Well, we've had our new toy for almost a week, and I've been quite taken with watching the community change and evolve as we've tried out all the new buttons and tricks. I've made some new friends, started some new conversations and, quite frankly, been moved to tears a number of times. This is a community of passionate people, we have a bunch of good writers and thinkers here with big, big hearts. The diaries, baby blogs within what is now the Borgblog Kos, contain some of the most beautiful things I've read in a long time. One of my favorite political writers turns out to be an accomplished poet. I learned that another articulate Democratic partisan is Australian, and I've spent time shooting the breeze with a Canadian who thinks he's an old coot, I love his sense of fairness and passion for justice.
(thanks to those who taught me how to split an entry between pages.....)
Markos, the diaries are a genius addition.
MT was one kind of community experience, this is an entirely different one. One of my favorite writers sent me this in Comments to my first diary entry:
Angry spouses ... (none / 0)
At 2:30 a.m.:
HER: Are you STILL on the computer?
ME: Yes.
HER: What ARE you doing?
ME: Reading a post by Melanie.
HER: WHO?
ME: Uh ... a big reader with good judgment named Melanie.
HER: One of the loudest, longest sighs ever.
Don't you go getting me in trouble again, Melanie. (thanks, buddy)
Like Kos on the night of the change over, I've been up late a lot, too, playing with the shiny new thing.
One of the things that I've noticed has changed over the first week is that ratings has been nearly abandoned. Kosians, this is a BAD THING. This blog is one of the most visited in the Blogosphere. What Markos has given us with Ratings is a way to police ourselves, because the thing has grown so large that Kos, Meteor Blades, Jerome and DHinMi (and even a half dozen more of them) can't police the place without help. Have you already forgotten some of those troll-plagued threads we had in the last months on MT? It got pretty ugly. With Ratings, however much you may dislike the idea upfront, we become an accountable community. Ratings, if it is used properly, allows us to propose our own set of trusted users who can clean things up if we get a troll invasion or even if the regulars get rowdy and start to tear the joint up. This cadre of users should be growing constantly as the blogosphere is a transient place, and even the most loyal Kosian can be sidelined by illness, travel, computer trouble or host of other ISP gremlins. Start rating again.
But Nota Bena: I've seen commentors use this feature to try to torpedo people that they simply disagreed with. That's not the point. Rate high a good argument, well-linked, even if you disagree with its conclusions. Reward good work, even if it doesn't agree with you. Scoop, used well creates a real meritocracy. I've given 4's to creative people who did beautiful things even if I didn't like the fruit of the argument. But Ratings has to be used if it is going to work. And, so far, it has, but we are still a very young community, so we need to continue to grow with this.
Shiny new toys, I get to design a poll to go with this......
I make a couple of passes over every thread, usually to comment, but at least one to rate, which means really reading the posts without havin to go through the exercise of forming a reply, just paying attention to what is in the post. In order for Scoop to work the way it is supposed to work, we should all be looking at Ratings on a regular basis. Don't expect me to do all the work for you!