David Cohn with the morning post today.
Now we have topic home pages. They come with a slew of features, and I'm working with our developers on a few more.
So what now?
It's time to reach out our hands and ask the blogosphere for help.
After you join a team, the best thing to do is to try and find more team members. Collaborative journalism is a little different from shoe-leather reporting. Eventually we will need to really go out and do the interviews and get the quotes, but we should never feel like we are doing that alone. Luckily if we are, there is an easy solution -- ping the blogosphere.
Everything that we are covering is a hot topic in the blogosphere. There are probably dozens of blogs each dedicated to these topics. Why not point out a relevant topic home page to them? They are already informed about the subject and so are their readers -- that's exactly the community that we want to tap.
For example, I intend to email Design Observer, EyeBeam Reblog and World Changing about some of our art and design topics. Imagine if they re-blog it! Who knows how many motivated community members we could get -- and they would have knowledge about specific topics too?
Now imagine if we ALL do that. There are 55 million blogs out there. I can't hit them all.
It might have been hard to do this kind of outreach before, but now that we have topic home pages -- it's as easy as forwarding a link. So if there is a topic you've been working on and you want to see more people working on it -- be the change that you want to see. Spread the links around and I bet somebody out there will not only join the team, they'll thank you for showing them how they too can finally report on a topic that they love.
