blogs, diaries, and conferencing systems
Via Feministe, I learned about the bruhaha over at Daily Kos, caused by Kos’ snippy and obnoxious response to some complaints about one of the ads on the site, and the "women’s caucus" site that has been developed as a result.
I’ve never really spent much time at dKos or similar sites. I haven’t figured out how to navigate them in a reasonable manner, and so I find myself sinking in a morass of posts. Is there a way to bookmark the people whose posts I like? I’m used to conferencing systems based on Caucus and Motet, which are basically modern versions of the old BBS model, with conferences, items, and posts, and get lost in the diary model.
This week, I’ve been trying to figure out the new TPMCafe, which is an offshoot of Talking Points Memo. It’s a bit of a hybrid, with a bunch of "professional" bloggers (including Anne Lamott), a complicated rating system for comments, and separate sections for reader blogs and discussion boards. It looks interesting, but I’m not quite sure what the goal of the whole thing is.
June 9th, 2005 at 12:51 pm
If you find DailyKos hard to navigate, it’s not surprising that TPMCafe might be confusing, since they’re both built on the same Scoop technology. TPM Cafe is just prettier. 🙂 Personally, I’m still trying to find my way around TPM Cafe, too.
On DailyKos, there are a few things you can do to make things easier. If you haven’t already done so, I’d suggest creating an account there – that way, you can update your preferences and decide how you want to view comments, etc. (You can decide whether you want to view comments chronologically, in nested order – my preference, or by ratings, with the top-rated comments at the top.)
You can “hotlist” (kind of like bookmark) certain diaries and you can also follow particular diarists that you enjoy either by “subscribing” to them or by bookmarking their diary home page, like mine at http://www.dailykos.com/user/Maura%20in%20VA/diary . I hated the dKos Scoop format when he first moved to it from Moveable Type, but now I love it. But it took a while to get used to it.
June 9th, 2005 at 5:20 pm
I can only bother with Daily Kos by viewing it through bloglines–it eliminates all the ads but posts all the content. I just skim it daily to keep up on why I should be outraged. I do the same thing with Wonkette.
Well, actually, I do the same thing with all my blogs. I read them on Bloglines, and click over if I want to comment.
I have no idea if that’s helpful or not. Ha!
June 9th, 2005 at 7:17 pm
Well, I’ve gave it a good thought and realized – I would actually like to be part of the “Women’s Studies Set” and thank Kos for a label I can finally get behind.
Have I mentioned lately how much I enjoy your site?