Yesterday I attended what Markos called the first meta-panel in the history of Netroots Nation, in the hope of gaining a little more understanding of the many mysteries of this website. Even though I have been a registered user of the site for about two years, I still felt, going into that panel, a little like entering a club of which I don't quite feel myself a member. There is still a lot of jargon that I don't understand. And so many users go by code names that Daily Kos seems like some kind of secret society. Plus, because there are so many users who are extremely active on this site, the less regular users will never quite feel part of the club.
Part of the reason I did not visit this site all that often in the past was that I used to find it a bit hard to navigate, understand, and even to read. (Too much orange!) All of that has been tremendously improved, in my opinion. I find the new site far more inviting. I applaud the team's efforts to re-vamp the site, and am very encouraged by the direction it is going. I was not surprised to hear from Markos that usage has actually increased since the re-boot. My usage has certainly increased. But there are still some things that are confusing to me about this site. For example, I don't understand how mojo works, I don't understand how groups work, and I don't really understand how the recommendation system works. Of course, I don't really have to understand all the inner workings of the site, and I don't really care to, to be honest. I'm just looking for the best place to publish my stuff. I like everything simple and clear, and so I was encouraged to hear that efforts are continuing to make the site even more user friendly.
So here are a couple of things I have noticed as a result of starting to cross-post some of the entries from my own blog on the site. Posting here gets me a fair number of views (especially when a couple of my posts ended up in the community spotlight) and a lot more feedback much more quickly than on my own site, most of the time, but not all the time. But despite efforts the team has made to make diaries that are more than a few hours old more accessible, viewership here still dies very quickly, whereas on my own site I continue to get hits on old posts weeks and months later. So I'm not about to give up my own blog, as long as it can function better as its own archive, and also because I have a lot more control over its appearance. At the same time, I'm intrigued by Markos's idea of encouraging bloggers to set up more customizable pages on the DKos platform, and I hope the team continues to explore that concept. All bloggers should worry that with the growth of facebook and twitter and who knows what future forms of social media, the blogosphere (even Daily Kos!) could be considered endangered. We need to continue to adapt, innovate, or die.
The other more substantive comment I would make based on cross-posting some of my stuff on this site is that it is affecting my writing, and maybe not in a good way. One of the things I tried to do on my own blog, from its inception about three years ago, was to try to maintain the kind of positive tone I saw in the Obama campaign. This site, on the other hand, seems to breed negativity. That is what has driven some of my fellow Obama supporters away from this site, and that is a shame. Since I don't mind mixing it up in a good argument (I'm an attorney, after all), I'm not leaving. But I'm thinking that maybe I should only visit and post here when I am in a more partisan, strident mood.
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