Crunchberry Project

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?

As a follow-up to my previous post about the Monroe Evening News, I reached out to Dan Shaw, the former managing editor and director of new audiences for the Monroe Evening News, who now teaches journalism at Monroe County Community College and serves as a consultant for the media outlet.

“About two years ago, we knew that social networking movement across the country was important,” said Shaw. ”And we needed to get into it.” Using Newspaper Next guidelines, Shaw and his staff created the MonroeTalks forums, which have blossomed into one of the more vibrant online communities on the Web. Check out his video on Youtube for some more info:

Although they clearly had some hurdles along the way with traffic, Shaw said the biggest obstacle to overcome is a lack of time and resources for projects like this at newspapers. Nonetheless, he said this should not be a major deterrant. “This is something that every news organization nationwide should be doing and they aren’t,” said Shaw.

But why should they be doing this? What’s the point? Money, of course, right? Think again. According to Shaw, despite averaging about 2.3 million page views per month, MonroeTalks does not make much money. “We make a little bit of money on it, but not much,” said Shaw. ”We don’t spend too many resources on it because it’s more of a community social networking experiment than a moneymaking enterprise.”

But why is that? According to Shaw, local businesses have been reluctant to advertise on MonroeTalks.com because of some of the controversial discussion in the forums. Which brings me to this article, courtesy of the Gazette’s Steve Buttry. In a small community (apprx. 60,000 households), it would seem that local business would benefit immensely from the 6-7000 unique visitors the site receives a day.

And despite the success of MonroeTalks.com, Shaw believes the niche Web products the Evening News is coming out with will be more popular with his audience, and MonroeTalks will fade into the background as the conversation niche for the Monroe County community.

As journalists, it is our responsibility to inform our public and foster discussion. That’s why we have undertaken this project. But the business side of the industry dictates that we need to make money doing it as well. The synergy of these two ideas is what ultimately makes online communities successful.

By giving our audience the opportunity to interact with the Web site and stay informed, more page views will be generated - giving advertisers more opportunities to reach our readers.

I guess that’s the point?

As noted in an earlier post, we developed personas to guide our development and to serve as users in our product mock-ups.  When the design team creates a template for what the commenting structure might look like and how it might function, they use the Bristol, Willow and Track personas to post example comments. 

The basic characteristics of our personas were hashed out a few weeks ago and we have been adjusting and building upon them ever since.  They now have histories, families, hobbies, friends, media interests and, of course, facebook profiles.  This enhanced familiarity with Bristol, facilitates the design team’s creation of comments she might make on a particular article (e.g. what she would say, how she would like to say it, and who she would want to say it to), which ultimately helps us create something geared to those needs. 

These Web sites have good examples of what a bio/persona should look like:
Chopsticker   Agile Modeling

p.s.  We think Bristol-berrywould dress up as Sarah Palin for Halloween.

(Click here to read the rest of this entry)

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.

Crunchberry Team's very first Iteration Meeting!

We’ve wrapped up our first week of design, research and coding. In keeping with our agile project plans, the development team (Brian and I) will work one week behind the design team (Kayla and Stuart). The design team spent the last week putting together features and mock-ups which the dev team will be building in software this coming week.

Since the design team hasn’t had time to put anything together for last week, the dev team built a simple CMS and put together a proof of concept for Facebook Connect. Using Django and pluggables we were able to whip up a basic dynamic news site, plain-jane comments and account registration in a day. It ain’t much to look at yet, but it will give us a starting point to build from as we get direction from the design team.

Facebook Connect was a bit of a challenge to get working, but it will do everything we would like: sharing stories to people’s pages and giving us a way to connect people to their friends and others through news and discussion. As Brian has blogged - it gives us an interesting way to keep the conversation civil: don’t make a scene, others are watching.

There is a bit of a fly in the ointment: When is Facebook Connect going to launch? And where are all the partners? They’ve gone live with a few partners, but the service was supposed to officially launch mid-October after being pushed back earlier this year. And when they do - will they decide that some feature is not a good idea? Not being able to pull a person’s Facebook friends or push a story to their feed makes our application much less interesting.

We’re going to try find out what the plan is from the horse’s mouth, but it gives us pause - do we keep trucking with Facebook Connect and be one of the cool kids on the block when it launches? Or do we hedge our bets and go some other direction and loose some of the potential Facebook brings?

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!

Image source: adactio/flickr

Starting out down this road, our guiding question was, “what can we create that will facilitate connections between people in Cedar Rapids, preferably through local news.” To encourage participation and connections between users, we have to think about what will compel people to contribute, not just consume. We are looking to the lessons learned by successful social networking sites to guide us through our research and development.

For the sake of our sanity, and in the interest of completing something by the end of our quarter, we narrowed our focus and chose a specific subset of people in Cedar Rapids to keep in mind while developing our product.

We thought it would be a good idea to aim for Gazette readers who are relatively tech savvy and use the Internet regularly — one less hurdle to overcome in getting people to use what we create. It looks like this hurdle is getting smaller.

