Crunchberry Project

So for the past seven weeks or so we’ve been talking about fostering community conversation, civic engagement, and enabling people to discuss the news that affects them. And we have come up with some pretty cool ways that undoubtedly encourage interactivity and will potentially help form an online community of engaged individuals who are motivated to have their voices heard.

But that’s what we need to get at - the people who comprise these communities. As much as the structure of what we create matters (ease of use, clarity, etc.), the fundamental piece to this puzzle isn’t the applications we are creating; It’s the people using it. Passionate people with genuine fervor for the content they are reading are the consumers targeted on the Web.

An understatement to say the least, the members of ESPN.com fit this profile perfectly. I sat down for a phone interview with Patrick Stiegman, vice president and executive editor and producer for ESPN.com to find out more about their Web properties, and the people who traffic them.

“The passion that sports fans have is the fuel that drives our community,” said Stiegman, who oversees production of an estimated 20 ESPN Web properties. “Sports is somewhat tribal - people tend to aggregate around a team, school, or state. With the fan profiles on our site, it’s like a virtual discussion at a bar,” said Stiegman.

The “fan profile” Stiegman refers to is the nexus of ESPN’s social community. With the fan profile, users can post a picture and information about themselves, message one another, see who has recently viewed their profile, add widgets, create a friend list, blog, post photos, join groups, and get updates about their ESPN fantasy sports teams. This virtual water cooler is essentially Facebook for sports fanatics – complete with a comment wall.

In addition to the fan profiles, users are able to personalize the news they receive from ESPN.com via their “MyESPN” page. Modeled after iGoogle, users can keep tabs on news from their favorite teams, check scoreboards, mark their calendars for TV listings, and check progress on their fantasy teams all on this one page. This personalization acts as a gateway to the communities the fans interact with, but according to Stiegman, it is a feature that is not used heavily.

“There is a lot of value around personalization in the news business, but people are hesitant to do it because they are worried that access could be shut down to it,” said Stiegman. “Ten to 15 percent of people personalize. The vast majority of people don’t want to put the time into personalization because they don’t want to miss something else going on in the sports world.”

While personalization (ideally) facilitates interactivity, it appears that many people are not willing to spend the time to customize the content they receive.

So to you, using your RSS reader, iGoogle page, and desktop widgets for news, (and of course, those of you who don’t), how vital is personalization to your Web experience?

photo by ashe-villain/flickr

Lately we’ve had all sorts of posts about various bits of industry research that we’ve been doing on sites like MonroeTalks, Salon.com’s letters to the editor model, Plurk and personas, but we haven’t taken the time to actually give an update about where we are in the process of this project.  

Well, here it is folks:  We are in the midst of our fifth development iteration.  We have so far successfully designed, developed and are testing the first of our comment structures - Q&A.  Ryan and Brian, our overworked dev team, made an solid product in minimum time.  

We have also designed our second comment structure - Short Format - and that is being developed during the current iteration and we’ll be testing next week.  

The design team, which consists of Kayla and I, augmented by Josh and Angela is working hard on the Letters to the Editor comment structure, as well as ratings structures to be reverse engineered into Q&A and Short Format, all of which are to be developed next week.  

Through each of the last three iterations we’ve been plumbing the depths of Facebook integration, asking how much is too much, how little is not enough and how should it all look?

This morning I interviewed Kerry Lauerman, of Salon’s Letters and Open Salon, as part of our industry research.

Salon’s Letter to the Editor comment structure stands out in a crowd. Their system, adopted in October 2005, is an innovative approach to a trusted and familiar model. Letters to the Editor are as integral to the history of newspapers as obituaries and wedding announcements.

Salon

Their model is simple: user’s must go through a quick registration and then can write a headline and post their letter. Editors highlight the best letters. Readers can choose to read only those marked by editors, or can see through every letter submitted. 

The letters to the editor structure is one that Stuart and I have considered in our design process, one that we may decide to pursue in the coming weeks. One concern I had before speaking to Mr. Lauerman was that the barrier to entry would be too high. The phrase “letters to the editor” implies a more intelligent, thoughtful reply, as opposed to “comment” which can suggest a snap judgment. It sounds like a great idea – promoting intelligence over outbursts, but to meet the goal of increased community engagement every effort should be made to encourage comments, not discourage them, right?

An example letter

In the world of page views, tallies of registered users and counting clicks, it seems like the focus online is on getting a volume of comments, rather than striving for intelligent discourse. We worry about having too high a barrier of entry to commenting, but maybe that is not a productive concern. 

