DU; I HAVE A Proposal for the site; PLEASE READ & respond..

I have already mentioned this to Skinner once; but did not post it to see how everyone else would feel Now is a good time for my idea because of benburch's dilemma here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5597025.

Here's the idea: Every month we as a group vote on a "DU Liberal Website and Blog of the Month". Voting would be in the first 3/4 days of the month and then LINKS/BANNERS for the winners would be placed somewhere on the main pages of the site. This would encourage traffic to the sites (many run by members here such as benburch; etc.) and a better flow of information and communication throughout our liberal websphere. We scratch their back; they scratch ours kind of thing. Lots of sites and blogs that one person has found and posted (but for whatever reason the thread dropped like a stone) would be able to get their fair share of attention.Yes; I am suggesting that we vote for a website AND a blog; so 2 winners monthly. We could have a nomination thread to start the process.

I would appreciate all input and feedback about this; it's just a rough idea and needs refining. Go to it!

Fact is, members don't lose much by association of DU with some really crap site that wins the vote somehow.

Besides, he has to set up the entire voting system to ensure one vote per registered nick.

it wouldn't put an undo load on him. And doesn't the poll function already have that failsafe? I'm not sure but I assumed it did..

Blogs I should read more often: www.juancole.com, and James Wolcott.

I'm blonde this morning...

For responses to threads. So you can set a threshold....say "3" to filter out crap responses like :"Yeah i agree", or "total bullshit".

It allows you to cut thru the chaffe.

Admins claim it to be super hard to implement but Slashdot.org has it in thier engine and i think they probably have more traffic than DU.

As i was saying yesterday:
"the only thing we have is numbers, but we seem to be scattered"

Progressive websites and organizations helping one another out could help counter the scattering.

Geez! This is the second time I've proposed this and it keeps dropping like a stone..I'll try one more time and then give up...

It would give a good highlight to sites that we might never see otherwise and it would give us all a chance to check them out BEFORE we voted on them. Perhaps we could have the nomination list for a full week, with voting open for the whole week. Every selected site would get a full month's exposure with the nominated sites getting a highlight for a week. That way, it gives everyone a chance to look at them indepth or keep them there for those that might be away for a few days at a time on any given nomination week.

I like the idea.

What a great idea!

I like the idea of encouraging traffic to quality sites, plus given the amount of stuff out there it would be helpful to have the endorsements to direct my attention to those sites.