Hey Surur, Quick Question
Surur, Smith and I are butting heads on something, maybe you could settle this please?
As usual we are trying to get this site rolling with enough traffic that there’s a debate in almost every post (you know, like on your site). On one particular issue of contention, my position on defibrillating this puppy is that we need, top priority, greater visible comment concentration to the heart beating. Smith’s position is that priority number one is that we need to rally each other up to post at least ten articles a day.
My qualm with that is that the article minimum may be perceived by our troops as too tall an order (or may be turned off to write by his use of the word minimum), that too active a flurry of new articles dumped on the front page without enough commenting building up before they get buried will backfire (at least until we get some heavier traffic, which we are in the process of doing actually), you get the idea – for a site in our apparent interminably-nascent state, who’s right here, me or Smith?
Now Smith is sensitive, so if you want to say he’s right even though he’s not, I’ll completely understand.
Doug Simmons
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Doug Simmons
Biographical info.. hmm. I have a history of not being able to strike the balance between what is "safe" to put into these forms and what is, in my mind at least, funny. Can't do it.
Is it a cop-out to say, “Yes, you both have a point”?
What we need with the comments are more LURKERS squeaking up!
Plus, we’ve discussed branching out to general “technology” – but what does that MEAN? Electronics only? Anything machine? Scientific research that may or may not apply to the previous? Anything that qualifies as a “tool”?
Basically Marti if it bleeds it leads.
>Anything that qualifies as a “tool”?
Affirmative, David K bio pieces are fair game, provided I supply the pictures.
In all the years I have been visiting the MD site, I have only gone to page two maybe 10 times, mostly to look for an article I had written earlier in the day. While churning out articles may have its benefits, I put a good amount of time into most every article I write, researching and testing, etc. It’s a big disappointment for me when said article gets pushed to page 2 within 3-4 hours of posting. All day might make the front page stale, but 8-10 hours, in a typical 16 hour cycle (8am-12am EST) is not unreasonable. Most of my articles are not time sensitive so I schedule them to post when I think they will spend the greatest amount of time on the front page.
Maybe what we need are two paths for posting. The first is like a news ticker with posts being added all day. These typically don’t garner all that many comments. Basically for consumption. The other part of the page would be for opinion pieces, that would spend most of the day on the front page attracting comments. Best of both worlds.
Jim I feel your pain, I do. I recently flipped out at Smith for letting his spam blast one of your articles off the front.
The best solution I have for you is to sticky your articles (yours especially). What your describing is detrimental to the site overalland and won’t feed your article as many clicks as you might think. And maybe a widget of some sort.
If you don’t feel comfortable stickying yourself, I am, and I encourage Ramon and Smith to do this too, going to start exercising some discretion and sticky articles for some period of time based on how much apparent effort went into them and how provocative to engagement they have been up to that point.
So let’s try that out starting now and you tell me if it’s a good move after a chunk of time.
Okay Jim, take a look, got a featured author thing on the top right and I’m stickying two posts (I think no more than two a time, and no more than maybe two days for the same post, should be stickied, and I’m reluctant to bump up the number of posts on the index higher than ten). For now at least, is this apparently a satisfactory resolution (in contrast to the resolution of the Surface RT lol)? And does anybody object to such post favoritism?
Also, would it kill you to come up with a more happenin’ avatar please?
Oh man I was wondering why such a sudden increase in articles. I guess this explains it. Who is running the show now?
Good question. Not easy to answer in a way that won’t confuse you even more.
Basically Anthony, Ramon is editor in chief, Smith is the owner and possessor of “final cut” which he exercises infrequently, David’s a high-ranking ehh figure and I’m the unstable capo slash go-to-guy who thinks he’s smarter than everyone except for maybe Stephen.
Oh wow I thought my stomach was grumbling like crazy. Turns out it was just a weedwacker. “We’ve all been there,” right?
I think we all just hit a wall. Hopefully we’re over it. I suppose there will always be slow news days.
Basically we’d like both paths to be number one. Then again seeing as how RIM tanked with the CO-CEO thing we might want to learn from history so as not to repeat it.
Commenting is crucial because something might be missing from the article that a commenter could bring to the table. A different viewpoint so to speak that would illicit a response from a reader.
I don’t think Surur have balls to come between you and Smith. 😀
Maybe this is Surur’s way of saying “no comment” which would be funny given my interest in getting comments.
There is definitely a correlation between the number of articles and traffic.