Lauerman said he doesn’t care if people are turned off from commenting by their letters system.  

“We never worry. If anything we worry it isn’t high enough of a barrier,” Lauerman said. “Our system is targeted at someone who wants to write something thoughtful, because that’s what we’re looking for.”

Lauerman wondered if anyone truly benefits from commenting systems where users can spout off without restraint.

“You are not building anything useful if people are just using it as a place to pop off anonymously,” he said. 

Former Salon editor, Scott Rosenberg, in a letter dated Jan. 30, 2006, said they believe that signed letters reflect a more considered thinking. 

“We know that some of you might be thinking, ‘Gee, when future potential employers are Googling my name, do I really want them to see this rant?’” he wrote. “Maybe that’s simply good motivation to write something that you’ll be proud of. If you think you won’t want to stand by your letter years from now, you might reconsider whether you want to post it at all.”

I like that Salon has the attitude that they want to receive quality letters, or none at all. Just because we want to get more people interacting online does not mean we have to set the bar so low that anyone can jump in. News organizations can still maintain their sense of intelligence and worth. Perhaps if more news organizations took this message to heart we would have more intelligent discourse and less cover stories featuring Britney Spears and Angelina Jolie.

So …. Plurk.  No, I did not just use onomatopoeia to recreate the sound of dropping a wet wash cloth, Plurk, a combination of People +Lurk, and Play + Work is a short format lifestream social medium.  

Lifestreaming a la Plurk

With Plurk users can document the things they are thinking, feeling, asking, sharing, wondering and many other  ”qualifiers” in a chronologically organized graphical user interface.

Users can earn Karma for their own and their friends’ activity on the site.  Earning Karma can bring rewards such as emoticons and some other rights, such as naming conventions.  If you don’t plurk frequently enough, your karma decreases, as well as if you attempt to friend someone and they decline friendship.  

While Twitter is still the biggest kid on the short format block, Plurk has garnered some attention lately from tech-bloggers such as CNET and SomewhatFrank.   But Plurk-user Bloggeries contends that Plurk’s certain je ne sais quoi is Cliques: a method of grouping some of your contacts and friends into a quick and easy assembly that you can quickly share plurks with.

Some might say they have social networking fatigue with the plethora of BrightKites, Blip.fms, Twitters, Facebooks, MySpaces, Tumblrs, Pownces and Plaxos, and after looking at so many, I am inclined to agree with those folks, but there is always going to be room for improvement on how we get together on the Internet, so the search must go on.

For those who hold their message board comments near and dear to their hearts, IntenseDebate has built an online community centered on its commenting software. An application that can be added to any Web site or blog, IntenseDebate fosters conversation, and builds its community around its users’ comments.

Recently purchased by Automattic (The company who brought us the open source blogging software WordPress), IntenseDebate will now be found much more commonly throughout the blogosphere. And with a larger Web presence, IntenseDebate will look to continue growing its comment-savvy community. So how are they doing it?

As you can see from the image below, with a clean, simple interface, users’ comments are threaded and ratable in a binary “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” style also seen on YouTube. By default, the top rated comments are seen at the top of every post, along with when the thread was last active for relevance. Comments can also be sorted by date and last activity. Also, all threads are collapsible, enabling the reader to separate the wheat from the chaff instead of having to sort through an entire message board to find the morsels of good content.

And if there is a conversation the user wishes to watch, he can do so via his RSS reader. To respond to a previous post, users have the option of continuing the conversation in the thread on the page, or they can respond via email – a unique feature IntenseDebate has implemented.

So how is this building community, you ask? Well, there is a link to the user’s personal profile, complete with picture and reputation points next to every comment he leaves.

Upon clicking on the user’s profile link, their personal thread of most recent comments, a list of users this person is following, recent profile visitors, and links to external social media such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as personal blogs and Web sites.

Check out this sample profile:

So I guess after learning about this app, my question to you would be whether or not you think this does a good job of generating community discussion. Would you consider installing IntenseDebate on your blog? Would you register for IntenseDebate so you could comment on another blog? Let us know your thoughts!

Insightful words from our fearless leader, Rich Gordon. Well, I’m your guy.

I unfortunately missed our Friday meeting and some subsequent work that was done this weekend by my fellow berries, but it looks like we’re still on track to narrow down exactly what we’re going to be doing with “superfeatures”. And of course in order to come up with something you guys are going to like, it is our responsibility to look at other thriving online communities to see what is currently working.

