Hi all, I'd like to introduce myself, I just joined. My name is Terren Suydam (username mmmmbacon). I love what I'm seeing here, and I'm looking forward to jumping in. Howard Dean brought me here, but the possibility of helping to transform the democratic process and bring power to the little guy is what has really intrigued me.
I have a question or two about Josh's post. Please forgive me if this has been covered. See inline comments. > As I see it there are two purposes to having MetaDean "rate" content: > > 1) To tell what's hot, popular, kickin' etc. (most important) > > 2) To allow for some kind of editorial comment on content (e.g. "Be > aware of this awful news article; it's a complete hack job.") and then... > Item #2 is encapsulated in the normal blog format. We have to trust > that we're smart enough and tasteful enough to do our own > editorializing. If someone just links to a dean-bashing article, pretty > soon someone will pick it apart in their blog, and then that blog > content becomes the hot link. What if we made it easy for consumers of stories to rate them? Perhaps we can offer this easily to sites that want to implement the Drupal software this group is creating. Having separate ratings - one determined algorithmically, and one determined by users - might help people to understand better what they're clicking on. Imagine if every feed displayed by MetaDean had two ratings underneath it: 'quality' (user-voting) and 'meme strength' (algorithmic). (I know, 'meme strength' is too nerdy. I can't think of a normal word that captures it quite so non-judgementally.) But this might help alleviate the potentially embarrasing possibility that Dean-bashing stuff winds up all over the top nodes as 'hot links', not to mention give a programmatic way to provide user feedback of content (for participating websites, anyway). Terren __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
