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But where do we comment?

Junaid was talking with me on Friday about how much traffic the Anna Nicole comments on "The Cooler" blog were getting.. Within in minutes of the news breaking,  we had 1000 comments to the blog entry.... it has climbed alot since that day.

We then talked about what happens next.... where does this community go to talk about this event?    So I checked out the pages and noticed:

1) Yahoo has no way to interact on the news pages they have.  They published lots of articles on Anna Nicole, but you could not add a comment to the page. Users "fell off"... they could not react to the news article.   Yahoo has a nice widget that shows you related links - but nothing points to a message board or blog or 360.

2) AOL News had some interaction - mainly polls.. It then directed you off to the TMZ or Cooler blog, but after that no place to go.

3) Youtube has thousands of videos in a matter of days on Anna Nicole.

4) Myspace and Friendster had communities and pages built up.

For AOL, we have the Cooler and TMZ blog and after that,  it drops off. No place for our "Community" to go to, to discuss the Anna Nicole situation. No userplane chat to discuss, no AOL Message Board, no AIMPage.....

Except for this one, which I created on Saturday morning to see "will people find it".   It sounds crazy I know, but when stories break or events happen,  we should have the tools to create a community - to show what is going on, let people leave comments/upload videos.    We don't do a good job of that yet,  but this "event" proves we should do it.

What do you think?  

 

Comments

Anonymous said…
Will, I think you've hit on something. Enabling users to interact with the news is key and will drive usage and help grow the community. :)
February 12, 2007 at 9:22 AM
Anonymous said…
Ahhh, so you're the iloveannanicole aim pager -- I had a feeling it was an internal.

Yahoo pulled their Web boards a few months back, ostensibly because some loudmouths were dominating the conversation -- it shows that communities require moderation and management, whether by users or others.

There should have been boards somewhere -- I agree that content needs to incorporate all of the community tools at our disposal, to help keep the conversation going. -- Joe
February 12, 2007 at 10:08 AM
Anonymous said…
I think this is a nice idea! Ideally there should be a central place, may be a "comments" product that people would go to comment on an article or a news story. "Comment on this" links instead of digg this ?

-Mohan
February 12, 2007 at 10:19 AM
Anonymous said…
Joe : I am the person who put the page together, and had another person go and post links.      (One ended on your page).     But the fact remains we do not have am easy way to build a site that can respond to these news or celebrity events.   Or indeed for cats, like the site i spun up there.

We have so many good assets - woohoo, pictures, uncut, blogs, aimpages that it should be easy to come out with something compelling very fast.
February 12, 2007 at 10:22 AM
Anonymous said…
This seems to be a great plug for CAB (Community in a Box)
February 13, 2007 at 11:05 AM
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