the future of planner reads is in your hands
November 4th, 2009 • posts i've written
I’m meeting with my developer pal later this week to talk about the next phase of PlannerReads.com and I need your two cents.
The site’s been live for about a month and a half and we’ve made steady strides growing traffic and contributors (71 in all!)… a big thank you to everyone that has shared the site.
We still have a good deal of work ahead to make the site a truly valuable resource for the planning and strategy community, but we’re committed to seeing this through.
Directions we’re considering (please jump in the comments and toss your support to ideas you want to see pursued)
– More in-depth profiles for the contributors of the site and more information on where visitors can find you across the web
– A rating/leaderboard system for contributors, who is sharing the best content first (best as in shared by other users)?
– A rating/leaderboard system for the sources linked to and shared; what sites are hot for our community this month?
– Adding more interaction to the site: can visitors vote up posts/contributors/sources?
– Adding other sources of sharing; should tweets count towards posts/sources?
– Questions/Polls (is there a weekly question we can pose to all visitors that would be valuable for the community?)
– Editorial, would you like to see more interviews with planners and discussions on the future of the industry?
– Portability, would you like a better conditioned RSS feed or an email newsletter with a weekly round-up of top posts?
Alright, let me know what I missed and what you think in the comments!
*quick tip: use the search on plannerreads.com to find articles about topics you’re interested in, like mobile, for instance.
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11 Responses (add your comment)
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Some great ideas.
My favorites: rating up and down posts, leaderboard for contributors (little planning competition never hurts), and a RSS feed (really, really would like one of these).
I dislike the idea of bringing in twitter. It just takes away from the sites main intention of sharing blog posts. I also think it dilutes the quality of site (no offense to anyone’s twitter postings).
Profiles would be nice but I could see it spiraling out of control and being a major time suck as this grows in popularity. Perhaps a profile section similar to on Twitter so that it is simple and short.
A leaderboard for posts could lead us all to looking at the same sites, and that would be bad for having diverse posts.
And thanks again for setting this up!
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I’ve signed up and I’m sharing (and thus contributing), however I’m not a regular reader of the feed as there’s too much content for me right now. I don’t know what the algorithm is right now, everything that gets shared is added or everything that is shared more than once? I think the selection criteria need to be a bit tighter, maybe shared 5 times, or different feeds based on the amount of times items got shared. So you’d have the main one with everything that’s shared, the feed with minimum twice shared, three times shared (just thinking out loud here). I realize this is solved in the website, however as Mike I need a way to pull this into my Google reader. But great work and keep it up!
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there were some things I thoght about some time ago, and having looked over your to-dos, I figure I can do well to put in some functionality stuff. but I cant think of any for now. so i’ll get back to ya
one quick thing tho, definitely think that stuff we tweet can be also brought into the fold, as long as it matches with our share profile correctly, so it matters not where the share came from. And of course this assumes what we share is stuff we read. Would help bump numbers I’d think, and help the algorithm.
Functionality wise, need a drop down or contributer list, and if you are doing the list you might as well make it like a leaderboard or a daytum display.
Also check with the content display (which I guess you will be doing), but for instance: individual posts have their original source listed at the bottom as a truncated hyperlink. Possible to make this be the actual page title and not “…”-ed?
rest of layout and colours are wonderful actually. I’m not so concerned about about a rating system as I think it may override the foundation of working with the contributions. But tweet includes should definitely help there. Plus you dont want someone to game the rating. let it grow organically.
TAGS: im sure what we have shared has tags, the original posts have tags, we should have tags repped, if even on rollover or something, in each post and definitely anotehr section,, similar to the contributers/leaderboard that shows tags. this can tie into “most popular subject this past month” stuff, and maybe that can be something folks have a discussion on, or not?
thats it for now. ecuse mah type-ohs
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If “all of the above” isn’t an option, I’ll go with:
– Editorial, would you like to see more interviews with planners and discussions on the future of the industry?
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I agree with Rick. I would like to see more interviews with planners–from around the world. It would be interesting to see what peers on the other hemispheres feel about the future of advertising.