According to research by Forrester Research Inc.,

“Looking at the US data, the big news in 2008 is that, not unexpectedly, social technology participation has grown rapidly. Inactives — people untouched by social technologies — have shriveled from 44% down to 25% of the online population. Spectators — those who read, watch, or consumer social content — have ballooned from 48% to 69%. If you think social technology is about to become a universal phenomenon, we just handed you a nice little bundle of evidence.”

We chose to focus on connecting 20-34 years olds because research indicates they are more comfortable communicating online and more likely to read news online than pick up a newspaper.

It is encouraging to see research that suggests what we develop will be useful to more and more people if we incorporate social networking tools to break down the barriers that are keeping readers from contributing.

It is not only that more young people are using social networking tools, but that ,“Social activity is way up among 35-to-44 year-olds, especially when it comes to joining social networks and reading and reacting to content.”

Go to groundswell.com for more information and to learn more about the classifications used in the graphs and to see and illustration of the Social Technographics Ladder that breaks down different groups and methods of online participation.

In response to Kayla’s post the other day, we were called out for not getting real enough. Aron’s right. In the rush to start building, we got ahead of ourselves. Team Crunchberry needs a mantra.

As the folks at 37signals put it in their superb book Getting Real, we’ve got to:

Explicitly define the one-point vision for your app

What does your app stand for? What’s it really all about? Before you start designing or coding anything you need to know the purpose of your product — the vision. Think big. Why does it exist? What makes it different than other similar products?

So! What is it we’re doing?

First, as you’ve already heard, we’re experimenting with the format of conversations around news. By changing the shape of comments, we hope to improve their quality — by guiding the conversation and by making it easier to participate.

Second, we’re experimenting with the possibilities of Facebook Connect, a very neat offering from Facebook that will launch in the upcoming weeks. The idea is this: instead of having a login on our site, Facebook users can login seamlessly with a button click.

Why could we want to do this? Besides lowering the mental overhead of forcing a user into signing up for yet another account, we’ll be able to play with real, established social networks. (And without expecting folks to set up a friends list on a site that none of my friends use!)

For instance, when a user makes a comment, we’ll push it to their Facebook feed. Will you be more likely to comment if you know your friends will see what you have to say? Will you be less likely to act like a jackass? We’re hoping so.

The Big Idea by luckyjimmy

So! What’s the Big Idea?

I’ll be sure to bring up our lack of mantra as an issue at our iteration review tomorrow afternoon, bur I’ll try and start off the conversation with a few whacks at it…

Let people speak where they’ll be heard.

Don’t be a jackass, your friends are watching.

Or maybe:

Conversations need structure and an audience.

It’s decided. As Stuart noted one of the super features we are beginning to develop is comment structures. 

This week Stuart and I are designing a question and answer structure for comments. We decided to tackle this structure first because it has come up so often in our class discussions that we had to take a longer look. Whatever we come up with by Friday will then be passed off to Brian and Ryan, our programmers, who will build the system next week.

mikemindel/Flickr

We will likely be designing three additional structures throughout the next few weeks. We have a lot of great, innovative ideas for different comment structures – and that is the problem. An argument could be made for any of these ideas, so what we really need is feedback.

Here are the comment structures up for consideration:

Letters to the Editor (much like the Salon.com model)

Users would write a headline and more formal letter-style comment. Could include an option for editors to highlight the best letters to feature prominently on the website or in the print product. 

claireblang/flickr

Polling

This comment structure is designed for people who don’t have a lot of time. One to three questions at the end of the story, users submit their votes and see results. 

the brownhorse/flickr

Ratings

Quick votes by users. Giving stars, thumbs up/down, or points to comments. The top rated could be displayed prominently. Users could also choose to display only those comments with a rating of 3 stars or higher.

Moderated by user (much like the Slashdot model) 

Users post comments. Other users (or users with special moderating privileges) give points to those comments they deem interesting, intelligent, etc. Users can choose to only display comments with X number of points, or “interesting” ratings. 

Short format (much like Twitter)

Users are only allowed 200 characters to make their comment.

Opinion disappears

In an effort to foster intelligent discussion, not based on opinion rants, this structure makes comments containing unsubstantiated opinion disappear in a shorter amount of time than other comments, such as anything supported by a citation or reference and questions. 

Waffle Whiffer/Flickr

Mad Libs

Users leave comments in this format: “I feel _________ about _________________.” Could feature a drop down menu of choices. 

Annotation/citation/reference/footnote

Allows users to make a comment or site an additional source at a specific point in the article. 

One-click comments

Users click buttons at the end of the story with general statements about how they feel about an article. Examples: “This story frustrates me,” “This article offends me,” “This is awesome,” and “This is well-researched.”

Format 

Allows users to choose the format in which they leave comments. Could include replying via video and/or audio. 

Live chat

Registered users can see other users who are logged into the site and begin a live conversation with them about a particular story. This comment would be visible to the public and displayed on the side of the article. Other users could jump into the conversation at any point. 

We want your comments on every blog post, but we especially NEED your comments on this post. What’s interesting to you? What are your top three? Why? Are there any models/ideas out there that we missed?