Leaderboard - by Patrick Thornton on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 18:53 - 0 Comments
Leaderboard for week of 11-17-08: blog back edition
This week we examine some new ways to get people talking.
You’ll see some familiar faces and a new one. All three are beat bloggers worth flowingly on a daily basis. They have so many lessons to teach us all.
We tackle cultivating communities and the wisdom of the crowd this week. Keep sending those nominees in!
Jon Ortiz | Sacramento Bee
- Ortiz recently launched a cool new feature, “blog backs.” It’s a great feature to spur better communication and conversations with users.
- This is how Ortiz describes blog backs: “review your thoughtful and provocative online comments, amplify points, answer questions, correct our mistakes and humbly accept your warranted criticism.”
- He takes good comments from users, elevates them and then responds to them. He also links back to the original post that spurred each comment.
- This feature is a bit like hoisting comments. But the added twist of responding to and clarifying users comments makes this a much richer feature.
Brian Krebs | The Washington Post
- Krebs runs the Security Fix blog. It’s a fantastic computer security beat blog. Almost any beat can benefit from the wisdom of the crowd, but a beat like computer security can really benefit from that wisdom. Slashdot has proven over the years that it takes a community of computer and technology experts and geeks to accurately understand many computer and technology topics.
- Krebs deserves making the Leaderboard for his work on exposing a U.S. Web hosting firm, McColo Corp., that security experts said was responsible for more than 75% of global junk mail. But this nomination goes beyond that.
- Because Krebs has cultivated a strong community, he is able to get first-hand accounts from users about how their network spam has dropped dramatically. Krebs and his community can tell a much richer portrait of this and other stories than either could do alone.
- Krebs has created a community of knowledgeable users that can help him report and share links and information with each other. He mixes it up in the comments after his posts with users and often provides more information and links. There are some really great conversations going on Security Fix.
Monica Guzman | Seattle Post-Intelligencer
- Guzman is one of the best in the business when it comes to cultivating a community. She had two nominees this week for the Leaderboard.
- This post (”Should civil rights be up for popular vote?“) probably didn’t take Guzman a lot of time to create, but it accomplishes two things. First, it links to interesting content from the Post-Intelligencer that has already been created and drives to traffic to that content. Second, it has been a major conversation starter. Proposition 8 has been a hot-button issue around the country.
- Her other nominee, “Spare some change for Starbucks?” is another fantastic way to get people talking and consuming more Post-Intelligencer content. This post was spurred by a story that said Starbucks’ profits dropped 97 percent, reader reaction to that story and a witty editorial cartoon. She used those three to get people talking some more. Part of cultivating a community is knowing what gets people talking.
Subscribe to BeatBlogging.Org via RSS.
Leave a Reply