First: Lock up your curmedgeons the 20-something journalists are starting to get organized. Not crazy about the U.I., but I LOVE the idea that young journalists are coming together.
Second: Mathew Ingram has a post on Open Salon. I bookmarked it with Del.icio.us, but their daily link blog postings are eradicate lately. So here are my thoughts.
“I have a few thoughts about the launch of Open Salon. Upon looking at
the site, as Mathew notes I saw an uglier wordpress. Also when I hear
the initial idea I think: Ugh, another Huffington Post. Do we really
need another blog aggregator? There comes a point where these feel more
like content ghettos than anything else. The blogosphere already IS a
network. Get a free wordpress blog and blast away. You don’t need Salon
to let you blog.
But, that’s not giving any credit to Salon. They
revolutionized the way we started looking at web content and I really
like the the possiblity of paying bloggers through tips (although it’s
doubtful anyone will make any real money). Trying new things is always
good and I do think we need alternatives to large aggregators like
HuffPost. Salon could deliver here.
As of right now: More unimpressed. I tried to register under “digidave”
and the site wouldn’t let me. Technical problems aside, once in, I look
forward to giving it a whirl. Update #2: The site won’t even load as of noon PST on the day of their launch.
Ghettos, hah! Wonderful choice of words. If we don’t watch out that’s exactly what blog aggregators will become.
David, sorry you couldn’t get in…we were hammered by traffic. Please try again! We are definitely not an uglier WordPress, we are quite pretty. And I wouldn’t call us a blog aggregator either. But check it out now that it’s working and tell us what you think.
The UI on twentysomethingjournalist.com is the default theme for a PHPBB v3 forum.
They probably just need someone with knowledge of css.
Like I recall you saying once about SNC:
“I’m a journalist by trade, not a web designer”
Something along those lines. 🙂