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I suggest the next step is crowd sourced expert curation. Some of the most popular posts on Reddit are where an expert enters the comments and lays the article

by brador 14y ago

I suggest the next step is crowd sourced expert curation. Some of the most popular posts on Reddit are where an expert enters the comments and lays the article bare for the masses. This is valuable. I'd pay for this. But, and it's a big one, experts aren't cheap and their time is scarce. They're not going to curate content for free all day like Reddits 12 year olds and the granularity of expertise means you'll never cover everything with a small number of experts. Two solutions: volume through scale to fund expert curation or find a way to gather and have them work for free. Maybe the research journal system could be used to provide non-financial incentives?

petercooper 14y ago
I don't know if this is quite what you mean but I've been doing something like this for a couple of years now and am bringing in decent revenues doing it. One example: http://javascriptweekly.com/ http://javascriptweekly.com/ .. and an actual issue: http://javascriptweekly.com/archive/96.html http://javascriptweekly.com/archive/96.html .. I have almost 80,000 subscribers to publications like this now and people seem to keep wanting more (so I'm looking for and bringing in expert curators, as you suggest, since I'm close to exhausting my topic range).
- brador 14y ago
  How do you get subscribers / traffic to reach 80k? Paid ads?
  - petercooper 14y ago
    Initially it was because I run/ran the most popular Ruby blog so the first couple of thousand subscribers came almost exclusively that way - http://peterc.org/blog/2010/306-1120-subscribers-in-2-days-my-foray-into-e-mail-newsletters.html http://peterc.org/blog/2010/306-1120-subscribers-in-2-days-m... - but since then it has been primarily a case of word of mouth and "domino" growth. For example, many Ruby developers are into Rails. And many of those are into JavaScript. So I branched out into a JavaScript newsletter too and had a few thousand subscribers quickly. Nice (and unsolicited!) words from people like Steve Souders and Paul Irish helped with testimonials and it grew from there. The next domino was HTML5 which was of interest to both JavaScript and Ruby people. So that one has grown even more quickly. And so on.. :)

by brador 14y ago

petercooper 14y ago

I don't know if this is quite what you mean but I've been doing something like this for a couple of years now and am bringing in decent revenues doing it. One example: http://javascriptweekly.com/ http://javascriptweekly.com/ .. and an actual issue: http://javascriptweekly.com/archive/96.html http://javascriptweekly.com/archive/96.html .. I have almost 80,000 subscribers to publications like this now and people seem to keep wanting more (so I'm looking for and bringing in expert curators, as you suggest, since I'm close to exhausting my topic range).

brador 14y ago
How do you get subscribers / traffic to reach 80k? Paid ads?
- petercooper 14y ago
  Initially it was because I run/ran the most popular Ruby blog so the first couple of thousand subscribers came almost exclusively that way - http://peterc.org/blog/2010/306-1120-subscribers-in-2-days-my-foray-into-e-mail-newsletters.html http://peterc.org/blog/2010/306-1120-subscribers-in-2-days-m... - but since then it has been primarily a case of word of mouth and "domino" growth. For example, many Ruby developers are into Rails. And many of those are into JavaScript. So I branched out into a JavaScript newsletter too and had a few thousand subscribers quickly. Nice (and unsolicited!) words from people like Steve Souders and Paul Irish helped with testimonials and it grew from there. The next domino was HTML5 which was of interest to both JavaScript and Ruby people. So that one has grown even more quickly. And so on.. :)