October 07, 2004

• Interesting. It's a pretty good model, especially if you add some fact-checking rating to the story. Having editors ensures that the stories aren't just whatever poorly-written, juvenile nonsense that the contributing trolls want to submit. The ranking on the page is pretty nice as well. I think the difficult part of the software will come from ensuring that the contributors get paid. From a manpower standpoint, it's going to be doing any sort of fact-checking you might want to do. But, as I said above, if you can rate a story as well-verified to pure rumor to popular submission or somesuch, at least the readership can decide. And, as more facts come in, you can change the rating. Having a print component is pretty cool as well. I approve. Anyways, as for software, any relatively flexible weblogging software could do it. For example, blosxom, my weblog tool of choice, is certainly flexible enough to do that, but it would require a bit of setup and some manual work on setting the rankings, unless you added some custom plugins. Wiki software that you approve the articles will do much of what you need, but I suspect there'll still be some custom work getting the articles to display in the proper order. I think, if one were interested in doing this right, the software development for the news display would be a relatively minor cost.
• In case anybody looks this up, I found Dreamweaver, which has several templates I think will do the job.