The conversation in the blogosphere is — I sincerely hope — about to change.
– Jane Hamsher, And the Big Announcement Is…, Firedoglake, July 2008
I’ve spent a bunch of time at Firedoglake’s Oxdown Gazette this last week, regularly checking the home page and recommended stories, commenting here and there, as well as making eight posts of my own starting with Hiiii (waves) — enough to form some definite impressions. So I thought it would be interesting to share them and see what others have to say.
Different people are on Oxdown for different reasons; so let me start with a bit about my perspective. I’m currently engaging in a lot of online activism while working on a book about social networks (professional bio here). I started my blog Liminal States last year with a goal of mashing up discussions about computer security and software engineering, social networks, politics, critical theory, psytrance, and personal stuff. As an activist, though, it’s important to have a base in the progressive blogosphere as well; with Get FISA Right, for example, OpenLeft played a critical role. My style is very collaborative, and a community-oriented site like Oxdown has a lot of appeal; and so for the Voter Suppression Wiki I decided to experiment with cross-posting there as well as Pam’s House Blend.
My first reactions in terms of the user experience reading and posting are almost completely positive. I like the layout, and cross-posting from my own blog (also Wordpress-based) is easy. The summaries make the front page or individuals’ diaries very readable. Also, I find the way FDL displays comments very effective for longer threads involving multile conversations — the "reply-chaining" is done quite nicely — and that’s useful here as well. Of course I have a few quibbles (why isn’t the <center> HTML attribute allowed?) but generally they’re pretty minor.
Oxdown doesn’t disclose the algorithm they use for recommendations,* but it seems to do a pretty good job of getting a wide array of voices while keeping quality high. Of the ten articles, there are usually at least one or two by Teddy Partridge or other high profile FDL-ers, but the majority are from names I don’t recognize. The front-page stories, by contrast, are largely by Ari, along with a handful from community members — including some realllly big names, such as Zack Exley’s cross-post of The New Organizers.** My guess is that this ratio will change over time as the flow of stories from the community increases; right now, Ari’s putting waaaaay more time into than anybody else.
FDL’s home page very prominently features the recommended diaries, which could potentially lead to a lot of traffic — one of Oxdown’s biggest potential advantages. Lemme tell you, when DaveJ’s Announcing the Election Protection Wiki and my TWO wikis, saving democracy? were both up there on Monday, we were stoked. FDL gets over 100,000 visitors a day, so this is potentially a big deal — even the vast majority who don’t click on either link now know that there’s an Election Protection Wiki and another wiki as well that also has something to do with democracy.*** Talk about getting our message out …
I still don’t have a feel for what kinds of stories are most likely to be recommended. FDL as a whole is often very action-oriented, and the vibrant discussion on Zack’s post reflected that; as I write this, TobyWollin’s Urban Gardening is on the recommended list. On the other hand, most of the recommended diaries seem to be news summaries and analyses: of Republican politicians and tactics, the bailout, and so on. My own action-oriented posts haven’t in general gotten a lot of traction with recommenders; two of them did make it to the recommended list, but in both cases I had sent links to several friends and asked them to rec, so this doesn’t necessarily reflect the broader community’s opinion. Of course, it’s hard to know how much to read into this; it might just reflect me being an unknown quantity on FDL, and not yet having had a chance to participate all that much on others’ threads. We shall see.
Unsurprisingly, mixed in with these overall positive impressions, there are also a few areas for improvement. An obvious one is the lack of a WYSIWYG editor. Another is the rather mystifying decision to close comments on a diaries after a couple of days. Some conversations flow more slowly; and it often takes a while for links to percolate through the blogosphere. By the time a lot of people saw to my request for input on Meet the Bloggers on FDL, it was too late for them to comment here. Maybe there’s something I’m missing, but I’m not sure what purpose is served by shutting off conversation.
There’s also a problem with how diaries look when you post them on Facebook. In Wordpress’ default configurations, Facebook typically does a surprisingly good job of extracting useful text to post — the first paragraph or a quote. For Oxdown diaries, posted items just say "Just another Firedoglake weblog". (Post it yourself to find out!) As Kevin Bondelli’s Generational Differences in Online Political Engagement on Future Majority discusses, Facebook is increasingly important not only a notification mechanism but a discussion mechanism. FDL already shows more awareness of Facebook than any other big progressive blog I know, with one-click access to people’s Facebook profiles; it would be great for Oxdown to build on this.
Finally, there’s the lack of trackbacks. Trackbacks are a way of automatically notifying any pages that you’ve linked to in the story that hey, somebody’s talking about you. Take Kevin Bondelli, for example; I have no idea whether he reads Oxdown, so unless I take the time to track down contact information for him and send him mail that gets past spam filters, he might never know that I just referenced his article. Trackbacks automate that. And for those like me who approach blogs as narrative, trackbacks are also valuable for weaving together different threads of long-running, interlocking stories — the comment stream here is a good example. So it would be really valuable to provide this functionality.
Hopefully these last three paragraphs focusing on areas for improvement haven’t given the wrong impression — stuff like this is only to be expected for something as new as Oxdown. What’s encouraging is that all of them seem likely to be easy to address if others also see them as important. Oxdown has a real advantage in building on top of the solid Wordpress platform, rather than rolling their own the way Soapblox had to a few years ago, and so they’re likely to be able to make changes relatively easily.
So on the whole, at least from the perspective of my first week, things look very good for Oxdown Gazette: I had a good first experience, it’s a solid platform, and (probably most importantly) the big carrot of being able to get a link from FDL’s home page is indeed accessible to the community. Of course, it’s early days yet, but it seems to me that the initial results are very promising.
What do others think?
jon
originally posted on Liminal States
* their FAQ makes the "security-through-obscurity" argument that this would lead to people gaming the system
** one of my posts was front-paged, which somewhat strangely seemed to take it out of eligibility for appearing on either the recommended list (and hence FDL) or the "recent diaries" on the right.
*** In retrospect, I probably should have put something about Voter Suppression Wiki in the title as well; in advertising terms, why pass up a chance for free brand impressions? Ah well, live and learn.
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Jon Thank you for this
My pleasure, Ari, and thanks for all the hard work you’ve been doing!
I like Oxdown. My posts reflect my interests, which I know are shared here, and permit me to expand on those areas where I have some expertise or special interests.
Thanks for this, Jon. Your comment about titling really struck home for me — folks will learn that the title, or headline, drives a lot of traffic and, thus, recommends. Hope folks get past the early sense of clicking on authors’ names they recognize (from FDL). Titling diaries in a way that intrigues readers enough to open them, read them, and then recommend them is something we’ve learned from Digg, and I think it’s just as important over here at Oxdown Gazette.
Again, I appreciate your putting this up.
Teddy, what would suggest to be more effective re “Your comment about titling really struck home for me — folks will learn that the title, or headline, drives a lot of traffic and, thus, recommends”
I do my damndest trying to educate/inform others and get beyond what the mass media is hyping on the ‘financial crisis’ -as well as being accurate and not just ranting- but comments are very few and far between(not to mention ‘recommends’).
I’ve no idea if I’m accomplishing my goals of clarifying what is going on and motivating others to voice their outrage/frustrations to those who supposedly lead us.
Teddy, good point about the analogy to digg titles (and summaries, too). The way I think of it is that readers have a virtually-infinite choice of things to read; what will entice them to check this one out?
Something else to keep in mind with titles is that their importance in Google searches. My brother Gregory K was presenting at a recent kidslit blogging conference and the woman introducing him mentioned that his talk the previous year on “choosing good titles” had led to her getting an editor. Afterwards Greg told me that she was the fifth person so far who had a similar experience … so yeah, this stuff matters.
ubetchaiam, yeah, it can be really hard to pull in readers (let alone commenters/recommenders) — especially when you’re writing about a subject that so many others are covering. things often default to a “rich get richer” situation, where the well-known posters get a lot of comments and recs, and so new readers naturally check those posts first. one way around this is to develop a niche, something that you in particular are known for — so for example, I post a lot about different aspects of social network activism, and over time people interested in that will hopefully start to recognize my name.
Specifically with titles, it’s like any other kinds of headline writing: you need to convey the key information, and at the same time stand out from the crowd. one thing I do a lot is look at other titles on the rec list, and think about which ones I particularly like — and why. The full title of TobyWollin’s post I linked to above is a good one: “Urban gardening, or, how to survive when you aren’t a homeowner and don’t have a lawn to rip up”. Right away I know what it’s about, and that it’s going to have a lively tone. PJ Bravo’s “We’ve gone from Silly Season to Hate Week. What’s next, Kristallnacht?” is another great example, capturing the narrative *and* getting some historical perspective in. I often think up two or three different titles for my posts as I start to write them, and then come back afterwards and see which ones I like …
Good post!
Whoops.. I wanted to add two helpful links of a couple diary’s past….
1) How to post images in your diary
http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/482
2) Formatting oxdown posts
http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/441
Also.. when composing your post title… please remember DIgg only allows 60 Spaces in their title bar. So folks will either have to edit your title or unknowingly chop it off if your original title is longer than 60 spaces.
I don’t know the exact number of spaces available in a DIgg summary.. but if your first couple of lines are not very informative and enticing… you are not helping yourself.
Digg summary is 350 characters.
Jon, I just put up a new diary; if you would offer a critique of suggestions I’d appreciate it.
One of the things that I appreciate most about Oxdown Gazette is the pleasure I get in nudging good folks with great thoughts/ideas to put up a diary so that their wealth is shared more widely.
Perhaps it’s not so obvious, but this is how great societies became great societies!
Share the wealth!
Very nicely done post, good stuff.
Much appreciated!
Thanks for the excellent links, Eureka Springs … I should have included them in the original post, my bad. And oops, rereading the post on graphics, I realized I failed to include the credits on the image I used:
Facebook graphic from AJC1’s flickr site, licensed under Creative Commons
ubetchaiam, a couple of quick suggestions: your style seems to be a roundup of various news stories, so you’re most likely to appeal to people who want a quick overview and some interesting links. At least to start with, you might try including “Bailout roundup” (or something like that in the title). So this one could be “Bailout roundup: we don’t need no stinkin’ oversight” or “Bailout roundup: the DTCC, who are these guys?” (which might catch the interest of somebody who doesn’t know who DTCC is). This makes it easier for people who haven’t yet read your posts to see if they might be interested. You could even try something like “Bailout links you might have missed: …” to capture the off-the-beaten-path nature of your links, but then the stuff after the colon would have to be a lot shorter.
In terms of the contents, one suggestion I’d make is to include the author and source for each item you link to, as well as the date if it’s not recent (for example the 2003 piece on the commerce clause). This gives a lot more information to people who don’t click on the links — and makes it easier for people to decide whether or not they want to bother. It also acknowledges the authors and the sites that published the work, so I think think this is a really good practice in general; for excerpt-and-link posts like yours, it’s even more important.
Hope this helps!
jon
I’ve looked forward to Oxdown for many of the point you describe. I see a number of great comments to the posts on the other home pages, but the conversation is usually a bit truncated- people like to jump to the new posts.
I don’t want this in any way to sound like a “left handed” complement to the site,(excuse the term please!) but I’m glad there’s not currently an overwhelming volume of posts. I’d never keep up or find my way through to the good stuff!
Great post and thanks for the link.
Mucho gracias Jon, the feedback/suggestions are appreciated.
Great post, Jon. Thanks for taking the time to write this up. Really appreciate your contribution.