We've been working behind the scenes for quite some time on a strategic rollout of features designed to really improve the browsing experience of DigitalJournal.com readers, as well as tools for citizen journalists. We've just launched a number of new features across the site, so here is an outline of the most important new tools .
Sort news by geographic location: Behind the scenes, all of DigitalJournal.com's citizen journalists have been tagging their articles with the geographic locations where the news event takes place. A story about the Iraq War, for example, may include news that is relevant to both U.S. and Iraqi readers, while readers from other countries might not be as interested.
We are now exposing the geographic locations of every news article so you can find more news from your home country, or from other regions of interest. If you click on any article and scroll to the bottom (right by the Vote It Up! button), you will now see a link to "More news from..." and a list of relevant countries featured. If you click on any of those country names you will be taken to a special section of the site where we will list more news from that country.
If you don't see a link to any countries, don't worry -- it's because the article is not specific to a geographical location and is relevant to anyone in the world.
Catch a buzz: On every article at DigitalJournal.com, there is a small link to "Share" (it's just above an article's headline). Here you can bookmark or share your favourite articles with friends on other social bookmarking and news sites.
We've just updated this to include the new
Yahoo Buzz service. As Wikipedia
describes: "Yahoo Buzz is a community-based news article website, much like Digg, that combines the features of social bookmarking and syndication through a user interface that allows editorial control."
If you find something on DigitalJournal.com you enjoyed reading, we invite you to bookmark it or share it with friends!
Track Revisions: This is a beta feature we've implemented to help citizen journalists get more feedback on their work and how it's edited. Our staff of editors is constantly reviewing articles on the site and assisting with grammar, style, punctuation or word choice when necessary. In an effort to teach citizen journalists, we've implemented a new "revisions" tab inside articles so you can see when and how articles were updated.
On the bottom of an article (beside the comments and voters tab), you will now notice a tab that says "revisions." This tab will only appear if changes have been made, so if you don't see one on your article don't worry. Also,
you will only be able to see changes on your own articles, not on articles written by others.
If we change a headline, edit an intro/abstract or update an article's body text you will see the name of the person on our staff who changed your work and exactly what was done. It's important to note we never put words in your mouth, or change the context of your articles entirely -- we only update for style, word choice, or to fix errors.
We want to be totally transparent with this process, and this feature is designed so that you can go back after and see how and why changes were made. This process should help teach you about mistakes you commonly make, or things you might be able to improve upon. Words that were removed will have
red strike-through text and words that are added will be
green. This feature is still in beta stage so give us your feedback if you have suggestions on how to improve it.
We believe this direct and transparent approach with writers is a huge step for citizen journalism because it's both quality control and proactive teaching. DigitalJournal.com prides itself on being different and unique, and so we think this feature goes a long way to lending credibility to citizen journalism. It's a collaborative effort in which we want to help make our entire team stronger.
Improved Spell Check: We've updated our spell checker so you don't have to check the spelling of your headline, then intro, then body of your article separately. On the top of your article (in the Edit view) you will now see one button to check the spelling of everything. We've also improved it to include some slang and popular names. Please remember to check your spelling before activating every article.
Improved Search: This is something we're continually working to improve and with this roll-out we've dramatically improved DigitalJournal.com's search feature. We've also tried to simplify it for users who aren't accustomed to performing advanced searches; you don't need to use the "+" symbol or "quotes," and instead you should just type in your keywords or multiple keywords and the most relevant results will be displayed. We'll continue to improve this feature, so if you have more feedback please share.
Pageview updating: Any website that shares a lot of "live" information must deal with heavy loads on servers. Our previous pageview-counting system would update with each new reader on an article, but that has been changed; our new pageview-counting system will now update every 30 minutes. If you're looking to find out how many pageviews an article receives, check back to monitor for updates. We're also now showing pageviews on blogs so every citizen and citizen journalist can get an idea of their blogs' readership.
These are just some of the many feature's we've implemented, and as always thanks to all of our members for their valuable feedback.
