A problem I see with Sphinn is, by the time something makes the front page it’s "old news". In hopeful language, not enough people are Sphinning fast enough -- yet. In less optimistic language, the design of Sphinn buries the good stuff with the unsphunn noise, while promoting the aged stuff to front and center. If it’s old news, do you want to Sphinn it?
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I think it takes to omuch work to sort through the What’sNew page to Sphinn up the good stuff, and that’s likely to get tougher as more junk gets dumped into the What’sNew page (as popularity increases, we can expect more attempts to post unworthy stuff). So maybe default order the Whats New page to most-spinned first? Maybe re-order the front page to highlight some hot upcoming stuff as one-line text links, above the front page stories? I’m thinking we would benefit from a way to more efficient promoting/sorting to get things to the home page in a more timely fashion.
It might help if: - To limit submissions to: one post per a day per a user. - What’s New frontpage to be classified according to the present categories.
If someone has spinned it, someone has read it, if someone has read it, it’s already out there, if it’s already out there. It’s old. What speeded up version of life 1.0 are you using? If you read Searchengineland, the news that gets spun from searchenging land is going to be old as you have just already read. I don’t think freshnest is a concern for most, we have RSS readers and email bots for that. What is more important is the varacity of the news and the resulting discussion. But yes, more spinners are needed, but it’s early days. Give it a chance.
John am I correct you’re looking for the equivalent of the "most/upcoming" of Digg or "what’s on deck" page of Netscape? Stories submitted in the past 24 in order of most sphinns to least sphinns?
Is knowing something the instant it "happens" more important than being able to quickly and easily staying on top of what is most important to know and getting true depth of understanding from the comments of others you respect? I think not.
Can you give some examples? I havn’t noticed any issues
I also wonder if with a large percentage of sphinn users being at SES the homepage has been less "active"
And now we’re all home, catching up on sleep. :)
Go into the 3rd and 4th pages of the what’s new section when you’ve read everything on the 1st page. You might find one or two good things you missed.
I have to admit I haven’t gotten in the habit of sphinning anything or visiting the sphinn page. I think this is my second comment. Maybe this problem will solve itself once people become more aggressive about clicking the sphinn button.
Last week was slow due to the SES in San Jose, I am sure this week you will see Sphinn more active. Steve
Heh -- John, I was totally with you on this one. I’ve seen a few stories lurking around when I do a Most Sphunn search and thought why on earth didn’t these go hot yet? A couple of thoughts, some of which have been expressed elsewhere. First, a lot of people have been gone at SES last week, so they haven’t been sphinning as much. That will help as people are returning now. Second, I’ve been doing tons of thinking about the What’s New page. Yes, over at Digg, you’ve got a "Most Popular" view of Upcoming (their "What’s New" on the home page. We probably need that. In addition, I think we might segment the What’s New page so that we show the top three or five stories with the Most Sphinns, then the newest stuff below that. If we resort entirely to Most Sphinns, it’s harder to see the new stuff coming in -- and people do want to see that as well. Third, I actually thought it was kind of interesting this past week to hit Sphinn and not see all the same stories I’d already seen at Techmeme or on the various search blogs. I still think those stories need to be up here, but it was a nice alternative view of the searchosphere :)