A couple non-flood things:
In response to the questions about the SoLo blog floating around, I don't know much more than you folks. I need to email Ambrose Fulton and see if I can find out what's up. I know the blog shows up as locked to non-admins, but as I am an admin of SoLo I can tell you that there's nothing new up there. I suppose this is a way to essentially take the blog down, but without losing all the data, or allowing some cyber squatter to come in and take over the address. I'll let you folks know if I hear from Ambrose Fulton.
Also, today the QCTimes publicly revealed their new social networking website, Quadsville.com. If you have a QCTimes.comments user name, you're already signed up for it. The website is obviously not as in-depth as something like MySpace or FaceBook, but it certainly does fill some needs. Frequently you could tell that commenters on the QCTimes website wanted to chat amongst themselves, not necessarily about a particular newspaper article. Prior to Quadsville, there really wasn't a way to do this. There were no profiles associated with the user names, nowhere to give someone your email address without giving it to everyone on the internet, etc. Now not only can people private message back and forth, they can start groups, discussion threads, or blogs of their own. A group of folks called the Quadsville Council will try to moderate things and keep a handle on offensive material and such. It also allows you to post and share pictures and movies. I've already started a group called "People who actually like Davenport" to give people who may disagree with the flood of online negativity about our city. 14 members and counting! I suppose Jim Fisher and Keith need to start the opposite group: "People who seem to despise the Quad Cities and never say anything positive about them." That's a pretty long group name though.
The website's worth checking out, and it will be neat to see how it evolves as more of the thousands of QCTimes commenters get involved.
3 comments:
Yeah, I'm a registered online user and I received the email the other day about it too. My first reaction was of a bit of apprehension. For my personal online viewing "world" or "style," it seems like something that could quickly grow to become too large for my tastes – something that would mean even more time online keeping up on things. I guess the multi-faceted plan seems to much for me. it's like Flickr, Myspace, Yahoo or Google Groups, and whatever else all rolled into one, all moderated by people who work for the Times (at least I think it's run by them). I know Melissa personally and like her, but I think I'd rather keep in-the-know via local bloggers doing their own things with their own sites. Maybe it's the DIY punk ethic that was instilled in me long ago.
On the other hand, it's like you're saying... it gives people like you, who made a wonderful group called "People Who Actually Like Davenport," a forum for an audience that is potentially much larger than any individual blog.
All in all, I'll probably watch for any visual-arts related discussions for a week or so, but my hunch is that if those discussions don't happen on the Reader, they won't happen on Quadsville.
Guess what "boom"town Davenport street front business is going to be the next to close. Reward, free membership at QCI's Quadsville Junction.
Hi Matt-
We'll be doing outreach to a bunch of local groups in the coming weeks, which hopefully will get some discussions going around the topics you mention. Melissa has a keen interest in those specifically.
All of the sites you mention have pretty much the exact same feature set that we do - groups, photos, videos, text posting and comments. It's our intent to stay focused on people with interest in the QC community.
The main key right now is just allowing people to have profiles and backchannel communications. Hopefully some of the rancor we've seen on the comments will eventually subside (although a lot of the tone you see has to do with the subject matter at hand).
And don't worry, we won't tell the punk police if you stop by now and then. I'll leave it out of the next MRR scene report. ;)
Great feedback, and thanks for the notice QCI.
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