I’ve written about Huffington Post’s superior methods of handling blog comments fairly recently, but I’m back again to dive deeper. In particular, I just came across an old email from the site talking about their new comment functionality, and there was one part in particular I found very impressive.
But we’re most excited to announce a new initiative where we will choose one commenter a month to become a featured blogger at HuffPost. Yes, a blogger! Reading through the comments on our site, we realized that our readers are an underutilized resource – smart and opinionated. Our decisions will be based on how many fans a commenter has, how often their comment is selected as a favorite and our moderators’ favorites. Every comment has an I’m A Fan Of and a Favorite link so start voting for the comments and commenters you like best. We will announce the first one at the end of this month!
Not only are they giving users an easy method to register feedback, they’re also giving specific details and process for how you, yes you, could become featured on the site. For most users this won’t even register as interesting, but that’s OK.
When we look at the 90-9-1 rule of online participation, we know that a smaller number of people will do a majority of the work. The strategy for engaging users who would want to become “bloggers” via their daily on-site activity speaks directly to that rule.
Great work, HP!
