(no subject)

[the_rck]

One of Cordelia's sort of friends had a bike accident and broke both her wrists. It's probably a good thing for her that the school year ends a week from Friday. (I call her a 'sort of friend' because Cordelia likes her, but this girl steals stuff from all the other kids in the class and generally harasses people. She gives most of the stuff back, eventually, but...)

Cordelia's best friend fell at school yesterday, tripping over a low fence that the construction folks put up during the winter and never took down. My impression is that the fence in question is no more than knee high, if that, and Cordelia says that it's in a place that doesn't make sense. The friend was badly enough bruised that she wasn't able to play in their in school concert for the fourth graders (She plays violin, and she had trouble lifting and bending her arm). It remains to be seen whether or not she'll be able to play at tonight's concert.

Lunch time is a little difficult for the kids in Cordelia's grade-- They send the kids outside for about twenty minutes, but the sixth graders are forbidden to use any of the playground equipment for fear they'll hurt the little kids or prevent the little kids from using the equipment. The school also keeps banning the activities the sixth graders come up with to keep themselves occupied. I kind of understand that because the kids argue a lot over the rules and some kids cheat, but those forty-six kids need to do something, after all.

Scott's parents are planning to come to the concert tonight. It's quite a trek for the fifteen minutes Cordelia will actually be playing, but they don't seem to mind. We don't know yet if Scott will be able to attend. He worked late last night, and he's hoping that that will mean he doesn't have to work late tonight. I am glad that they decided to separate the band concert from the orchestra concert. It means fewer people crammed into the multi-purpose room and a concert only half as long.

I wish there was a good way to get feedback on metanews. I'd like to know what sort of links are actually useful to our readers and what sort nobody wants to read. I'd like to pare down the blog list a bit and maybe try to find some other blogs that have content more focused in areas people are interested in (and with a better ratio of meta to not meta). I mean, are people actually interested in fifteen different links about the same episode of Game of Thrones? I don't have the time (or the knowledge) to evaluate which articles are the best, however, so I'm not sure how to cut that down.

I have gotten the definite impression that people want the names of the blogs included in the text we attach to the links. I'm just at a loss as to how to do that without adding a lot of time to something that already takes me too long. Writing up a link takes between two and five minutes, depending on how often I have to go back and forth between windows and on how well my browser and Gdocs are interacting at the moment. My best guess is that adding the blog name would increase that time by at least thirty seconds a link, and that adds up.

ETA: For Metanews, I'd also really like to know if it's necessary for me to keep tagging things with 'warning:spoilers.' I link a lot of stuff that says, in the title, that it's talking about a specific episode of a show, and it seems to me that sensible people would assume spoilers in something like that. Meta about a movie that came out last week also probably has spoilers. (Heck, meta about anything almost certainly has spoilers. I just don't bother to warn for things that are older.)

Comments

[yuuago]

Re: Metanews

I'm not a regular there, I just poke around every now and then. But it would seem to me that it'd be reasonable to have some kind of cap on how many things are linked per subject, or even a subject + fandom cap.

So in your hypothetical GoT scenario, a cap of maybe 5 for a single subject (ie the most recent episode), with a general fandom cap of 10 links for the fandom in total. Then add on anything else that you get as submitted links. End result: you have 5 on the hottest issue, 5 on other interesting stuff about previous episodes, and then (let's say) 4 that were submissions. Those numbers might seem a little low - and I'm not really in any megafandoms, so maybe it's too low, I'm just using these numbers as an example - but I do think setting a limit of some kind is reasonable.

As for deciding what to include, I'm not sure how one can easily evaluate that either, though my general feeling is the longer it is, the more likely it is that a post will have something interesting/relevant to say (though this can vary a lot).

... Anyway. Good luck with getting all of this sorted out. It seems to be a pretty big thing to handle.

[the_rck]

I suppose I could go by length. It just seems like everybody and their cousin is writing Game of Thrones meta every single week. Half of them feel the need to recap the episode they're discussing, too, before they talk about it, so that it's really hard to get beyond that.

Something like Age of Ultron or Mad Max flares up with a lot of different and interesting stuff but dies down again fairly soon (movies seem to last two to four weeks in terms of peak meta generation). Well, I suppose Game of Thrones will die down, too. I have the impression there's not much left of this season.

[kalloway]

Possibly, I would add a general 'all links may contain spoilers' note at the top of each post. I generally assume that a post talking about something I have not entirely consumed may in fact contain new information/spoilers.

Maybe you could make a (monthly?) feedback post and ask some of these things to the community.

[the_rck]

I'll suggest that to the other two link finders. I think it might be useful.

[lady_songsmith]

Re: metanews, I kinda get the impression -- I saw the discussion I think you're referring to -- that the blog name is mostly desired in cases where a blog hosts multiple posters, and could easily replace the author name in such instances. Lady Geek Girl, for instance, because a lot of people actively avoid that site and thus don't recognize contributors' names. Mary Sue would be a less volatile example. Basically anything where the "brand" is the blog name not the person.

(Incidentally, having seen that discussion, I hope you're taking care of yourself first. No contribution to fandom is ever worth your mental or physical health.)

[the_rck]

I did offer to put in the blog name instead of the author's name because that is a switch I could make, but the person I was talking to didn't like that idea in the slightest. I got a little ticked with that particular person because they seemed to think that there would be no extra work involved in providing all of the information they wanted.

Somebody else, a while back, suggested that we simply paste in the url twice, once for the html link and once in plaintext so that people can see where it's going, and I could do that without much trouble, too. It would look dreadful, but I could do it. I just don't know if people would prefer that.

I have the impression that Lady Geek Girl and The Daily Dot are the websites people are most concerned about identifying before clicking. I haven't decided, but we might drop The Daily Dot, The Mary Sue, and Fangs for the Fantasy at least until we have someone else to help with blogs. I haven't done Fangs for the Fantasy this week at all, and I'm not sure I'm going to. I feel torn about that site because I don't think the meta in their posts is all that great, but, at the same time, they post about shows that nobody else is talking about at all. The Daily Dot and The Mary Sue are very high volume in terms of number of posts and fairly low volume in terms of the relative number of meta posts (also their meta often isn't very deep), so I have to put in a lot of time on them with not much result.

I want to keep Lady Geek Girl because, regardless of the ideology or the tone of the posts, the site does reliably produce long articles that are clearly meta. We don't judge meta by whether or not we agree with it or by whether or not we like the people posting it. (The one exception was my refusal to track down Sad or Rabid Puppy posts for the Hugo Awards business. I draw the line well before Vox Day.)