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BUZZYEAH

Andrew Meyer's blog focused on innovative solutions, disruptors, exploring his genome, technology and the 'under $2 crowd'.

Excellent Reader Comment On “Make PressDemocrat.com Better, Pt 1″September 17

Reader comment:

"You make some strong points. The Press Democrat has a long ways to go. And I'm not just saying that because you advocate for me to have a bigger presence in the publication. ;)
The one thing you left out was the need to improve our forums and comments. Right now the comments are often vile attacks against victims, professionals, and way too often minority groups. Very few tools have been given to online readers to help police the forums -- and they don't appear to be effective. In my opinion, our comment section in its current iteration drops the overall value of the online publication.
I'd also be interested in hearing you expand on your definition of "real blogs." Because while I don't have a blog, both Beck and Maiocco do. And Maiocco's blog drives HUGE traffic to the Web site. I don't have the exact numbers, but I think it's fair to say his blog contributes a double-digit percentage of traffic. That said, the blogs are fairly basic, text-oriented pages, with few options for us to expand on. What more would you like to see on the blogs?"

Originally posted as a comment by Nathan Halverson on BUZZYEAH using Disqus.

My

Make PressDemocrat.com Better, Pt 2: Improve Comments, Improve ConversationsSeptember 17

If you read Pt 1, you'll know that I'm a lifelong Press Democrat reader and interested in making PressDemocrat.com better. In the post, I talked about four areas where PD.com could make their site more Internet friendly.

This post is going to look at a more defined area on PressDemocrat.com: Comments. I've heard plenty grumblings (here, here and here) about the conversations in the comments section on PD.com. If you improve the comments section, it should improve the conversations. Here are a few suggestions:

1) Location, location, location
2) Timely conversation
3) Community moderation, including voting and flagging
4) Etiquette, moderation rules up front and center
5) Reader profiles (i.e. accountability)

Now with more explanation:

1) Location, location, location

On all

Make PressDemocrat.com Better, Pt 1: Internet FriendlySeptember 13

I've been a lifelong reader of Sonoma County's Press Democrat newspaper. Still remember waking up before school and following PD coverage of the Polly Klaas case when I was 9 years old.

Nowadays I read my newspaper online. NYT, WaPost, WSJ, etc. I don't have a subscription to a single print newspaper. This means that I also read the Press Democrat online, too.

The trouble is that the PressDemocrat.com seems to be an afterthought. It doesn't feel to be born of the web. It's stiff and clunky. It feels as if the print articles were copy-and-pasted to PD.com since it's 2008 and "you got to be online".

For instance, my mom will email me that I need to read a specific PD article in "today's paper". So, I'll jump online and browse the PD.com headlines and use the site's search feature to find the article. But, I usually come up empty-handed. That is until I jump over to Google and do an extreme search function like:

site:http://www.pressdemocrat.com "car crash in Windsor"

Anyways, my point is that PressDemocrat.com needs to become more Internet friendly. How

Choice Links From My Twitter AccountSeptember 7

Here is a wad of interesting links I shared via my @andrwmyr Twitter account over the past few weeks. Enjoy.

Bobcats squat foreclosed home in Lake Elsinore. http://bit.ly/2WiyvB @pichot Probably already found O'Reilly's Obama interview, but here's a link: http://bit.ly/oreilly @paperwords Your Carl Malamud article is on Techmeme: http://bit.ly/4pvX09. You should write a real blog for PressDemo. @andrwmyr will blindly hype anything TVOTR creates (even before he's done listening to new leaked song): http://bit.ly/tvotr The new SoCo Sheriff's website looks great: http://sonomasheriff.org. Nice work, @mikeshelby. Thx for heads up, @lauranorton. Tiger Woods, Karl Lagerfeld, Giorgio Armani, Brad Pitt, etc, building hotels/golf courses in Dubai. What housing slump? http://bit.ly/XFJgk Trying 2 follow @graygoose an open source cyber warfare project to figure out cyberstrikes on Georgia. http://tinyurl.com/5f7ggj

A Comment RebloggedAugust 28

Blog commenting system Disqus introduced Disqus 2.0 a couple of weeks ago. And, I left the following comment on their post announcing the updgrade:

Now, what if you gave commenters the option to simultaneously post their comment to their own blog as a blog post. Whoa... that would blow my mind.

Originally posted as a comment by Andrew Meyer on DISQUS Blog using Disqus.

Little did I know that Disqus was about to release a reblogging comments feature. Disqus announced the feature as a comment on Fred Wilson's blog that they immediately reblogged to their own blog.

How does it work? Just click "reblog" on any Disqus comment and you can post the comment to your own blog. Is a reblogging comments feature beneficial? Who knows. We'll see.