Building a Better OmniNerd Society

I'm not actually a communist, far from it, though I have been known to enjoy the film Red Heat on occasion.

As for real matters, the whole democratic aspect to O-Nerd seems most vexing to me. On the one hand, it seems that we would want to keep people's Nerdlogs away from moderation, but would people want the ability to vote up a particularly good log and have it appear as a link on the main page?

I think the NerdLog is a great way to get people's feet wet and perhaps coax them into greater site participation.

have you considered just allowing more random thoughts on this site? more blog-like, with people posting their individual thoughts more than news or other topics. That's why MySpace has been soo successful.

I would like to see more options for email notifications. Right now by default you receive an email when someone replies to your comment. It would be nice to be able to "watch" a news post and receive an email notification whenever a comment is placed, even if it is not in response to your comment.

They may be kind of all-over-the-place, and might even contradict one another, but here are some thoughts:

• I’d like there to be something on a coffeeshop topic or news post that indicates what section of OmniNerd you are in. As it is now, if you visit one of those pages and it’s your first time to O-Nerd, you may not have a clear way to determine if what you’re looking at is all OmniNerd does or what.
• The user should be able to insert information on the books in their booklist so as to to be able to easily insert full references from them into articles.
• The comment section on articles needs to be more visible.
• OmniMarkup should have the ability to create tables.
• O-Nerd should provide code to allow other sites to have “submit to O-Nerd” buttons.
• It should be more obvious how to contact the author of a particular article.

Also, some thoughts I've received from others:

• Be able to add links to the poll questions and options.
• A “From the Archives” section on the front page to highlight past content that may be worthy of review due to current events/discussions.

I would like to see V3 block registered users from making anonymous comment! If they try, system will show user IP and handle.

I would be tickled if you could somehow get the tag that classifies O-nerd as "personal or discussion pages" removed so that I could get passed the damn WebSense fascists that the Army pays to ruin my O-nerd fun at work. Maybe this could be "news and ...." something or other.

Long time reader, first time commenter. Just wanted to mention that I like OmniNerd the way it is. This isn't to say that I'm against changing it, though I would suggest sticking with the same basic administration type (oligarchy) and policies. I'd hate to see OmniNerd become diluted and defocused as the result of 'popular demand', which I believe could happen if you go too far in the democracy direction. I'd rather have a small number of people doing legwork to select content than rely on mob rule (voting) from anybody who cares to vote. I don't have any data to support this, but it seems to me that lots of voting might have a normalizing effect on the content and the community (well, I guess k5 comes to mind).

Thanks!

-Andre

A few thoughts on NerdRank and comment scoring. Currently comments are scored by a dozen or so arbitrators, moderators and admins. All comments get scored and they are usually scored pretty quick. Should all users be able to score comments and if so how should the scoring work?

There are various ways a comment might be scored. For example, a comment may start off with a score of 1 and then users could vote on the comment, increasing or decreasing the score by one each time. Digg does it this way. For this type of comment scoring you need a ton of users or most comments will not get scored. SEOmoz also does it this way. Their traffic is closer to OmniNerd than Digg (but still higher) and most of their comments are left with a default score of one. For example, in this post that I wrote (ironically about Digg comments) only 13 of 42 comments received something other than the default score. Only 4 comments had more than one vote.

Another way to vote on comments is for each user to rate the comment on a scale. For example, check out this blog post about Brandon's mortgage article on Get Rich Slowly. At the bottom of the post you can give the post from 1-5 stars and the average score is shown. (currently 6 votes, 3.33 out of 5--let's vote it up!) Anyway, something like that could be merged with the current comment voting system. All users could rate a comment using the current framework and an average presented which includes the number of people voting. Do you also want to consider rating news posts and articles, not just comments?

When I first heard about NerdRank I thought no one would care about it. I was wrong. People care about leader boards. Like a video game, people are motivated by seeing their name more up the charts. The challenge, then, is to have NerdRank calculated and presented in such a way that it creates maximum motivation to contribute frequent quality content. I noticed over at SEOmoz that once they started using the comment scoring system I mentioned earlier that the quantity of comments just about doubled. Each comment is automatically worth a point and moves you up the leaderboard. There are also incentives if you reach a certain number of points. I think there would be some value in changing NerdRank so that it is easier to see changes. For example, instead of NR7 you could be NR7.432. You could watch that number change every time you submit news or make a comment--not delayed 48 hours. Right now the changes are probably too slow for most people to notice.

Current dates and timestamps are based on CST. What about the ability to change your time zone in your preferences to reflect your location?

I read OmniNerd, and I can comment.

I don't know how to get more than one comment to show

and I know there must be more comments out there.

I see the -1, 5 and all those cues,

but don't know how to use it.

I guess I'm just not enough of a nerd to cut it.

There are obviously oodles of promotional venues through which we can get users to assist with promoting the site. We already have automated links for Digg, Delicious and Reddit. Would it make any sense add additional promotional tools like Netscape, StumbleUpon, etc?

At first, the answer is no. It's pretty evident that virtually nobody really helps to promote OmniNerd's material. But we could add to the preferences an option to "turn off" those promotional links so that they at least disappear for users that have no interest in helping.

Just a thought. Of course, perhaps there's a way to give credit for actively promoting the site by detecting the promotional click?