Writing circles preview

As you can probably tell from the amount of changes to the site in recent days, I’ve been pretty busy making updates and generally working on enhancements to the site over the last week or so. One thing that I promised was coming in early July is our new groups/micro-community feature, tentatively entitled “writing circles”, and I wanted to post a quick update about how that’s coming along.

New features this week

First off, you may have noticed that writing circles is not live yet. This is mainly because I’ve added and revamped a few other things around the site since last week, such as:

• Overhauling the commenting system (new comment types, better comment paging and loading; some of this is still in progress)
• Author guidance
• Revamped site footer (oooh, shiny!… and more useful)
• A smattering of bug fixes and performance enhancements

Protagonize in the press

Now, you may have not have seen this if you’re not a Vancouverite, but the Georgia Straight, a weekly Vancouver newspaper, published a great article about Protagonize today:

Web community spins Protagonize’s yarns
http://www.straight.com/article-152025/web-community-spins-protagonizes-yarns

The article was dead on the money, though it did cover the groups feature, something that I had discussed with the author a month or so ago when we last spoke, and I was planning to have live on the site by today. I apologize for the delay, but I think the enhancements to the site in the last little bit are a good enough reason to justify the few days delay. I anticipate the groups feature will be ready at some point next week; it’s going well, but it’s just taking a little longer than I had estimated it would (isn’t that always the case with estimates…)

We also had some sidebar coverage yesterday in another local daily paper, 24hrs, which you can check out (transcribed) here:

24hrs Blogosphere Buzz: 07.02.08
http://www.cyberbuzz.com/2008/07/02/24hrs-blogosphere-buzz-070208/

The official writing circles preview

Anyhow, I thought I’d tide you all over with a teaser, and give you a good overview of some of the features writing circles will offer.

First off, the obvious question many of you have posed is “what exactly are writing circles? The quick summary would be:

Writing circles are fundamentally micro-communities, a concept similar how “groups” features function on other community sites and social networks that you may be familiar with, but where group moderators have a bit more control. The group moderator has full control over the type of writing that goes on inside their group and can invite Protagonize members, or other users by email address, host writing competitions, moderate discussions, run contests (and eventually polls) within their circles. Sponsored (commercial) groups will also be featured around the site, similar to our featured author or Editor’s Pick on the main Stories and Authors pages, and will have a few extra features. Sponsored groups will not be available immediately but will follow shortly after the main writing circles release.

Here are a few salient points that should help explain how it all works. I’ll just refer to writing circles as “groups” in shorthand fashion here. :)

• Anyone can create and moderate a group
• Groups can have multiple moderators
• Moderators can edit all posts (optionally — this will be a switch when creating a new group) within their groups; this should really help groups that are made up of a couple of authors who are all moderators and want to collaborate on larger projects together
• Moderators can remove stories from the group at their own discretion (note: this doesn’t delete the story, it only removes it from the group)
• Groups can be public or private (at the discretion of the moderator)
• Groups can be open (allowing people to join themselves), open with authorization (people can apply to join, and the moderater can accept or decline their application), or closed (only people invited by the moderator can join)
• Groups are entirely free to create for individuals, community groups, or non-profit organizations, but not if you’re creating a group for a for-profit entity (i.e. a business of one form or another)
• Sponsored groups can be created for businesses or individuals who want to sponsor specific types of activities, and will offer some branding opportunities
• Sponsored groups will have a few options that regular groups don’t have, but that won’t limit the functionality of regular groups
• Groups can have restrictions on content — some examples of this would be: whether or not they allow mature content; whether they allow members to invite other users or not; whether or not the profanity filter is enforced by default or not; if they have a maximum number of posts per user over a certain time span (e.g. only 1 post a day, etc.); or if they allow non-group members to write follow-up segments of stories that are in the group (this may take some tweaking to get right)
• Groups can contain discussions (yes, full discussion threads!)
• Users will be able to join multiple groups (though there may be a Facebook-style maximum number of groups you can belong to, to keep things within reason)
• As it stands, a story can only belong to one group at a time (due to issues with trying to enforce rules between different groups, since a story can have multiple co-authors); however, you can always remove a story from one group and add it to another, assuming it falls within the ruleset for that group
• Group members will be able to subscribe to RSS feeds and notifications of new content in their groups
• Members may or may not (depending on the group’s settings) be able to invite friends to groups they belong to
• Each group will have its own homepage, complete with hot stories, top rated stories, popular authors, and many of the other statistics you see on our high-level stories and authors pages
• There will be some “system” groups that everyone can belong to, i.e. a central Protagonize group where users can provide feedback and suggestions, or just chat amongst themselves

Whew! And that’s not all of it. Still, I hope that gives you all a clearer understanding of how writing circles will work. My quick disclaimer: not all of this functionality may be implemented at the initial launch (for instance, the sponsorship option will probably come a bit later), but this is what I intend to have up and running in the next little bit. I also have a good list of other features I’d love to add to groups down the road, but some of those may be a while coming. :)

I’d love to hear feedback from our authors, too. If you have suggestions for things you’d like to see, or problems you foresee with the features I’ve described above, please comment here or on the help center and let me know!