Barrett:
Erik and I wanted to seek your advice on ways to radically re-format the LOOG into something more unique. When Scott, Erik, and I originally put together the concept for the site, we had a grand vision of what we wanted to accomplish but we've never had the right mix of readership size, budget, and roster, nor enough understanding of crowd-sourcing, to pull it off. We had it working pretty well the first several months of the site, but the tools we were using turned out not to work well once the site grew beyond a certain size. Since then, we've been trying to figure out new ways of pulling the concept off, but none of them have been feasible for one reason or another. At this point, though, Erik and I are starting to think that we've got a large enough roster and readership, combined with a likely source of some seed money (not a lot, but probably enough) to pull it off, especially given Erik's background
in programming. The major obstacle is that I don't think either of us has a good enough grasp of how to design the site to get it to work, which is where you'd come in.
As you'll see, the "grand vision" was something pretty compatible with the goals of Project PM. Essentially, the goal was to create something of a mini-blogosphere, and I think the original post that was the inspiration for the site was entitled "A Blogosphere For One." The idea was to foster the ability of writers and readers to view the world through new and/or different perspectives and really challenge each other's beliefs. Although we wound up focusing more on politics and policy, I think we ideally wanted the blog to have no specific focus so much as we wanted it to show the interplay between any number of broad topic areas.
The means for achieving this goal was, and will forever remain, a format and roster geared towards direct, but highly casual, dialogue (whether we've always lived up to these means is another story altogether). In the early days of the site, before it became too big for its original layout, one of the commenters referred to the site as a "conversation between friends in a bar," with the commentariat being the groups in the booths next to us at the bar.
And that's pretty much the atmosphere that we still need to achieve, but the atmosphere alone could only go so far; with a small group of generalists, there eventually comes a point where you're not really learning much from each other anymore or able to consistently build on what you each write.
So to achieve the goal, you need a fairly large roster of contributors, all/most of whom are invested in the site, and with a wide array of interests, experiences, and expertise. If, for instance, you can get right-wing philosophers debating the cultural merits of even something as trivial as Seinfeld with a left-wing Joe Schmoe (albeit a reasonably intelligent one), then you're going to get interesting results. And the more contributors you have interacting with each other, the better - at least as long as they're generally not hackish and are actually interacting with each other. Indeed, I think Erik and I already have a pretty good idea of how we'll next look to expand if we can figure out how to properly structure the site.
Where Erik and I seem to mainly be getting caught up is on the "actually interacting with each other" problem. The more contributors and content you add, the more difficult it becomes to follow or continue a given discussion and arrange information.
The obvious solution to the arrangement of information part of the problem is to create a system with a whole bunch of different "channels," which operate as semi-autonomous mini-blogs, but whose content is readily accessible from the front page. But the trouble with channels is that they'll incentive self-segregation within the site writ large (basically what happens at most of the online magazines), thereby discouraging writers from even considering posts on other channels, much less interacting with writers on other channels. One solution to this is to have every post on every channel at least initially appear simultaneously on the main page, but this just gets you back to where you started.
The other issue that seems to be coming up right now is that the nature of the site virtually guarantees writers and readers are going to get deeply offended by other writers who take particularly strong positions on things about which they're sensitives. To me at least, solving this issue with censorship and a strict enforcement of civility is worse than the disease, especially since incivility can occasionally be a very useful debating tool. But the issue needs to get either solved or mitigated nonetheless, for fear of whittling the roster and/or readership down to an echo chamber of sorts.
Increasingly, it appears to me (and, I think, Erik) that the real solution to the problem is going to require some sort of crowd-sourcing or social networking, which is why we're turning to you for your thoughts. So......any thoughts?
Finally, for obvious reasons, we'd ask that you not share Erik's or my thoughts on this with anyone. Any changes along these lines would be a radical restructuring of the site that's going to ruffle some feathers pretty drastically. We're also not certain that there's a way to achieve what we're hoping to achieve, in which case I think we're both quite happy leaving things as they currently are and will keep the roster at its current size permanently. So we don't want to ruffle feathers unless we know exactly what we're going to do and how we're going to do it.
Thanks,
Mark