Comments on: IDEA #63 – Become the next Michael Arrington

By: Yusuf Motiwala

Yusuf Motiwala — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 16:47:29 +0000

I liked the idea, especially using contributors ad-sense code.

By: Laura7

Laura7 — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 05:51:51 +0000

I suppose newsvine.com and newser.com already do this. Seems like we are heading towards a news overload.

By: Azzam

Azzam — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 11:36:09 +0000

This kind of seyup is easy, I could do it in a couple of days; But the problem is PR, thats what it all bottles down to. Look at plugIM created using pligg (a digg clone), it is getting some popularity in the underground marketing world but no mainstream hype yet. A lot of coding has been invested in it with 100% adsense revenue share.
If someone is going to take care of PR then it may flourish.

By: Steve Poland

Steve Poland — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 20:23:51 +0000

Would want to have a few editors that could approve posts — also would need some evangelists [probably the editors] to really solicit people to write and contribute their posts to this proposed website. Also need inside information, as to get the breaking stories that TC/Mashable/VentureBeat/bloggers/digg will link to.

By: Gary

Gary — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 15:17:47 +0000

>>> Why would someone submit a post to this site, rather than their own blog?

There’s no reason for a post to this site or to their own blog to be mutually exclusive. You should allow people to post to their own blog and the site. Or, better yet, allow their own blog postings to simply be automatically imported or posted to this site.

By: Steve Poland

Steve Poland — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 13:42:28 +0000

Let authors link back to their blogs for sure.

By: Eric Nagel

Eric Nagel — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 13:38:14 +0000

Great follow-up comments so far… I like the WP idea – this could be built in a day with the proper WP plugins.

As for AdSense… sure, many techies, who will write the posts, may block AdSense, but the readers are more likely to have it turned on.

How do you reach critical mass? Break a story, get it dugg, get Arrington’s team to cover it and link back to you.

Would you allow authors to link to their own blogs? Or do you limit external links?

By: Colin Dowling

Colin Dowling — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 13:30:47 +0000

Doing it for tech would be a new spin. However, a number of places – including offline papers building an online presence – are doing this for local communities and neighborhoods. Great artcile in this week’s Time magazine about citizen journalism.

Assuming you would be looking for news and not just op/ed pieces, the one issue I see would be that you would have to “get up early in the morning” to find people to submit stories who weren’t already leaking to TechCrunch, GigaOm, etc.

Interesting idea.

By: Lars Koudal

Lars Koudal — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:06:23 +0000

This is actually a pretty good idea! I think the biggest problem would be to get initial visitors, to drive the traffic. From then on it would be to ensure steady subscribers to the site.

You could consider WordPress actually, that via plugins has a lot of these features built-in. … Editors, SEO friendly backend, and I am 99% sure I ran over a plugin not long ago where you could change the adsense key per post, which would be what you were looking for.

I think a lot of people would be happy to get their ideas and posts out to a bigger crowd, especially if you get enough traffic to the site.

Set it up in wordpress, make sure the plugins and system is running smoothly, get a custom theme, buy some reviewme’s to drive initial traffic, and then you could be golden

I can help with the wordpress part. If you need help, drop me a note.

By: Robert

Robert — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 04:26:08 +0000

I’ve been thinking pretty heavily on a citizen journalism kind of site, and I really like this idea as well. Being a software developer I’m pretty sure I could build such a beast as well .

The adsense part isn’t a bad idea and I’m aware of at least one forum that doesn’t something similar. However I think with the tech community adsense may not be that big of an incentive as it is pretty well known that techies block ads. The $25 idea would definitely be a pretty good incentive.

As long as you can avoid people trying to game the system (think Digg), it could be a pretty good venture.

If you are serious on this one, I’m game.