ViewDot

Ok, what to The View and Slashdot have in common? Not much? wrong.

Both programs (slashdot can be considered a daily program that broadcasts over the course of a 24-hour period) incorporate that thing that we all seem to be liking more and more as time passes. Collaboration.

Probably an offshoot of the Web's ability to quickly form communities of trust, people are turning more and more towards themed groups for news. While I don't think the Big Media model (look at any dead tree magazine or newspaper, they're one "individual" whom you trust to be impartial and know all.) to topple over and die anytime in the next century, it is "losing ground" to this new form of media. Weblogs are inheriently biased, they make no attempt to be otherwise. They do, however, in the case of Slashdot, bring together a wide variety of biased opinions. You probably know all this already, though. What next, then?

The View, innocuous as it is, presents a new possibility. Imagine something akin to slashdot with a "celebrity panel". Take a group of well known, or alteast highly competent, smart folks. Nicholas Negropante would be nice, but unlikely. Pay them something based on the ad revenues generated. Their job is to take the reader or panel submitted pages and review them, then review each other's commentary, then comment on each other's reveiws, etc. A little more elitist, perhaps, but that coule be mediated rather easily with a variety of means. My personal favorite would be to have the highest-scoring reader comments "bumped up" to the panel.

The end result would hopefully be a reduction in noise, the current bane of the blogging community.