Salon weblogs integration
Posted on July 25, 2002 @ 15:24 in General
Yesterday Dave Winer announced a deal between Salon.com and Radio Userland, providers of fine weblog software. Radio Userland is providing Salon.com with software and services so that Salon can offer their customers Salon Blogs. I must say I have some mixed feelings about this. On the one hand it's nice to see a fairly high profile operation such as Salon offer a place and in a sense some credibility to weblogging. On the other hand, there's one main problem IMHO with the current Salon Blogs system: they're not integrated with the rest of the Salon site.
Take a stroll around Salon's website. On the frontpage you'll currently find a couple of links about the launch of the Salon Blogs and in the sidebar there are some links to the Blogs section. On other pages however (such as the News index) you'll find no links or hints towards the blog section of the site. The Blogs are not in the site header either. The search page doesn't seem to search or index the blogs. I don't know what further plans Salon has, but for the moment they are simply another company offering a blog hosting service. And not very interesting one either...
Okay, there is a recently changed weblogs page and a most-read rankings page, but if you decide to read one of those blogs the URI looks something like: blogs.salon.com/00001084/. Hardly enticing in a game that's partly (or wholly?) about the ego. You want a personal, telling URI for your blog, right? Something like blogs.salon.com/BlogsOfSteel maybe.
Next, since you're paying for this service, you probably want more control over your page. Maybe you want to lose the Salon.com header bar that runs over your blog. What?! Yeah, the blogs are almost nowhere on the Salon.com website, but Salon is pretty much all over the blogs, inescapably so. Are they just interested in driving more traffic to Salon over the backs of their bloggers? That would, I think, be a very Bad Idea. Why? Well, it looks like a rather shallow and greedy business model to me, but more importantly, Salon seems to be missing the opportunities these blogs offer on a very fundamental level.
Weblogs are hailed as a radical new form of publishing that possibly threatens more traditional forms of publishing. Apart from this repeating of rhetoric, it seems to me that Salon now finds itself in the unique position to explore how weblogs and a more traditional publication can feed off eachother. And this has to do with integration.
What kind of integration? Well, as a MovableType user, the recently introduced TrackBack functionality comes to mind first and foremost. TrackBack allows for two-way (peer-to-peer) communication between weblogs, or more specifically, between individual entries in those weblogs (see it in action here). This system would allow the Salon bloggers to link to Salon.com content and reversely, would allow Salon.com to show which blogs (which entries more specifically) are currently linking to their articles. Information would be immediately and visibly contextualized, amplified and extended. Seeing a link to your own blog show up with Salon content would be a big motivation for the bloggers, while in reverse, Salon could set up a system where they prioritize certain high quality entries or bloggers, drawing on the potential of the bloggers and offering more diverse and indepth context for their content. Such a system would create a symbiotic relationship between Salon and their bloggers. Primary (prime?) content would still be Salon's, but the context would be the bloggers'.
TrackBack is a versatile and open-standards (XML) system and it could be developed in many interesting ways, but any (intelligent) system that would integrate the work of the bloggers with Salon's content would do the trick I think. I simply use TrackBack to make my point that Salon could stand to benefit from drawing on the immense capital of their community (to be) of bloggers (and possibly spark another small revolution in publishing). It would be a shame to see this opportunity for both the bloggers and Salon go to waste.
Comments and Trackbacks
Thanks for the thoughts and feedback on Salon blogs. Let me respond on a couple of points:
(1) Integration: This is something we're going to be experimenting with a lot in coming weeks and months. Getting pages into our search engine, for instance, isn't so easy; our search engine doesn't work very well at all right now, even for Salon pages. Our development team is a lot smaller than it was 2 years ago! Give it time.
(2) The Salon nav bar is on the default blogs template but it takes about 30 seconds for a Radio user to delete it and replace it with whatever he or she might want. We viewed this as a simple service for users who wish to associate themselves with Salon, not a land grab.
(3) Trackback is very cool, and we'll be exploring ideas like this as we continue to experiment with Salon Blogs.
Posted by scott rosenberg on July 25, 2002 @ 16:21
Sounds exciting. I'll be watching with interest what's going to happen on Salon :)
Obviously I haven't tried out the system myself and all the blogs I looked at had the Salon bar at the top of the page. It's good that the users have a choice of keeping it there or not. Apologies if I sound a bit harsh in my post.
Posted by Frank on July 26, 2002 @ 00:22
Frank Schaap offers some observant criticism of the way Salon has (not) integrated their weblogs experiment into the Salon site
Trackback from The One True b!X on July 26, 2002 @ 01:35
Interesting article from Frank Schaap. Checking his rss/xml feed & Trackback feature :-)
Trackback from AroundMyRoom on July 26, 2002 @ 12:48
Frank Schaap talks about Salon's new Salon Blogs, and gives Salon some pointers on how to improve the new service.
Trackback from Life ongoing, and other tragic comedies... on July 26, 2002 @ 17:15
Salon.com kooperiert nun mit Userland und bietet einen Blog Community Server an. Allerdings läßt der Service wohl noch zu wünschen übrig.
Trackback from BlogHaus on July 27, 2002 @ 12:52
i couldn't help noticing that the url associated with scott's name in his reply is a vanity address (rosenberg.salon.com) that resolves to his blog-serial-number-type address.
i wonder if salon will be offering similar options to their nonemployee bloggers? that is, could blogistan.salon.com resolve to my blog, for example?
i guess i should be asking scott, this!
Posted by xian on July 30, 2002 @ 16:59
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Comments and trackbacks have been closed on this site. My apologies.
Since MT-Blacklist inexplicably stopped working I had no other recourse than close comments and trackbacks to stop the spam. I've been meaning to correct this for quite a while, but life got in the way... in a good way I should add.