I agree with Ed Corrado that the purpose of the peer-review process is
to improve the articles, not to give thumbs-up or thumbs-down. How about
making the review process consist of submitting an article into a wiki
(with proper discussion page etc.) and letting it simmer there for a
while before moving it to the more formal journal area?
I think getting the dynamic-content part right will be the hard part.
I'm always frustrated by the problem of comments in blogs: often they're
as important as the postings, but how do you track them? Subscribe to a
separate comments RSS feed (as you have to do on my blog)? Have the main
entry appear as new in the main RSS feed every time someone posts a
comment (as Art's blog does, I believe)? Neither of these really gets me
engaged with the discussion the way I (sometimes) want to be. If the
journal is going to be truly edgy, we need a better solution than
anything I've run into.
We seem to be forming a consensus that the journal would consist of
different things, including:
1) formal articles, things that might otherwise have gone to D-Lib or
Ariadne
2) short how-tos / lessons learned pieces, like lightning talks, ideally
sparking a string of comments and additions like Art's shepherd's pie
recipes
3) hacks: actual code
How about demos? Should we aim to have the server-side capacity and
facilities to actually show new stuff in operation? A lot of this would
have a limited shelf-life (in that we wouldn't undertake to maintain the
code), but it would be nice to have a single place where you could see
some eye-candy.
Peter
Peter Binkley
Digital Initiatives Technology Librarian
Information Technology Services
4-30 Cameron Library
University of Alberta Libraries
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada T6G 2J8
Phone: (780) 492-3743
Fax: (780) 492-9243
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
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