I wrote a post over at UMW Blogs that introduces a new feature allowing anyone at UMW to highlight a post or blog from around the community. I tried this over a year ago, but it was on a blog other than the homepage, and I don’t think enough people really saw or understood the idea yet (which still may prove true).
But now, given the Add User widget is such a layup, it is simple for anyone within the UMW community to signup as a contributor and feature a post. And once they do (or should I say “if they do”), their posts will immediately queue up and after a quick review be published to the front page, think of this last feature as a built in safety valve. One which will also help me catch any shameless self-promoters, because I reserve that right for myself alone on UMW Blogs 🙂 But the real push behind this is that there is so much stuff being published on UMW Blogs, that we really need some mechanisms to start making the great work people are finding more visible to the community at large, and I guess this is one simple way at it amongst many. No one could possibly read everything at this rate, but many of us easily could, and by sharing our favorites we might introduce a whole different layer of interaction and encouragement through such a framework.
Special thanks to Serena Epstein for the photoshopping.
Now _that’s_ a cool feature. It’ll be interesting to see what themes emerge from the featured stories over time. Will you be tracking them with their own tag cloud, so perhaps after awhile, one can see commonalities? Do featured stories change depending on current events? Who are the individuals who more commonly select stories to feature?
What would be even cooler than cool would be to have a weekly or every other week audio / video podcast of the week’s featured posts and etcetera. Perhaps for a featured story, you could bring on the post’s author(s) as well as the person/people who featured it.
And of course, I’m always happy to do a cameo appearance. 🙂
Hope you’re doing well.
Should change the star on Uncle Sam’s (Jim’s?) hat to a WP logo. Just sayin…
hey Michael,
Nice to hear from you, hope all is going wel for you down at ODU. I think the weekly podcast/vodcast ideas is a good one, I’m just not that organized, and my intention is to disperse this stuff so that anyone can do it at any time. I’m not sure it will catch on, but if it does it will move the featuring process to a far more “democratic” space, that will hopefully expose some new themes as you suggest because I certainly have my own tastes and ideas, and the featured posts are reflecting my sensibility far too much. I like the WP logo idea, and we may have to take this one back to the drawing board, hope to see you soon.