I’m posting about the coming changes to USAToday.com even before it goes live, because it looks like a newspaper company is finally getting what this net thing is all about. As I read through the announcement post on their blog, I got more and more excited. Here are the highlights:

Comments on every article.

Each user gets a profile page, where you can put a bio, photos, or even your own blog. Editors, reporters, and journalists will also create profiles.

You can vote for stories and bump them up a list of most-recommended stories.

Stories are tagged with keywords.

The new homepage will have the most-read, most-sent, most commented, and most-recommended stories.

Feeds.

Open forums.

USAToday licensed this technology from Pluck, a tech startup in Austin (it seems they are helping other newspapers).

I’m sure we’ll see some crazy stuff - spammy or rude comments, swimsuit models hitting the home page, but it’s an experiment, one that I’ve been waiting to see get underway. I don’t normally read USAToday but I’m still looking forward to kicking some tires this weekend.

Additional Reading: 10e20, CyberJournalist, Jeff Jarvis, ParisLemon

Categories: Technology :: Tags: :: Trackback URL
Front Page
Previous Post: Buying Yourself A Front Page Digg
Next Post: The Future Of Computing: Brains In A Jar?
Related Posts: Interesting: USAToday :: YouTube: Lots of Morons Out There :: USAToday: Anti-Social Readers? :: USAToday: Casual User Perspective ::