Which brings me to the bustling online community of the Monroe Evening News: monroetalks.com. As of today, this Web site boasts almost a quarter-million comments on over 10,000 topics; all generated by about 3,200 members. The site, which has been operated since March 2007, averages close to 1 million page views per month, and has served as an effective forum for its readers to discuss the things that affect their community.

So how are they doing it? Well, after becoming monroetalks.com’s newest member, I checked out some of the features their users are given. After supplying the bare essentials (email, username, and password), a registered user is given a profile, and is afforded several opportunities to reach out to other users. Here is a sample profile: 

In addition to your personal profile, here’s a sample of what readers see when you leave a comment:

Essentially, this site has created a social networking site based around the news. This is the Facebook of local news – except instead of being looked at for how many friends you have, one is judged by how many times they have been ignored, how frequent they post, and how often they generate and foster discussion.

In addition to the ratings and profile, members also have the ability to “ignore” other users, and they are brought back out to the main forum page after doing so. Also, a feature I’m a big fan of is the “Who else is viewing this topic” feature - a takeoff on Youtube’s “Active Sharing” model, where users can bond over the same media they are viewing/reading.

The last feature I want to point out is beneficial to both researchers and members alike. Check out the statistics page! Not only can we see their Web traffic statistics, members can see who the major players in this online community are based upon how many posts they have made, how many topics they have started, and how much time they have been on the site.

Which of these features do you like, which would you use, and what other features out there work for you?

Ok, so I recently gave a presentation on current commenting technologies being used by commercial Web sites. The three I chose were boston.com, chicagotribune.com, and espn.com, all of which use different methods to manage and maintain user interaction on their Web sites.

boston.com manages and maintains the comments users leave on its Web site. After leaving a comment in the box and submitting it, the user is thanked for their feedback, and told that their comment will be reviewed and posted by the boston.com staff. As a result, there is no instant gratification for the user, and boston.com has to have a staff member who reviews and posts the comments deemed publishable.

chicagotribune.com is a stark contrast from the boston.com model. Instead of having a staff member who reviews and posts comments, they have outsourced this duty to Topix, who manages the forums. As a result, the user is taken away from the Tribune’s Web site, and users are allowed to post whatever they want. The user, however, does get instant gratification in seeing their comment posted. As a result though, good comments sometimes need to be weeded out from the bad ones. Check out George Castanza here:

So last but certainly not least is the model that espn.com has adopted. In order to post a comment, users need to create a “Fan Profile“. After providing ESPN with some basic information (apart from the standard email address request), users are allowed to comment on stories, manage a friend list, and message other users. Judging from some articles that have several thousand comments, I think ESPN’s approach is having a lot of success.

It’s a win-win; users get to see their comments posted, and ESPN gets to market all of its products to the user. I’d like to see some of their data though to see what features users are engaged by.

What factors encourage you to leave a comment on an article?

Charged with the task of helping a newspaper organization reinvent itself, our group has been given some tremendous tools to work with. Already in possession of a newspaper that reaches more than 40% of the metro-Cedar Rapids area, Gazette Communications also owns KCRG-TV, the local ABC affiliate.

Combined with gazetteonline.com and some of its other online and print properties, Gazette Communications has already laid the groundwork for a multimedia powerhouse, and is ready to make the “epic surge” into creating an equally strong online community. The inherent challenge however is creating synergy between the Gazette and KCRG-TV, while still having each organization keep its brand identity.

I just finished reading the book Linked by Albert-László Barabási this past weekend. With his Ph. D. in theoretical physics, Barabasi delves deep into network theory, and offers a major piece of advice that completely applies to the Gazette:

“As research, innovation, product development, and marketing become more and more specialized and divorced from each other, we are converging to a network economy in which strategic alliances and partnerships are the means for survival in all industries.”

Indeed, with the properties it has, the Gazette is more than capable of putting together a product that can engage its readers beyond article comments. But how can we make them work together to create a “successful” online community?

According to Robin Miller of the Knight Digital Media Center, there are five rules for building a successful online community. Check out the link for explanations, but here they are:

1. Your discussions must be threaded or nested, not just “flat.”
2. You have readers who know more than you do about any given topic — and plenty of readers who don’t know nearly as much as they think they do.
3. Let your readers judge each other so you don’t have to judge them yourself.
4. All good things must come to an end.
5. Why buy a cow when the software is free?

Taking these things into account, what are some of the things online that interest and engage you?