Let me begin by stating unequivocally at the start that I am very excited to see DK4 come to fruition, and think it will be a big success once the kinks are worked out. The social networking features, the ability to create groups, to write multiple diaries in a day, to more easily search for desired content, and much much more, will be a quantum leap forward for the website. It may even help to mitigate the short head, long tail problem in the progressive blogosphere overall, and potentially assist in redemocratizing the blogging medium within the progressive community.
But the new design contains a major organizational flaw. It's a flaw that few have quite managed to put their finger on, but they can feel it. Most of the discussion about this flaw has centered on the disutility of the Recent Diary list, which Markos discussed yesterday.
Markos is right: the current system in DK3 has major problems, which he enumerates:
Right now, the only way to be found is for people to be on the site when your diary is posted. If you post at the wrong time? Too bad. If you post right after breaking news? Oh well. If you post on a topic that is currently not hot, tough luck. If you post in the middle of the latest site flamewar, you know what'll happen.
Every day, a few pieces break out and make the recommend list (odds are better if you're one of the diarist elite), which means that a few more people will see the piece, but it'll still be limited to those visiting the site whenever it happens to be on the expanded list.
And either way, once your piece is off those two lists, it's pretty much history. It may show up in the odd Google search, but chances are it's lost in the ether.
All true. But the proposed solution may be a cure that is worse than the disease, if accommodations to resolve the flaw are not made.
As the site currently stands, there are three categories:
- frontpage posts;
- recommended diaries;
- recent diaries
Although it's not an explicit rule, there is an understood hierarchy here. The best recent diaries get recommended. The best recommended diaries serve as discussion for the community, and probably filter into the frontpage. And the frontpage itself is of and by the community, theoretically, since the best diarists are theoretically selected to become frontpagers.
In this system, everyone in the hierarchy is trying to accomplish the same goal: excellent, informative writing on subjects of interest to the progressive community, ultimately with the goal of helping elect more and better Democrats.
Because this is a political blog, by necessity most of the best and most interesting posts on this subject are ephemera: posts about current events that may or may not be relevant, say, three years from now. Outside of the Sunday essays, it's a rare frontpage post that one would want to refer back to, say, four years from now for information relevant to today, or for great writing. Frontpage posts are largely ephemeral--good for their time and place to accomplish a certain objective, whether it be to help push a certain meme, or tarnish a Republican, or promote a good Democrat, or debunk a myth, etc.
Recommended diaries, meanwhile, are like a mini-frontpage. They cover what the frontpage might have missed, or tackle topics and theses that might theoretically be a little too controversial for the frontpage, given its gigantic audience. And even meta has its place: a place for the community as a whole to discuss issues relevant to itself, that do not belong on the frontpage. Celebrity diarists get noticed for a reason, usually due to the quality of their work. If the system is working as it should, those diarists eventually become frontpagers, giving the community a chance to read their favorite authors, and new diarists a chance to make the recommended list more frequently. That's how it works in theory.
On any given day, then, I can spend ten minutes on DailyKos, and become informed and enlightened on a range of topics of immediate interest within current events. A quick scan of the frontpage will tell me the most important things that are going on. A quick scan of recommended diaries will tell me what's happening both within the community, and what's happening perhaps under the radar of the frontpage. And a quick scan of recent diaries will tell me much of the breaking news of the day from a progressive perspective.
What DailyKos is NOT, by and large, is a place for long, theoretically timeless, well-researched articles on a particular subject. Such diaries are good, and often get recommended. But they're not actually why most people come to the site. They come to the site precisely for ephemera.
DK4 is organized, intentionally, by tags and social networks. Tagging is the heart of DK4. Surfing the recommended lists of individual users are the second most important method of navigating DK4. That seems like a good idea at first. But when you look at it more closely, there's a big problem: a tag-and-surf based system minimizes the ability to find up-to-date information and perspective on ephemera. Unless, of course, one creates a tag for "current events"--but then, that tag would become so broad as to be useless.
To put it another way, if the frontpage posts were tossed into the DK4 mix without the advantage of their constructed platform, they likely wouldn't rise to the top in the new system. Because they tend not to be about specific taggable issues, but about the ephemera of current events.
What that will functionally do is create a system where the frontpagers are engaged in a qualitatively different kind of blogging than the most widely read material within the community. Which will only serve to create an even larger disparity than currently exists between the frontpage and the community. Also, it will be harder to find ephemeral information about current events beyond what is on the frontpage.
And that's a potentially fatal problem. I would suggest that as we move forward to the implementation of DK4, that solutions be examined for helping to ensure that quality writing on current events that does not easily fit into a researchable tag silo does not go unnoticed in the postmodern tag-and-surf collage that DK4 currently represents.