One of the most disappointing things about this site is the way that top-class material just gets flushed away. The humans are already doing an incredible amount of work, tipping, recommending and commenting on posts, diaries and threads. Fascinating discussions go on `after hours' on some threads. Every one else has left but two people keep on hashing it out days later, getting really involved and making their arguments well.
Newsie8200 has publicized another problem: the sheer quantity of really good stuff that goes by unread, often even after its been flagged in this excellent series of diaries. Daily Kos is now worse than the Economist. I am always really pleased to get my issue (fire up my browser) but I am also saddened to realize that I will not be able to read everything that is worth reading.
As I understand it, we are approaching forty-thousand registered users and the site has a viewership that is several times that. I have read the number 300,000 unique page views per day. If that means what I think it means...
... then we have at least a quarter million viewers out there whose only interaction is through our polls. We need to figure out a way to let their voice be heard, perhaps through more polls. I realize the `troll feeding' risks here but I'm sure that a bunch of REALLY bright people can work this out.
BUT the humans are already working pretty much flat out. Sure I hope the site can make enough money that Kos can hire (some / more?) full-time staff but that will never be enough. The MACHINES must do more. Machine abstracts and summaries are still pitiful but they are better than nothing. Combined with the mojo / anti-mojo (recommends - un recommends, highly rated comments - troll rated comments) ratio, they could help in archiving, as could the sheer number of page views.
Imagine that this site loads and you can see at a glance where the furious action is right now, what's been talked about most in the last several hours, what the conclusions are from most threads, and where the most page views are. Imagine that with a little more digging, the site will help you discover Kossack opinion on any issue that has been widely discussed. The information is available. Anyone interested in digging into comments, diaries, ratings and recommends can learn an awful lot about any of us. Since we put the information into the public domain we should use it. I applaud the demographic projects that have passed through here.
Actually I guess I put my finger on a great problem of IT. It is great at giving us information but lousy at giving us knowledge. This site and the left blogosphere as a whole need to be at the forefront of this. The corporations will mine the data to make us buy more of their products or to sell us shoddier insurance. We need to mine the data to fight back. They will feed us lies. We need to know what is true and how we feel about it and felt about it.
There are an awful lot of very bright, successful, well-educated people here. We have computer programmers here. Surely we can think of some ways to extract useful, permanent, machine-readable content from what goes on here? Or is this beyond the state of the art? That is your poll question.