DK4 groups have the following abilities:
- Publishing diaries.
- Republishing diaries.
- Scheduling diaries.
- Collaborative writing of diaries.
- Group membership.
- Group messaging.
- A group page and a description.
Different groups will use this same set of abilities in quite different ways, to meet their needs.
This diary is about group republishing. Take a diary written by someone else. Republish it.
Why Republish? A Model
Community Spotlight/Rescue Rangers is a republishing effort.
Your group can be a form of Rescue Ranger. Rescue diaries of interest: republish them.
Community Spotlight has a regular group blog view, in addition to the top of page spotlight box.
The Rescue Rangers are the purest form of a republishing effort: a group effort to spotlight their take on the best diaries at Daily Kos, run continuously.
Other groups can model part (or all!) of their effort on what the Rangers do.
If you are a subject-matter group, republish the best diaries on the subject that you come across, whenever you come across them.
Or especially if your group is narrow in focus, republish all the relevant diaries you come across.
Why Republish? A dKos Publishing Niche
A Community Spotlight–like group, doing republishing and nothing but republishing, can fill various niches.
A single user, or some group of users, with a sense of what they want to spotlight, can republish what they like of the diaries they come across. If people like the sense and sensibility of what diaries are spotlighted, they will follow the group.
Why Republish? Biggest Bang for the Buck
There your group is, having a nice blog view and all, and pushing good diaries out to your follower's streams. And you didn't even have to write them.
Say you are a group doing a fair amount of writing and publishing. You want to get your own viewpoint out. Providing a good steady stream of content, using republishing, will bring more followers. Getting more followers means that you get your viewpoint out to more people. Mutual benefit.
If your group has a strong point of view, and you come across a relevant diary that doesn't share the point of view, you can add the ten-foot-pole note: Check out this crap! "Republished in the interest of discussion."
Why Republish? An Example
KosBusters was formed for beta testing. The blog view for the group has got, as I write this,
1. A republished diary, written by someone else, picked up by the group as being relevant to the group interest; and then
2. A published diary, by KosBusters itself.
Like so:
By combining publishing and republishing like this, KosBusters can bring you more complete coverage of DK4, than it could do by publishing alone.
How to Republish
An overview:
1. On the diary page, hit republish and select a group. This will put the diary on your group queue.
2. Go to your group queue page. Find the diary on the list. (Re)Publish it.
3. The diary now shows up on your group's blog view. It has also been pushed to the stream view of all your followers.
Step by step:
In this example, I'll be republishing a diary by Joan McCarter, for the group Income Inequality Kos.
First hit the republish button. It is down below the diary, above the comments:
Select the group you want to republish to, and hit save:
Now navigate to your group's page. Go to the queue tab for the group:
Find the diary on the list. It's the only item on the group queue in this example. There might be others. Hit publish now:
The diary now shows up on your group's blog view:
The diary has also been pushed out to all your group's follower streams.
You can also schedule the diary to be republished later, instead of (re)publishing it now. Some groups will be using the ability to schedule diaries. Republishing can be scheduled to happen at a specific time, just like publishing can:
One Diary, Multiple Groups
The group PDX Metro covers Portland. PacNW Kossacks covers the Pacific Northwest.
Here is a PDX Metro diary:
And the same diary republished by PacNW Kossacks:
With republishing, one diary can be picked up by many groups.
About Republishing Yourself
Groups can collaborate in diary writing. This can range from full on group diary writing: everyone contributes their part. To an editorial stage: you put your diary on the group queue, and let others in the group make editorial improvements. To just a review stage: please look at this diary before it goes up. Make any suggestions in a group message, or in a queue note, about the diary.
Groups will work out their own practices for degrees of collaboration. Collaboration requires that the diary be published by the group.
If you don't want any degree of group members being able to mess with your diary, you can first publish the diary as yourself. And then republish your own diary, by the group. The distinction gives you a degree of control.
KosBusters! is a group of DK4 beta testers who decided to continue bug hunting and feature testing now that DK4 is the official platform of Daily Kos.
In addition to locating bugs and testing newly released features, we plan to post informational diaries—such as this one—to aid everyone in using and navigating the site. If you have any questions, we are happy to answer them as best we know how. We are not currently accepting new members.
Updated by Garrett at Tue Feb 15, 2011, 04:23:33 PM
If Publish Now does not work when you try to republish a diary, from the group queue, use the Schedule Later workaround.