Forgive my current focus on the meta aspect of Daily Kos, and specifically the transition to this new platform. It's pretty much all I've thought about for several months, as we implement a framework I first whiteboarded four years ago. So this is a bit of an obsession for me.
It's early in this transition process, so I'm still soaking it all in, watching you guys soak everything in. But I've already come across my first surprise -- the Diaries page is much more useful than I expected.
Many predicted a firehose of diaries, and that hasn't panned out. But it's still early. That can change. What's more interesting to me is just how much I end up visiting a section of the site I thought I'd ignore.
First of all, its nice to be able to sort diaries by various categories (most recommended and most commented, by day, month, or all-time). That's cool, but I expected that to be cool.
What I like more is that I can now get a much truer sense of what's driving the community. In the past, site culture demanded a single diary about any breaking news. If someone wrote a duplicate, even if it approached the issue from a different angle, people would demand it be deleted.
Now, I can get a feel for how hot and important a story is to the community by how many people decide to write about it, and I'm already seeing a broader diversity of opinion on various topics, since we all bring our unique perspectives to the news.
I love it, and truth be told, I didn't expect to. In fact, I didn't expect that Diaries section to be all that valuable. I was wrong. It's now a key destination for me.
I had very specific expectations of how things would work out, but I've also done this enough to know that you guys will use features in ways I never envisioned, and that site sociology doesn't always behave the way I thought. And that sometimes, even features I might find uninteresting on the drawing board, become integral to my Daily Kos experience once plugged into this vibrant and dynamic community.
p.s. So what about the Daily Kos mobile site? See here.