Guest Editorships and Open Systems

Hi everybody,

(Warning, this is going to be a long
entry.)

I happened to stumble upon a Journal entry
by Robin (of These
Are the Days of Our Lives...), which kind of took
me to task about the direction I've taken the whole Guest
Editor thing.

Actually, she
flamed me pretty good,

but I don't mind [Update: Okay,
I see that it's tongue-in-cheek, except with more naughty words than
one would expect for that sort of thing.] I would, however, like a
chance to talk about some
of
the questions she (and some of the commenters in her entry, as well as
others) have raised.

(By the way, if anyone has a
rant or complaint about me, my blog, or Journals in general,
feel free to send it to me as well as post it to
your blog -- it's the only way that will guarantee that I will see it,
and I won't get mad. Honest.)

Okay, so about the
Guest Editor

thing. As you recall, it's the primary way we're featuring blogs: I
ask

someone to be Guest Editor and pick their favorite blogs and do a blog

entry about them, and then I point to the Guest Editor's blog
entry.

I do this because I am 1.)
incredibly lazy and 2.) relying on the
collective wisdom of Journalers and bloggers to find
stuff, on the theory that many eyes are better than two (or four, in my
case.)

Now, there are several complaints and
concerns about this, which I hope I am characterizing
correctly:



* It's been months since I asked; why haven't I been
picked yet?
The answer, unfortunately, is
simple math: Guest

Editors' (or Editors') picks are once a week, and we've only been
doing

them since June, so we've only had 23 Guest Editors so far. There are

close to 100 more people on the
ever-growing list of

people who've expressed interested in being a Guest Editor -- even if

you subtract the people who don't want to have anything to do with me

or AOL any more after the ads debacle, that's still a lot of people,

and we're only able to feature one a week.

How can
we remedy

this -- can we have multiple Guest Editors each week? Possibly -- I

will look into it; however, please know that coordinating all this is

not easy. It's just me doing all this.

As I've
mentioned several times before, we're working on additional ways to
feature bloggers -- the Face Wall on the Journals Main Page is one
of the newer ones, and I'm hoping that the partner
ping stuff that went up with the R2 release will help us
build ways to automate displays of newly created or
updated blogs...but, I also understand that being a Guest Editor or
Editor's Pick carries a status or cachet that other
features do not.

* If there are so few
Guest Editor slots available, why did you waste two around Thanksgiving
with your own picks?
I

apologize for this one -- due to both the timing of the ad banner

fiasco (which kept us pretty busy, as you can imagine) and the

logistics of the short holiday week, I couldn't guarantee that I could

coordinate everything with Guest Editor candidates on time, so I

decided to put up what essentially amounted to filler (though I hope
it

was decent filler).

Despite what I said earlier
about the Guest

Editor being created out of sheer laziness, there is still a lot of

work involved, from outreach, asset gathering and management, art

creation, authoring, and publishing to Journals main, this blog, the

boards and the Alert (which I also failed to send out last week, sorry
Brandi).


* You've missed out on so many good AOL
Journals! Why are you wasting time letting people feature non-AOL
blogs?
Okay,

this is a pretty controversial one and I know a lot of you will

continue to disagree with me on this, but please hear me
out.

First off, I tell Guest Editors that they have
the editorial freedom

to pick whatever they want (well, okay, within the bounds of decency
--

I'm not an anarchist). Telling them to limit their picks to AOL

Journals would like me being forced only to talk about how you

shouldn't use a 3rd-party
FTP client

because the AOL in-client FTP tool is so great (which it isn't -- it's

older than dirt and a pain to use) or that you shouldn't use the great
Firefox
browser because it's not AOL's. It's not honest, and it's not
right.





Similarly, if I tell a political blogger Guest Editor that they can't
feature PowerLine or Daily Kos,

just because they're not AOL blogs, even though that may be that

person's favorite, bestest blog ever, doesn't seem right. (And yes, I

know that neither PowerLine nor Daily Kos need the extra traffic since

they're pretty dominant already -- this isn't about pimping blogs for

pageviews, though.)

As you hear time and time again,
blogging is about relationships -- if your
relationships include non-AOL blogs, why shouldn't you be able to
highlight those blogs?

From a practical perspective,
there's a very big blog world

out there, and AOL needs to be a part of it. The more we participate
in

the blogosphere, through meaningful interaction (and remember,
blogging

is all about relationships and interaction) the more the blogosphere

will pay attention to us. (And not just because AOL gets a writeup on
the ad thing in BlogSpotting
or because we do a blog
survey that gets picked up in the blog
press.)

Keeping the raw numbers in mind, there are a
lot -- millions -- more non-AOL blogs than there are
AOL blogs -- that's a lot of new potential visitors
and commenters to your Journal out
there.

Now,

please don't take this as a slam on the AOL Journals community. Part
of

the reason why the Web and the Blogosphere works is that it is
open. The blogosphere would be a completely
different place if Xanga
people couldn't interact with Blogger people who couldn't
link to LiveJournal
people...you're going to hear more about "Web 2.0"
in the coming days, but it's about this -- closed systems stagnate --
open systems thrive.

The AOL Journals
ecosystem to date has been pretty closed.
I know it's comfortable, but it can also be
cramped -- I've had to work really
closely with the Guest Editors to make sure that we see new
Journalers featured, instead of the same names over and over
again, which is a very real risk (and another type of
complaint I'd gotten early on).

A final point I'd
like to make about this goes back to the first
Guest Editor's picks, where all of the
picks were non-AOL blogs. Perhaps that was the wrong foot to setoff
on, but I'd asked for Dan's
picks and I had to keep my word, and it's not his fault that
his primary blog reads were off AOL.

However, I saw
the following sentiment a bunch of times: "You SUCK
for featuring non-AOL blogs, but ohmygosh PostSecret is
soooo cool."

Now, largely
because of the Journals
exodus,

I'd opened up the possibility to have non-AOL bloggers make Guest

Editor picks -- I don't want to close off any possibilities, though as

I said before, we've got a long list of people who want to be Guest

Editors, so I don't see it happening anytime
soon.

Whew, that

was a pretty long one. I had originally planned to talk about a blog

entry floating around today on how to get more
visitors, but that will

have to wait until tomorrow.

In any case, if you
have any ideas

as to how we can better feature AOL Journalers, both
here and via other

methods, please let me know in comments or
mail.

Keep in mind,

it doesn't have to just come through me. For example, maybe we do some

kind of Journals passaround, where everyone does an
entry that links to

5 of their favorite blogs (AOL and non-AOL), and we find some way to

spread these around (kind of a combination of a blog carnival and the

Halloween trick-or-treating that you guys just
did.)

Just thinking out loud, let me know your own
ideas.

Thanks -- Joe

Tag: Guest Editor's Picks