Salon Magazine launches ‘Open Salon’ – user-geneated blogging & aggregation community
Salon Magazine, a long-time supporter of open source software & blogging, has launched Open Salon, a user-generated blogging & aggregation community according to a post by Scott Rosenberg, a co-founder at Salon.
From Open Salon’s “What is Open Salon” page:
The Open Salon home page functions like a real-time magazine cover. We spotlight the best content, but you can also see what other members are reading, rating and commenting on. A new issue goes up every evening at 8 p.m. ET; we update the cover every morning at 11 a.m. ET, and as necessary. In the near future, we’ll begin featuring the best Open Salon content on the cover of Salon.com. We’ll also be unveiling ways for you to earn money for your great work on Open. More to come.
The frontpage of the site, as of this morning, is showing several stories that appear to be of high quality, along with a newspaper/magazine like look & feel, featuring photos, pull quotes, and article blurbs & excerpts.
Mathew Ingram is asking the same question that I have though – Will anyone come?:
I think Open Salon is an interesting experiment for the online magazine to make. Although it has some excellent writers and some great content, it’s been awhile since Salon did anything that caused much more than a ripple as far as online media goes, so part of my interest lies in seeing whether the site can pull this off or not. And Salon has certainly put together some or all of the pieces of a new-media strategy: blogging, a Digg-style rating feature, featured content promoted on the main site, and a micro-payment system. Even if it doesn’t work, it should produce some interesting lessons.
This type of community has been tried before by other sites – it will be interesting to watch how well Salon and its group of users can manage this community…
I, too, am curious to see how well Open Salon is going to do. Two weeks ago I launched my site, which has similar concepts as they do. I am a complete noobie to blogging, but I had thought about my idea for months. I wanted to provide a place where everyone can share their thoughts and ideas, where everyone would feel comfortable talking.
Well, it’s been two weeks, and nothing. The people have not come. My husband says I should “put more stuff up there for them to read”, but the point of the blog was to have everyone participating, not to have my posts plastered all over the front page. Honestly, it’s frustrating at times. It’s like having a table set for tea, and the guests never arrive.
So…as I said, I’m curious to see what happens at Open Salon. I wish them all the best.