Salon Blogs

When Salon announced its plans to launch a weblog hosting service, comparisons with discussion boards seemed natural. Discussion boards are usually seen as a stable for wannabes, treated with good-natured condescension by the publications that host them. After all, their participants are writing for free, often in response to the writing of the real contributors. Occasionally, a poster will impress an editor sufficiently to make the leap to the other side, but for the most part, the division is a nonporous one. The absolute nadir of this type of attitude was represented by now-defunct Feed Magazine, whose submissions page told prospective writers that "the best way to write for Feed" was to participate in the forums — somehow Steven Johnson and Ana Marie Cox managed to find different ways of contributing to the magazine that worked just as well for them.

But it persists in more benign forms. Slate gives gold stars to its best Fray posters, like an indulgent third-grade teacher. There's nothing necessarily wrong with it. Posting in a discussion forum does not make one automatically capable of producing magazine-quality work. But by indiscriminately confining these posters, many of whom are talented writers, to the forum ghetto, Web publications are overlooking a possible source of content to exploit.

That's why Salon Blogs is such a brilliant idea. It takes the same people who might be posting to discussion forums and channels their willingness to write for free into something more structured. Not only that, but the autonomy offered by a blog might draw in some writers who would be loath to be associated with anything as gauche as forum-posting. And it ranks the blogs by popularity, so, theoretically anyway, the best-written rise to the top. Salon gets nothing but free content, from people who are paying $39.95 (after a 30-day trial) to have Salon host their blog for a year.

Unfortunately, it also seems a little late. Doesn't everyone already have a blog, or at least everyone who's going to have one?

Salon first announced the service July 24, and as of this writing, 82 people who didn't have blogs (or had them elsewhere) have signed up. Some of them already show signs of promise. Dave Cullen, who wrote some excellent articles on Columbine for Salon, stands out as one of the best. With jabs at Sunday morning pundit show guests for excessive use of the phrase "I must tell you" and a thoughtful discussion with another Salon blogger on whether inter-blog discussions read like academic disputes, he hits just the right note of not-too-stuffy media criticism. And Radio Free Blogistan is the rare blog about blogging that actually gets beyond bashing small-town newspaper columnists who think blogging is self-indulgent. Of course, it wouldn't be Salon without a porn blog by a self-described "full-time pornographer." "Most clips are short (less than 15 seconds) and only some have sound, but this is as good as free porn gets," he, or she, points out about one site.

So what do you get when you sign up for Salon Blogs? First of all, you get to use the Radio UserLand software — Salon bloggers can't seem to agree if it's better than Blogger, though. There's no Unix version of Radio; you must have a Windows PC or a Mac.

You certainly don't get a snappy URL — a typical address is http://blogs.salon.com/0001132/. At Diaryland your journal will be hosted, free of charge, at the address yourname.diaryland.com. Of course, yourname.diaryland.com doesn't contain the substring "salon.com." And that's what people are really paying for. Through sheer force of will, Salon has become one of two standards for Web publications. One may disdain Salon's frequent forays into gratuitous sex writing and alternative-weekly cliché, but everyone reads it.

But for all the autonomy and exposure Salon Blogs may bring to the average user, the project could have been far more successful if Salon had only listened to the posting peasants of their Table Talk discussion area. Almost a year to the day before the launch of Salon Blogs, Salon decided to make Table Talk a pay-only service. Posters who had been there since 1997 were now being asked to pay $10 per month. When community members were apprised of this plan, they warned the editors that everyone would leave. Even the people who were at first willing to pay, they argued, would walk when all their online friends left. Salon didn't listen, and Table Talk, whose content was often better and always more abundant than Salon's actual articles — partially because it focused so little on the magazine itself — atrophied in a matter of weeks. Visiting there now, one finds a virtual ghost town, a place where some of the best old threads get a post once a month.

A functional Table Talk would have been a natural complement to Salon Blogs and provided a ready-made group of both bloggers and readers. Why would people who weren't willing to pay for forums be willing to pay for a weblog? For one thing, forum-posting is almost universally acknowledged to be a waste of time, so even Table Talk addicts might not want to make it official by paying. Blogging, though, has cachet. It's an art form, a way for an aspiring writer to connect with readers. And while a forum with, say, 100 members, down from thousands, is an dinosaur in its death throes, a weblog community with 100 bloggers and under the umbrella of one of the Web's most popular magazines has an aura of exclusivity.

With a Table Talk as active as it once was, Salon Blogs members could look forward to reading instant feedback on their work. Table Talkers who were also bloggers could read their friends' blogs and encourage others to sign up. Lurkers would also recognize the names of Table Talkers, who generally posted under their real names, and follow the blogs of the posters they liked best. And the participants of Table Talk tended to be older than those of most discussion boards. Early twentysomethings and especially teens were rare. These demographics might have provided Salon with writers who had never tried blogging but would be terrific at it once they got encouragement from their favorite discussion site. Salon tried to cash in too quickly, and in doing so eroded a lot of their base.

Cullen and another Salon blogger, Erik Speckman, recently tried to quantify the impact of content posted on blogs versus in comments to those blogs. Front-page posts, Speckman argued, are "first-class content," and comments are "second-class content." In terms of the hierarchical organization of the typical blog, this is accurate. But if the content on Salon itself is considered first-class content, then where do these blogs lie? It's hard to make the case that they're on the same level, since they're put together by unpaid, unedited and often unknown writers and not linked to from the front page, but they're a step above traditional forums. Salon's challenge is to convince the general public that for a small fee, they too can be first-class.

— Julia Lipman (julia@flakmag.com)