Stap isi

3 January 2010

Baboons! Baby-snatchers! Bashi-bazouks!

The raw number of comments on a blog or forum isn’t necessarily an indicator of its success or failure. But it’s one of those metrics that carry a lot of weight. Compared to pageviews, they often look disappointing! What’s good?

The Sydney Morning Herald is a high volume site. Last week, according to Hitwise, it was the 17th most visited in Australia.

Matt Crozier of Bang The Table blogged about the number of comments it had received on its most discussed stories in 2009:

1. Roads are for cars, not Lycra louts – 478 comments
2. Internet censorship plan gets the green light – 459 comments
3. Your call is important to us – 435 comments
4. Cyclists do not have the same rights as motorists on roads – 412 comments
5. Hated without cause: faith’s high price – 363 comments
6. A plague of atheists has descended, and Catholics are the target – 331 comments
7. Science cooks the books, driving sensible people to screaming point – 316 comments
8. Sharia in Australia: sanity or shocking? – 308 comments
9. God is good, but just be sure not to take Him too literally – 293 comments
10. Cyber attacks smite atheist websites – 287 comments

Crozier compares the ratio of comments to visits with Bang The Table’s busiest consultations – “way less visitors than the newspapers and way more comments” – and suggests that people are more likely to participate if the decision makers are present. Score one for community engagement.

“If we think someone who has influence is listening to what we have to say then many more people will participate by commenting or voting.”

The SMH also attracts a very broad audience – with an accompanying shallowness when it comes to local or niche issues.

This story about a Sydney council attracted 76 comments – a significant number. But how would you rate the usefulness of the comments if they were part of your council’s planning or consultation process?

Compare with this discussion taking place amongst a much smaller group. There’s a good number of comments, perhaps more than would be posted on a council web space, and with a high ratio of quality to quantity.

Seems to me that:

1. no matter the raw number, we should value constructive comments highly because they are clearly difficult to elicit (whether online or in person); and
2. in some circumstances there will be more value in working with one or more existing communities than building our own sites.

— b3rn   comments, web metrics   Jan 3, 12:01 PM   #   Comment

26 July 2009

Hansard for commenters

A NSW public service manager made this comment on The Hon Penny Sharpe MLC’s blog post about NSW Public Sphere:

Transparency and access are both 2-sided. Somewhere, it would be great to see a discussion about how departments avoid being tied up by citizens who get new, ever more public channels to push their own grievance? Particularly when there is no underlying basis, as sometimes happens. This small percentage of people can consume large amounts of time at current levels of access and transparency. Look at how some are adept at getting issues into the media which is, after all, interested in stories that get attention in preference to injustice and inequity per se. The number of stories in the existing media is disproportionately weighted compared to the total volume of public administration, large parts of which are both efficient and equitable. Esp the more sensationalist media. Its the side to access that we don’t like to talk about much. What happens when these citizens participate?

I like the Guardian’s community features and particularly the way comments made across the site are aggregated and displayed on a page generated for the user.

… just as every guardian.co.uk author gets a contributor page in which their contributions are archived so that their participation can be explored across topics and over time, so should our users. — Meg Pickard, 19 August 2008

There are technical challenges – you’re publishing across multiple platforms (website, satellite sites, proprietary backend systems) and you’d want to consider extending aggregation to collect contributions from constituents’ own spaces.

But if we agree that OpenAustralia is ‘a good thing’ then we should start looking at the other side of the conversation.

Your comments stand as a public record of your participation on the site: think Hansard, for commenters. — Guardian Community FAQ

— b3rn   comments, community, identity, moderation, publicsphere   Jul 26, 10:44 AM   #   Comment

24 March 2009

How do you deal with nutters?

You can’t avoid them. At some point – probably about 10 minutes after you open a forum or blog – they’re going to make themselves known. And they don’t stop.

The main cost of nutters is time. They send you and your colleagues on wild goose chases. But nutters – even being nutters – will have something to contribute. How do you draw out or corral constructive input?

Here are some suggestions on dealing with nutters from my friends (some of them community managers, others nutters):

1. give them a damned good listening to;
2. ignore them; or
3. out-nutter them.

If you’re a parent, you know the parent thing:

1. reward the constructive;
2. ignore the provocative; and
3. enforce the rules when they are broken.

If you’re a parent, you also know that’s easier said than done!

Giving it time is another strategy. You hope that the group becomes self-moderating. Reputation systems can be helpful, but ultimately your community needs enough contributions across the scale so that the extremes are seen to be so.

Good levels of participation and an active, enagaged community are probably the best bet against nutters. And there’s a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow.

— b3rn   comments, community, moderation   Mar 24, 11:50 PM   #   Comment [2]

19 October 2008

Comment everywhere

The Guardian has extended the functionality and improved the information design of its community features.

The site as a whole is exceptional – see the tagging scheme for aggregating related information, the RSS feeds for almost everything and the rich yet composed front page. If you’re building or evaluating content management systems, see how the Guardian’s web platform evolved for a valuable real world case study.

But here I want to focus on their implementation of user comments, profiles and clippings. It’s how I think a Council website should work!

• Comments are not restricted to blog posts. People can respond to multiple information types.
• A person’s contributions across all information types is aggregated and accessible from their user profile.

Continued...

— b3rn   blogging, comments, identity   Oct 19, 07:28 PM   #   Comment