The idea here is straightforward. As a newspaper grows in size, eventually it gets to the point where a single folded stack of newsprint is too cumbersome. That means distributing it as a group of folded stacks of newsprints, folded together.
And long ago, it was discovered that a good way to organize those distinct folded stacks of newsprint was to make each stack as "section", with its own distinctive area of interest. This allows an individual to quickly get to the material they are interested in.
Of course, there is still a Front Page, on the front of the folded stack of newsprint that is folded on the outside of the pile.
That's the gist of this proposal. Set up some broad sections, and allow TU's to vote on which section a diary should be in, when they recommend a diary. The top recommended diaries in each section make up the front page of that section, and the recent diaries that have received the largest number of the recommendations as being for that section make up the "recent diary" list at the side of that section.
Details below the fold.
Rationale
The Daily Kos has clearly outgrown the constraints of its present "virtual" stack of pages, as was shown quite clearly in the blogasm over the Pailin Pick ... (terminology? After the convention, that might have to be the Pailin Drill) ... well, in my own personal view at least.
My personal view is formed in part from spending a number of months mostly accessing the Daily Kos via tagpages and a subscriber list. As I may have mentioned one or two dozens of times during the final phase of the primary contest, I cast my vote in early March and was going to be voting for the nominee in either event, so I had no pressing interest in following the day to day of the last few months of the primary season.
And so I was mostly bypassing the front page and going directly into tagpage links like dKos Environment on my browser bookmark folder toolbar.
With the run-up into the conventions and a much better teaching schedule this quarter, I had been reading the front page of dKos much more regularly over August, and so I was aware of the Palin blogasm.
So that, in part, is my perspective ... a regular in a number of tagpage ghettos who brought that perspective back to looking at the Daily Kos frontpage with increasing regularity and then into watching the Palin blogasm unfold.
And in my view, Sectioning might well have avoided the worst of the problem, at least from the view of a casual onlooker at the Daily Kos (as opposed to a 24/7 inhabitant) ... which is that the recent diary list is flooded with a long stream of almost content free Open Thread Comments, flushing the real recent diaries down the drain.
In other words, the basic community blog model that the Daily Kos uses is probably well suited to a community blog with 5% of the participants of this site ... but having a community blog with this many participants muddle through with that same model is like trying to have an elephant ride an off-the-shelf tricycle. You want an elephant to ride a tricycle, you are much better off with a trike custom-built for the elephant.
Concept
The basic idea is that someone opens the front page of the Daily Kos, and at the top of the front page is a set of tabs, with the "current" tab at the far left reading "Front Page".
Then there are four more tabs across:
- Hot Topic
- Politics
- Policy
- Community
I'm going to be loose about the definition of what goes into each section, because in this proposal, in reality, what goes in each section will be precisely what the balance of TU's thinks belong in each section.
That is, in practice what happens is that when a TU clicks "recommend" on a diary, it opens up a drop down menu, and they pick which section it is recommended for. So that no matter what how the description is written, if the community decides to use it slightly or substantially different, its the active participants who in reality decide.
Hot Topic: Diaries on a breaking story or event, which would otherwise flood the recent diary list of their section.
Politics: Political Strategy, Tactics, Polling, Fund-raising, Frameshopping, etc.
Policy: Both specific policy proposals and the broader information base that underlies specific policy proposals, including the basic knowledge of science and history without which we risk inventing a new mistake or repeating the mistakes of the past (or inventing a new mistake in a way that has been done repeatedly in our history).
Community: The social ties that bind ... where I am thinking mostly of the regular series like dKos University.
Each section would have the same layout as the Daily Kos Front Page. The display diaries are the most recommended diaries for the section, and the "recent diary" list is filtered down to those recent diaries that have received recommendations for the section.
How Does This Proposal Change The Front Page?
It adds that tab bar to the front page. That's it. Nothing else changes. In particular, the reclist, which is common to all sections, does not discriminate between recommends by section ... for the reclist, and therefore for the impact of a recommendation on the front page, a rec is a rec is a rec.
How Does This Proposal Change Tags?
Not one whit or tittle in terms of the technical structure of the tagcloud. However, in making recent diaries in a particular general area available for longer on the recent diary list, it could lead to those with a knowledge of an area having easier access to diaries in that area, which ought to be good in general for the quality of tagging.
Does this Proposal Divide the Daily Kos up?
Not that I can see. Nobody who accesses the Daily Kos through the front page is going to see any difference. It might, however, lead to greater turnover in reclist diaries, since some of the diaries that have greater exposure as the display diaries in the individual sections might build up momentum in their sections and get into the reclist, where today the same diary is likely to be restricted to a relatively small circle of tagpage readers and subscribers to the diarist.
How Would This Proposal Be Implemented?
Well, I guess the diary database would have to be extended to include a section count to track how many votes a diary has received for each section. And the code would have to be written to generate a section, based on those votes.
Also, the Rec button code would have to be rewritten to implement the drop down menu for TU's.
Because of the addition to the database, this is a change that would be far easier to implement as part of a version upgrade than as a free-standing modification, which makes it most natural to roll it out with Version 4, which is slated for after the General Election.
Why Should I have to bother with a drop down menu to rec a diary?
IMAO (in my arrogant opinion), if you are a TU and you cannot be bothered to go through the massive effort of picking a section from a drop down menu, you are recommending too damn many diaries now.
Conclusion of the Prelude
Obviously, any diary like this is either a non-entity or the prelude to a discussion of what participants would like to see. So this is either a prelude to nothing or merely a discussion starter.
So restart discussing.