The Comments Section in Peoples' Blogs

is a problem - acknowledged! Thanks Graeme. You're from Toronto, right? Can you see the Quicktime videos?

1) Get a decent text editor. [spell check, paragraphs, fonts, bold, italics, bullets--all the fun stuff]
2) With a good photo editor.
3) Blogs archived need to be archived by subject, not date
4) Either get more diverse catagories or allow us to create catagories.
5) Top 10/5 whatever blogs viewed/read. Otherwise "I am in Pittsburg" wastes readers' time.
6) Change the web addy system so blog addy reads Eg: http://www.homelessnation.org/Brett/subject

BTW Graeme you CAN change the colour scheme if you don't like the one you have, I think there are 4 others....

Yes, the categories are rather random. Which would you suggest?

These kind of terms actually have a lot of functionality we haven't tapped on homeless nation. For instance, if you were to tag your post "politics", after your post we could list the 5 most recent posts on the subject. Or if people tagged "legal", we could list resources in their area that offer legal advice. Things like that. So it is definitely an under-used aspect, which would be interesting.

We will also definitely have some sort of "top 5" blogs/videos, and we're trying to work this so that it doesn't "judge" the work but rather provides a way for our users to promote good stuff to the top.

Not sure whether we will ever be able to change those web addresses, but I'll note that for sure.

Thanks for your comments,
Brett

I would suggest you go by "hits" as top 5 [or 10].

This would encourage people to learn how to create "hits" thus increasing the popularity of the whole site as well as the search engine standing of the site....

My biggest pet peeve though, honestly is the lack of a decent editor. For those who aren't computer savvy or who have literacy struggles or those who like to write, this is a real drawback.

It might be hard for us to change spellings and things on people's blogs--a lot of people write their own spellings on purpose, or would feel insulted to have it replaced for them...I think it's hard for an editor to pick and choose.

I wasn't referring to a person "editor". I was referring to a text editor--like Scribble/Word/Pagemaker or such that has spell check [if you want it], bold, italics, bullets, different fonts and colours, etc.
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JOHN SHERIDAN: So how did you find out about all this?
BESTER: I’m a telepath. Work it out.

Yep, I'm from T.O.

Most of the vids I've encountered here are in Windows Media, not Quicktime format. Anyway, I have a dialup connection so streaming videos don't really work for me.

A hack I've been using to get around the slow connection prob is to click on 'view page source' in Firefox after loading video pages, then I use this to track down the actual links to the video files and download 'em manually for offline viewing. Takes a while, but it works!

I have the same prob you do. I have Roger's light and am constantly downloading so vids aren't my thaaang either. Just too slow, even without the p2p. Plus I am far more literary by nature...

One thing that we'll probably have in the next version is the ability to "subscribe" to videos, just like podcasts. This way, you can launcher an aggregator that will let you download stuff in the background whenever there is a new vid. You could do it at night etc.

For an example, check out the Democracy player - http://www.getdemocracy.com/

Thanks for pointing out you are on dialup - its always good to canvas peoples connectons to see how many people actually check the high bandwidth stuff.

What about letting the bloggers create catagories as they go? That way, anything new can be listed. Eg. Suppose I do one on "comics and graphic novels" or "donut shop trends" "squatting techniques" whatever. Yeah, you will wind up with a *lot* of catagories but it may be more effective, if unweildy.

Is that possible?

These would be "tags". Yes, it would be unwieldy, but could be interesting. I'll look into it.