‘Spur’ by Red Scout is a good start, though.
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Helge Tennø November 5, 2009at 12:04 pm
A great initiative which I am truly appreciating every day. So all thanks to you and your pal!
As feedback I’d like to say I favor stuff that “games” things. So anything adding ratings or leader board structures to people or sources would be nice.
Would also like the feature “number of people who shared this”, so that it’s easy to filter out the stuff that a lot of people like from the stuff that just one or two likes. Find this could be a good filtering mechanism.
As a comment to the Twitter thing, I would say “Keep it clean”. Make a tool that’s really good at doing ONE thing. If there is an interest for plannerreads twitterfeed, why not just set up a twitterlist with the people already sharing stuff in it.
Again, thanks for a brilliant initiative..
Best
Helge -
My votes go to:
- More in-depth profiles for the contributors of the site and more information on where visitors can find you across the web
– A rating/leaderboard system for the sources linked to and shared; what sites are hot for our community this month?
– Adding more interaction to the site: can visitors vote up posts/contributors/sources?
– Adding other sources of sharing; should tweets count towards posts/sources?
– Questions/Polls (is there a weekly question we can pose to all visitors that would be valuable for the community?)
– Editorial, would you like to see more interviews with planners and discussions on the future of the industry?
– Portability, would you like a better conditioned RSS feed or an email newsletter with a weekly round-up of top posts?
Basically MOST of them
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Lot’s of great ideas! I’ll second stuff like promote/demote posts, RSS and a leaderboard.
Most seem to dislike the idea of adding links via Twitter, but it would make it easier to share good reads w/o having to subscribe to the feed first. I’m not saying you should share the actual tweet, but a tweet like “link + hashtag” (e.g. http://j.mp/qwerty #plannerreads) could function the same way a Reader share does. Don’t know if it will add noise and lower the quality of the shares though…
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yea thats what I mean with the twitter stuff. I’m not sure about you all but I find a good 3rd of my reading comes from twitter links from other plannery types. And I may RT something like that. Magnus’ point hits it perfect I think. If we RT with a hashtag, then that link goes in. It would serve the same function. the content of the tweet isnt important in this case, I just think that it can’t be only me that finds some of hte “sharable” links/articles are found and come from outside gReader.
Case in point, I’ve seen some good BBH article shared here, by multiple folks. Well I dont have them in RSS, but I get those links via twitter. If I’m reading and often commenting on those posts, well then why not have a #plannerreads RT with the link be included here.
2c
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Hey Bud,
I really like the ideas behind PlannerReads and I’ve been a willing and pleased participant in sharing, but I think the interface to access and make sense of the shared reads is holding the project back.
Here’s a thought: have you see The Hype Machine? -> http://hypem.com
They crawl a set of blogs that post MP3s, aggregate the data then roll it into a new stream based on frequency of commonality. Could something similar work with PlannerReads?
I think all your suggestions above sound good and other above have provided good prioritization feedback.
To me the two things to avoid are brute force metrics that get promoted because they’re easy to measure and metrics that provide self-reinforcing feedback loops.
My prime reason to participate as a contributor and receiver is to discover new / offbeat / unknown posts outside of my usual sources. I’m not interested in another echo chamber.
Data crunching sources like spinn3r (http://spinn3r.com/) might help with some good horsepower but the big problem to be solved remains in the interface.
Thanks for the time, effort and commitment!
My favorite two ideas from this bunch:
1) A rating/leaderboard system for the sources linked to and shared; what sites are hot for our community this month
Yes, please. This site is a great discovery engine for people who share a particular, yet eclectic, interest. The more stuff that the site can help visitors discover, the better.
2) Portability, a better conditioned RSS feed or an email newsletter with a weekly round-up of top posts
I would like this content to be more portable. I’m no longer in the habit of visiting sites (I spend all my time in Google Reader). But, I feel like it would need to be curated in some way. Even if it was just a round up of the most shared items every 24 hours. Or maybe a weekly email would make sense?