Hey peeps. Many of you may know that the folks behind CC and SB Nation are the same people who brought you Daily Kos, the most popular progressive blog on the interwebs. There are similarities between the two, and I want to call attention to one particular feature that started at dKos and is now part of the "new" Camden Chat: the recommend feature.

Why recommend? You may remember that at the old CC, as traffic to the blog increased, sometimes diaries only stayed in the right sidebar for a day or so. And popular ones with lots of debate often got pushed to the second page. 

The point of the recommend button, obviously, is to keep popular topics in the sidebar. This hasn't been an issue during ST, because there hsn't been a whole lot of compelling O's news. But as our readership increases, and the games get going, those Fanposts (formerly known as diaries) are going to get off the page in a hurry. And that sucks, because then you start to have duplicate fanposts and people posting all over the place. 

So if you think a fanpost is particularly relevant, noteworthy, whatever, recommend it. If enough people do that, it will move up to the "recommended fanposts" section where right now we just have the "welcome" post. If you change your mind, you can always "unrecommend" a post later. 

For example, if Brian Roberts gets traded this week to a japanese team, that's going to be pretty noteworthy. So when someone starts the first diary on that topic and you're reading it, you should also recommend it. Because you know it will be relevant and active for several days while we try to figure out all the japanese talent we got in return. So in the words of the Chemical Brothers, PUSH THE BUTTON. 

How do you recommend?

If you look down below this story, you'll see a bunch of buttons, with the "Recommend" button being all the way to the right. It looks like this:

Do me a favor, please head down there and hit that button. Trust me on this. I'll wait.

.........

Done it? Great. If enough people do this, this fanpost will stay on the front page for a few days, and you'll not only get to see "recommend" in action, but a lot of other people who log on to the site a few days from now will also see this story (when they normally wouldn't). 

Cheers.

zk