Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Christina Wodtke

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:18 GMT

thanks for the word “Apophenia,” the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. I’ll be making heavy use of it in the future.
http://skepdic.com/apophenia.html for more

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:20 GMT

That’s one advantage of the new “suggestions ” area—you can put something half-baked up, and get the community to help you think. Then, when you are ready, you can write the article.

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:20 GMT

Joe and all—We really believe in the importance of the editor also. That’s why we have taken a different, hybrid attack.

The CMS supports editorial workflow, and B&A articles will always have a true editor to shepard the process, leaving the author’s voice intact and preserving the integrety of the magazine’s style as well. But it also harnesses the power of the crowd. Reputation points, while leaving the nonparticipant behind—or unaffected, depending on your point of view—also rewards an intellegently crafted participation, and punish trolls.

It will be interesting to see how it all shapes up in the coming months. We plan to adapt the program to the community’s behavior, learning as we go.

Excelisior!
(excelsior was used by Comics great Stan Lee as a closing for his lettercol. It was borrowed from Longfellow’s poem, Excelsior. Obscure, yes, but who doesn’t love a fun fact? Speaking of, it’s also what they call the material used to stuff teddy bears.)

Christina Wodtke — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 19:50:01 GMT

no worries! It’s clearly not a stupid question, but rather a bug. But we do need to know what story it is. Can you include an URL, as well as your OS/browser information?

Also, you can always write to “editors” at this site. :)

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:20 GMT

We’d love to, and our new CMS supports it, so let’s get some people submitting audio-video stories!!!

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:21 GMT

note—we were hacked, and are recovering. some things may look odd, or comments will be missing. please bear with us….

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:25 GMT

I agree—we have many folks on the web talking about why they did this or that… but too little from the originators.

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:25 GMT

btw, WHO POSTED THIS? A bug let it slide through with no author.

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:25 GMT

it would be interesting—figuring out what the buzz is, what’s going on… Could help in both choosing what conferences to go to, and what to go to at the conference.

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:27 GMT

Gabe Zentall: http://www.zentall.com was our first designer. But all designs get messed with, and start to fall apart as new things are added and Gabe’s vision has long been corrupted. We hope the new design lasts as long as Gabe’s did!

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:30 GMT

it’s entirely possible to upload anything to a story. Not so to comments, for what I think are obvious reasons. But one can always post to your own site and offer a link…

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:32 GMT

A neutral, third party article like this coudl be invaluable. keep going.

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:34 GMT

it will be redirecting to this link now
http://www.eleganthack.com/boxes/contest/archive/anon-alb…

Sorry but we’ve changed to a new system, and still figuring out the bugs!

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:34 GMT

I’m interested, but would like to know more… how woudl this article unfold? Do you have a premise on the nature of those repurcussions, or are you inviting participation from teh readers on what they are?

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:36 GMT

What I find interesting is most of the complaints are not IA complaints, but interface design complaints. That’s not to say there aren’t IA problems on B&A—there are plenty!
In any case, we added tooltips to the +,- and are redesigning them.

Search deserves its own special time. We aren’t designing our own engine, so it may take awhile before we have a great search. What we are looking at is keywording/tagging to improve relevency first.

Keep those cards and letters coming!