for the prisoners.

Because I spend most of my time considering which features affect community behavior, I wondered what is the online equivalent? What are those aspects of the fixtures of our design that create or dissuade evil (and how could it have affected the situation that led to Kathy Sierra's life threats) Is anonymity on the web something we want to discourage? How can we continue on without flagging (which obviously PublicSquare has.) I've been told that people feel more kindly to me and respond more gently when my avatar includes my baby. How can photos change our communications? Does a icon carry the same weight as a photo, does a photo carry the same weight as a photo of a face?

Good and evil are not something we as designers think of all that often. In fact, fairly often we hand wave and point to Leni Riefenstahl as our icon of beauty in the face of evil (beauty as the face of evil?). But we are not just recorders of life who can choose to do so with or without style, we are the architects of life, just as much as architects of buildings or urban planners.

I think every design choice in PublicSquare is built with conscious or unconscious implications on user behavior. You are responsible for your actions. Your bio carries every comment, every story you write. Your photo hangs out next to your words, as does your reputation. The reputation on each comment reflects passer-by's reactions. People don't approve when you make a snarky comment, or even when spelling errors are publicly mocked. The community decides what's acceptable and what's not, if you give them the tools to do so.

I wonder what tools create abuses of power. The theory in Zimbardo's book is most people have the capacity of evil within them, they just need the right situation to bring it out.

We can't hand wave if there is even a slim chance he is right.

If we design community spaces, we must design with community mores, be it a small community or the community of man.

Photo_031207_001
Originally uploaded by Box and Arrow.

Joking aside, thanks to Carrie, Jeffrey and Chris for helping me fold last-minute fliers!

life as a Boxes and Arrows editor...

Well, with that forthcoming title, I thought I'd see if there are any students out there, bursting with ambition and seeking mentorship who'd like to some design work for PS as an intern. We have other needs also, so if you have many talents ... email me @ cwodtke here(this domain) and we can chat....

We're trying to figure out how to fill up PS with cool looking templates, considering we have no dough to spend. I'm not a huge fan of contests (hmm, wonder why...) so I thought I'd ask you folks what you think motivates people to offer their design chops up for free?

A chance at a shuffle?
Being listed prominately?
A chance at advice on their work?
Just the chance to have their unadulterated work used?

I'm curious, and puzzled.

WE ARE LIVE!

PublicSquare

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.

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.

It's designed for
• Small teams
• Overworked
• understaffed
• underpaid
• Large numbers of authors/contributors
• passionate
• made up mostly of the audience
• Edited content
• advertiser or classified suported

Okay, let me walk you thorugh a couple of the core concepts....

8020 Publishing

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:

1. What did I forget
2. and can you please critique my writing, as I produce it?

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?