Hai, Y'all!
I swear I'm trying to fall in love with New Kos because ... where will I go? What will I do? if it sucks as much as some predict? So I keep going over there, and I keep reading the diaries Markos posts, and I gotta tell you, I'm not excited yet.
Part of the problem is that I actually read the FAQs and DKosopedia when I joined up here, so I've been using my Hotlist page and the Search function and the little tag search jobbie under the rec list for a long time, finding everything I've looked for and, best of all, finding things I didn't know I wanted. I even got jotter to show me how to do a multi-tag search. Since I don't much care for group activities, it's safe to say I think Daily Kos - THIS Daily Kos - is just about perfect.
While I have a passel of concerns about New Kos, this diary is about my gnawing concern that community diaries are going to struggle for survival on New Kos.
[NOTE about beta links: If the links to DK4 don't work, try turning off your pop-up blocker.]
The first thing you see on the DK4 Front Page/Home Page is a big ole box that says COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT and lists six diaries. The first clue I got that the Community Spotlight has nothing to do with community diaries is this: those are seldom diaries bearing a community tag.
However, the beta site wasn't even open to all when I first noticed that, so I passed it off to a misunderstanding on my part and looked for other ways to easily follow community diaries. I got excited the day I noticed the Tags Page had been activated. If you click over there you'll see that one of the "Most Popular Tags Today" is community, no surprise there, but scroll down and take a look at the lists of Master Tags and Tags By Type:
Master Tags: Defense Economy Education ELECTIONS Energy Environment Health care Humor International Labor Meta Personal Polls Science Teaching Transportation.
Tags By Type: Corporation Election Event Foreign Place Master Media Meta Organization Person Diary Series US States US Government US Law US Place.
Yup. You saw that too, didn't you? Community is not a Master Tag, and it's not even listed as a Type of Tag.
What the heck is that all about?
I have to ask the question, my friends, because it goes to the heart of my greatest fear about DK4. Community diaries are all about live blogging, or blogging in real time, or whatever you want to call it. Without a prominent Recent List and/or a Master Tag, the community diaries will fade away.
If the list of Master Tags is amended to add Community, those of us who read them and write them can, I'm guessing, "follow" the Community tag in some way so that we know what's going on. Many of the most popular diary series use the community tag: pootie diaries, KosAbility <cough>, all the long-running Saturday series ... I'm going to stop there because it's a long, long list. I'd much rather have everything with a community tag in my stream than the odd things showing in it now.
What do you say, Markos? Will you please add a Master Tag for community diaries?
UPDATE: If you're reading diaries about New Kos but not yet exploring the site, please do so. Also, when you're there, use the bug report for anything that doesn't work, or doesn't work well, or if you'd like to have a function that isn't there. Remember that old saw about voters, the one that says you can't bitch if you don't vote? Here, you shouldn't bitch if you don't explore and file those bug reports.