Citrus Fortress » web http://citrusfortress.com/wp look in your heart. Wed, 04 Aug 2010 19:59:59 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Programming the community: Plinky, an assignment-based expression platform, launches http://citrusfortress.com/wp/2009/01/programming-the-community-plinky-assignment-based-expression-platform/ http://citrusfortress.com/wp/2009/01/programming-the-community-plinky-assignment-based-expression-platform/#comments Fri, 23 Jan 2009 02:19:37 +0000 Tony Zito http://citrusfortress.com/wp/?p=36 Plinky launched today, and it appears to have the twittosphere all a-twitter. The promise is simple, but well, promising: they will present you with a “prompt” every day — a little evocative question or assignment — and you will respond, sharing your responses on twitter, or facebook, or your blog of choice. It’s a smart idea, meant to tackle the “blank page” problem that presumably keeps many from blogging now, by giving a helpful little push in the form of a structured question or assignment to work within.

You can see my answer to the prompt “name three songs you’d put on a road mix tape” below. It takes a nice, hand-holdy approach, first simply providing blank fields for artist and song title, then asking for an intro, justifications for each of the songs (which I neglected to provide), and finally asking you to select album art. All highly structured, and simple.

It reminds me a lot of the new defunct  web 2.0 dating site consumating.com, (bought by CNET in 2005) both in terms of style (big type! ajax everywhere!) and in its approach to coaxing interesting responses out of people with highly directed questions and assignments.

It’s a great example of programming the community, and represents the 2nd wave of the user-generated content boom. By goosing the UGC machine with a little prod to expand the producer class by an order of magnitude or two,  the entire ecosystem gets more fun stuff to consume.

]]> http://citrusfortress.com/wp/2009/01/programming-the-community-plinky-assignment-based-expression-platform/feed/ 1 Welcome to the Citrus Fortress! http://citrusfortress.com/wp/2009/01/welcome-to-the-citrus-fortress/ http://citrusfortress.com/wp/2009/01/welcome-to-the-citrus-fortress/#comments Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:33:11 +0000 Tony Zito http://citrusfortress.com/wp/?p=34 Quite exciting! The portcullis of the citrus fortress is finally lifting! Ported content over from blogger, and obviously there’ll be more to come soon.

This is very much a work in progress. I’m even still working on my animated GIF of the jackhammer man.

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