New Open Mic Section!
This is, I believe, the most important announcement since the launch of EmbeddedRelated.com. Needless to say, I am really excited.
It started with the idea of opening the blogging opportunity to all members of the site, instead of only a selected few. It evolved into what I am calling, at least for the time being, the "Open Mic" section.
According to Wikipedia: An open mic (or open mike) is a live show where audience members may perform at the microphone.
In our case, the live show is EmbeddedRelated.com, the audience members are the members of the site, and here's the microphone.
The question is, how are you going to use the microphone ?
I will initially trust that no one will abuse the power of the open mic - so there will be no rules for now. It will start as the Far West of the Embedded Systems Community. Of course, I reserve the right to delete any entry if I believe it is in the best interest of the site and the community. But for now, no over-the-top rules as I don't want to discourage anyone from using the microphone in creative ways.
Some ideas on how to use the microphone:
- You can use it to share your knowledge with the community by writing tutorials, top ten lists, etc.
- You can use it to ask questions or start discussions. Other members of the site will have the ability to respond through the powerful comments system.
- You can use it to blog about a current project you are working on, or a conference that you are currently attending.
- You can use it to write reviews about embedded systems products (components, software, books, etc)
- You can use it to ?
Through the rating system, I will learn what is appreciated by the community and what is not and will react accordingly.
I believe this new section could easily become the most popular place on EmbeddedRelated. But first, it will have to gain momentum and to help in this regard, I will reward a few selected early adopters. Members who will make the place interesting quickly through their intelligent and interesting contributions will have the pleasant surprise of receiving Paypal notifications that some money has been sent to them. Between now and the end of July, I will commit at least $1000 in rewards that will be distributed based on different criterias (quality, traffic, frequency, etc).
Finally, if you write an article and it draws my attention by getting high ratings by the community, it could be promoted to the blogs or tutorials section, where it will be subject to the blog reward program and could generate for you up to $500 in rewards.
As usual, please report any bug or problem you may encounter. There are always some issues with new sections...
Now let's see where this leads, and thank you for paying attention!
Stephane
- Comments
- Write a Comment Select to add a comment
so can we make submissions that may be multi-media based?
thanks
The best way to find out the possibilities is to try the editor and experiment with it by clicking on "Write new article" in the left menu. You'll find out that it is possible to embed youtube videos for instance. For images, one would have to first upload the images to a service like imgur or flickr, and then refer to them with the image icon in the editor. It is relatively simple to do. But I will soon write a blog post to explain how to proceed for the most common tasks...
In any case, I found it easier to simply write my articles directly HTML in my editor of choice (Emacs) and then paste that code into the "edit html" window option. Obviously, you can substitute any tool that generates HTML within the specifications of the blog system.
A simple mark-up language like that used my reddit might work here, and would enforce a consistent style throughout the site, as pasted HTML from an HTML editor is quite likely to force a different style.
In any case, if you wish to substitute a more friendly WYSIWYG editor, you will need to find someone who is on top of these type of things then I am.
I will also note that the editor can make a huge difference in user participation. Two of the most knowledgeable, helpful, and prolific posters over on 43oh.com all by stopped participating when the forum software was "upgraded" several months ago. It really does make a difference.
It is truly sad that threading was de rigueur with Usenet back in the 80s, and yet today things have migrated towards the absolute and complete flatness of facebook.
I'm the admin of 43oh.com. Try looking into the CKEditor.. It's pretty good.
Respectfully disagreeing with the previous poster, the editor alone does not make a difference in a community. Content and community really matters. When we changed our software, we had a few bugs in the editor, but it's mostly resolved now.
I'd also encourage multi-threaded reply support. It's very hard to keep a conversation going otherwise. Have you looked into "Discuss"?
Another tip(although aesthetic) is to reduce the no. of color palettes on ER. I can right now count 9 different colors on fonts and backgrounds, which disturbs viewing a little.
Hopefully this takes off. You have quite a few good articles here. Also, let me know if you need any help.
B#
43oh Site Admin.
Thanks a lot for the generous comment - lots of good tips.
I have looked superficially into Disqus a few months ago, but will have to look again. If my memory is good, it is a very nice looking and powerful commenting system, but the price was really high.
Thanks also for the offer to help.
If you are on linkedin, please feel free to add me to your network:
http://ca.linkedin.com/pub/stephane-boucher/a/294/435
There are certainly ways that we could collaborate in the near future.
If you want to develop rich content, the type to which rharding64 was likely referring to, you need to make it as easy and as enjoyable to do so as possible for your users. Particularly for new users who are just getting started.
I am making somewhat of a deal of this because last week I spent a good 2-3 hours just developing a good workflow in order to post to EmbeddedRelated. I do not mean to bitch and moan about that. On the contrary, before I even started writing, I had planned on writing about twenty articles, nominally generating $50 is revenue each. With that part of the equation, the time spent developing a productive workflow is a very good investment. And honestly, I've been coding in HTML for nearly 20 years now, so it is just no big deal for me.
But again, things are different still for someone who may only have one article to submit to the Open Mic. I have a suspicion that the most valued writers, the ones whose time is at a premium, may just close the window before even hitting submit.
To post reply to a comment, click on the 'reply' button attached to each comment. To post a new comment (not a reply to a comment) check out the 'Write a Comment' tab at the top of the comments.
Please login (on the right) if you already have an account on this platform.
Otherwise, please use this form to register (free) an join one of the largest online community for Electrical/Embedded/DSP/FPGA/ML engineers:
